Mapping Your Patient Journey to Your Marketing Strategy

Content is fundamental to every marketing strategy. For a healthcare provider, the right content for your patient at the right time can be very helpful to them. This makes mapping your patient journey to your marketing strategy very important.

The right content is only helpful to the right person at the right time. It helps you to understand their needs and then map those needs to your content marketing strategy.

Healthcare consumers demand a lot of attention. This is mainly because of the intricate nature of healthcare. From this basic understanding of how intricate healthcare is, you can design a marketing strategy that factors in the needs of your patients at each stage of their journey.

The purpose of linking your content marketing to your patient journey is to ensure that you are accessible to your potential patients. It helps your existing patients derive value from their relationship with you.

Most likely you already have a marketing strategy for your healthcare business. However, it is also possible you designed this strategy without considering your patient journey.

You probably came up with a wonderful content strategy on how to get new patients to visit your facility. Maybe you just want a way to retain your existing patients. Or you probably have a few articles on your website that are not converting much.

The bottom line is if you want your marketing efforts to yield results, you must have an acute knowledge of your patient journey to help you devise the right strategies and see the right results for your efforts.

In this article, you are going to learn about how to map your patient journey to your marketing strategy to yield great results for your healthcare business.

If you don’t understand what the patient journey entails, read our article on understanding your patient journey. It would help you to understand your patient journey and subsequently, how to map your patient journey.

Importance of mapping your patient journey to your marketing strategy

Mapping your patient journey is essential to a successful marketing campaign. For example, if you have a chiropractic business in Ghana, understanding your patient journey will help you identify the various points you come into contact with your potential patients and then help you market effectively to them.

As a chiropractor, one of your patients is someone experiencing back pain. With this knowledge about the likely symptoms they may be experiencing, you can map out a patient journey detailing all the various channels and information that would be required at each stage of this patient’s journey.                                                                                                                                             

There is first the stage where the person is exposed to information about their symptoms or signs such as consistent back pain could be a sign of an underlying spinal condition. This stage creates an awareness in the patient of their condition.

The patient decides to find out more about the likely cause of their back pain so they may call your clinic to book an appointment with you to determine whether they have the condition or not.

After that, they come to your clinic where they go through the processes in your clinic to understand their condition and seek treatment.

During treatment, you may offer a combination of both office and home therapies, together with some lifestyle modifications such as changing desktop chairs. This all constitutes the treatment stage.

The next and final stage is staying in touch with them. It involves evaluating their experiences and providing post-treatment care to ensure they are loyal to your practice.

Even though these stages may look simple, they are quite complex when you analyze them critically.

Importance of mapping your patient journey to your marketing strategy

Understanding this journey will help you to launch the right marketing campaigns that target the right kind of people with the right information at the right time.

Mapping your patient journey to your marketing strategy also ensures that you get the right return on your investment by using the right strategies. It helps you to balance all your approaches and strategies in your marketing.

It helps you to ensure that you have the right content at every stage of the journey. If you don’t have a well-defined patient journey, you could provide a lot of content, and yet not enough for every stage of the journey.

Moreover, mapping your patient journey to your marketing strategy also helps to ensure that the right channels are being used. If you understand who your potential patients are, their age group, their interests, their habits, their career, their income, etc., it could provide valuable insights into the right channels they use in their businesses, and their relationships, and help you target them rightly.

Before we look at each stage of the patient journey and the marketing strategy or content strategy to use, let’s revise the patient journey and the stages it involves.

Stages of the patient journey

Understanding your patient journey is important to help y

·         Awareness: This is the stage the patient becomes aware of a condition they have. The information could be received through experiencing symptoms or from someone else.

·         Interest/ contact: In this stage, the patient is aware of their need to get in touch with a healthcare provider based on the information they got regarding their health. 

This is also the patient’s initial contact with the health system. They may call to book an appointment, or schedule a visit on your website. Some may even send an email to get more information about when they can visit.

Care/ Diagnosis: This stage involves all the steps they go through in your clinic. It involves meeting the physician, going for tests, and making a final diagnosis of their condition.

Treatment: This is when a clear treatment plan is drawn for the patient using test results and interaction with the patient. The aim is to provide the best treatment.

Ongoing care: One of the best stages for ensuring customer loyalty is this stage. It includes a series of management, self-care, lifestyle modifications, follow-ups, and patient care between visits. This is important to ensure patient engagement with the system to deliver the right service and care to them.

Mapping Your Patient Journey to Your Marketing Strategy

The various aspect of the patient journey requires different marketing strategies. These strategies intertwine the efforts of your staff and your marketer.

Considering the stages involved, you will realize that the stages before treatment are usually the stages where patients search for information to enable them to decide to come to your hospital or pharmacy.

The rest next stage depends on you, how well you deliver care and treatment to them.

Now, with patients more concerned about their health than ever before, people are relying on the information you provide to them on your website and the internet in general to make the right choices.

To help you craft great content for your content marketing strategy and overall marketing strategy, let’s look at four crucial stages and the content you have to create for each of the stages.

The overall aim of marketing is to get new customers and retain your existing customers. These four stages are designed to ensure exactly that.

Awareness

This is the stage where your patients are searching for their conditions. They are likely searching for diseases that are causing the signs and symptoms they are experiencing.

At this stage, the quality of information you provide them with will be crucial to enabling them to continue their journey with you. Also, how well the content captures their signs and symptoms will be a major factor.

The more important thing is to have content about the conditions you treat in your clinic. Have some content that addresses the likely questions your patients have too. This is not the time to talk about your hospital and the facilities you have.

 For a dentist, you can talk about the diseases you treat such as toothache, etc.

Interest

At this stage, your patient has realized the fact that they need medical care. Now, they begin to make more inquiries about the available solutions for their health needs. They are likely searching for a cure or treatment for this or that disease or condition.

This part can be captured in content for the awareness stage. However, in the case where a patient doesn’t begin their journey from the first stage, it will help you attract the person.

Some people already establish their condition before doing any online search. A person with a toothache may search for how to treat a toothache or remedies for a toothache.

When you have this information available that captures their original intent and advises them to see a dentist and have their tooth removed, it is sure to help them contact you.

Consideration

This is the stage the patient considers their treatment options. A patient may be exposed to the many options available to help them treat their condition.

At this stage, they search more in-depth for all the information covering their treatment to help them make the right decision.

They will look forward to understanding the procedure, the side effects, and what they involve. At this stage too, you can have content that talks about your facility and the types of equipment. This information will tell the patient of your expertise in handling their condition.

Decision-making

This is when they finally decide to visit your clinic. Here they will need information about when to see you for their consultation. This may include information on what consultation would involve, and what preparations to make before going to your clinic.

·         Ongoing care

This stage is very important in maintaining customer loyalty. Here you should have content that answers likely questions they will have after their treatment. Content on some home remedies for some of the conditions they are likely to experience is very necessary as well.

Here too, you can have content about lifestyle modifications they could incorporate into their schedules to help them remain healthy.

A good content plan will help utilize all the available opportunities your patient journey presents you.

Conclusion

Understanding your patient journey is key to content marketing success. Provide content that answers their questions and solves their problems. Make them get value at each stage of their journey with you. You can be sure to get them to visit your clinic if you practice this.

A good content marketing plan is always helpful when combined with an overall marketing plan.

We hope you found this article helpful. If you need help to put together a content marketing plan or an overall marketing plan, kindly get in touch with us.