Marketing New Healthcare Services

Marketing new healthcare services at a health system is exciting and potentially scary. What healthcare marketing strategies should you use and where to begin?

To implement your healthcare marketing plan, marketers need to understand their audiences: what audiences will consider a type of treatment, and how will they view it? What context will your audience use to think about their issue? To find out, first pull insights from machine-learning data derived from internet conversation data and search data. Take a look at the case study below as an example:

Case Study — First Step

To market Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) and Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT) as treatments for severe depression to prospective patients, Gamma Health Studios (Gamma) researched high-level data insights for these two treatments and depression overall.

We used a combination of data tools including machine-learning conversation data gathered across the Internet to understand potential customers to market these new healthcare services. The top-level insights below may help you think about the marketing challenge at your own healthcare organization.

Marketing Insights to Market a New Healthcare Service–Depression Treatments

• People are very interested in discussing and sharing information about treatments that they think help their depression. These answers varied from prescription medications such as Wellbutrin to testosterone to vape pens.
• Specific target audiences rose to the surface as those struggling with severe depression: people with long COVID, veterans, and mothers with post-partum. While patients with long COVID make sense, this group wouldn’t have been top of mind for us. This is one reason that pulling insights is so helpful.
• The data shows little discussion for ECT and TMS within the broader severe depression conversation. It appears that the treatments aren’t that well known. Good to know. How well-known is the treatment that you’re looking to market?
• A part of living with severe depression is convincing others that your suffering is real.
• After a high-profile suicide, social conversation about depression spikes.
• Anxiety is paired with depression in tens of thousands of searches each month.

Gamma Health Studios will follow with a deeper data dive into perceptions of ECT and TMS for potential patients and a nuanced look into the overall data landscape of general severe depression conversation. We know that the first step in any marketing for hospitals must start with audience data to establish context for the effort. The next step is content creation. More to come in a future blog post about how to infuse insights into the creation of video and digital content. For distribution, one thing to consider is using YouTube. YouTube is made to target specific healthcare audiences. For information about YouTube for health care and niche audiences, check out this blog post.