Unsurprisingly, 94% of marketers say that personalized marketing leads to more sales…yet only about 1/3rd of us feel like customers are getting a truly personalized experience with the brands they manage. We’ve seen that disconnect ourselves and heard the many reasons why personalization is a challenge for a busy medical office.
For starters, there’s the time component. If you have staff members just twiddling their thumbs, you are far in the minority these days. Medical offices have so many other priorities and (sometimes literal) daily emergencies. Add to that how hard it is to obtain, train and retain top talent. It’s harder to personalize your message when you have higher staff turnover. And it can feel daunting to try and tailor your messaging when you don’t seem to have time to tackle even the basic marketing tasks as it is.
Let’s take a look at some of the most efficient ways to offer more personalized marketing with minimal involvement from doctors and staff.
- Email and Text Marketing Segmentation – On a high level, your patients have one thing in common: they’ve had a service provided by your office at some point. But that’s kinda where the similarities end. With just a bit of creativity, you can segment your patient lists into different buckets for more relevant messaging. For instance, you might have separate lists for surgical and nonsurgical patients. Or you may have a list of “superfans” who are the first to know about specials and offers. Segmentation for your email and text marketing involves a bit of legwork at first, but after that the work is mostly in our hands to craft more individualized messages and sends and keep the lists tidy.
- Review Requests – Many millions of review requests are sent every day. And an overwhelming number of those are utterly ignored. How do you break through the noise? By personalizing your request. A couple ways to do this. We highly recommend a personal ask directly by the provider during a follow up or retreatment visit. You can couple this with a “review us” card or text message (even better) to point the patient right where you want them to leave a review. We can even help you set up review request reminders with personalized journeys to encourage patients to get off their duff and leave a glowing review.
- Influencer Marketing – If you and your staff are short on time, or just to shake things up with a fresh perspective on your social media, consider tapping an influencer in your local market. Start with your patient base. You may know of a patient or two who is particularly active on social. Ask him or her about becoming a sort of “brand ambassador” for your practice. By partnering, you can help both social channels feel more personalized and authentic, while organically growing your social following.
- Live Social Events – Wait a minute, wasn’t this list supposed to be about things that wouldn’t gobble up doctor and staff time?? The reality is that, especially for smaller medical practices, your faces and perspectives ARE the brand. Live social events can be structured to limit doctor and staff time to the event only, with minimal prep and follow up needed by your office. The big upside is that you’re offering an open opportunity to tailor content for the attendees and answer questions on a personal level. The Q&A format also takes little prep time, though be prepared with at least a few talking points to keep the live event engaging and on point.
- AI’s Role – Isn’t there a robot standing by to do all these things and more while you just rake in the dough? Not quite yet. But AI can help to take some of the tediousness out of marketing personalization, and can even help you personalize in ways you hadn’t thought of before. Generative AI is an excellent resource for personalized topic ideas, though it’s important to keep in mind that these tools are only as good as their training, and bias and just plain wrong information lurks in many corners. Generative AI can help you craft 5 different marketing emails for 5 different user segments within seconds, but always make sure to thoroughly read through the output to ensure it aligns with your brand values.
- A Note on Privacy – As you are no doubt aware, patient privacy (and user privacy in general) is a major consideration whenever interacting and communicating with patients. Google, Meta and Apple have all significantly clamped down on the use of third-party data to target and message users. HIPAA data breaches and violations are on the rise. Within this landscape, it’s critically important to communicate with patients and prospects only in the ways they want. NEVER send out email and text to folks who have not opted in. NEVER buy a list of emails or social followers. You must be respectful of patient privacy, not just for legal compliance, but also because play fast and loose with patient information can seriously compromise trust.