5 Tips for How to use Inbound Marketing in Hospitals and Healthcare

 image from ChiroPractice

In my previous post, I asked the question, how are you or would you use inbound marketing in healthcare.  To answer this question you really have to ask yourself, "how do I build relationships online?"

For healthcare marketing, we tend to use outbound marketing, pushing our ads out to the consumers with no real message that "connects" to the consumer.  No matter what area you work in healthcare, there is a way you can connect to your current and potential patients.  Ask yourself this: What information are your patients looking for that you could provide the answers to?

How Can We Use Inbound Marketing for Hospitals and Healthcare?

Last December I stumbled on a podcast that introduced me to inbound marketing on the blog Six Pixels of Separation .  The podcast was how Marcus Sheridan aka The Sales Lion, used inbound marketing to increase business for a small pool company.  It is such a simple idea, but brilliant.  The concept is basically having a two way flow of communication with people online by providing useful information that people are seeking.  By doing this, you are able to build trust and loyalty.

So as I was getting ready to start my new job in the marketing department for the hospital I worked at, I started to wonder....how could we use this for hospital marketing?

Finding my strengths in ideation

Last week I decided to take this StrengthsFinder 2.0 test as part of a mentoring program I am doing.  It was interesting because it focuses on your natural abilities which they call your strengths.  Typically what you will see is people focusing on how to improve their weaknesses, but not this book.

So here are my top 5 results:
1. Ideation: People who are especially talented in the Ideation theme are fascinated by ideas. They are able to find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena.
2. Positivity: People who are especially talented in the Positivity theme have an enthusiasm that is contagious. They are upbeat and can get others excited about what they are going to do.

Markets Always Outperform Companies

This title is a quote from Dick Foster that goes like this "Markets outperform companies--they always have, with only a few exceptions, and you want to be on of the exceptions"  .

What does that statement mean to you?  For me as a person who works in healthcare is that we WANT to be the exceptions.  Unfortunately, I think if we are working in healthcare, we do not think this rule applies to us.  But we will find out soon that it does.  I sure that at some point Kodak thought it was too big to fail and so did other fortune 500 companies that are no longer on that list. Hospital's I hate to say are falling down the same path and we need to start thinking five steps ahead like in  a game of chess.