The healthcare marketing industry is a many-faceted one, requiring a marketing program that employs scientific research, integrated marketing and communications for company branding and an advertising mix with a measurable return on investment. In today's market, you can build your brand, your ad mix and your assessment tools using online resources.

Whether you're new to marketing for the health industry, or have made a career providing healthcare marketing information, your marketing focus can range from very specific to a generalized campaign:

1. Employ health care marketing agencies who specialize in branding. These professionals can also revitalize your organization’s image to increase your presence in the healthcare marketing industry.

2. Combine advertising for the health industry with solid research and the services of experienced ad-buying pros.

3. Use targeted healthcare marketing lists, market research and assessment tools to design and evaluate your efforts.

Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Use strategic marketing for the health industry to build or reinvent your company's image

Any healthcare marketing professional promoting a hospital, home health agency or hospice that is just starting out, or renewing the brand of an existing facility, should focus on branding that appeals to a target market. If potential patients associate your hospital's name with personal attention, they will be more apt to use your services than if they associate your agency with corporate politics and big-budget executives. In today's competitive healthcare market, branding is the key to increasing target market share and profit margins.

I recommend: Partner with the experts at Brand Institute, Inc., to optimize your plan for marketing in the health industry. Listen to free audio excerpts from a training CD set at Healthcare Success Strategies, and learn how to establish an integrated marketing communications plan to grow your own patient, employee and doctor referrals.

Employ medical marketing and advertising specialists to build a modern advertising mix

Traditional advertising media are effective for targeting aging Boomers, but the wise marketing professional also includes electronic media in their company's targeted marketing plan. Online healthcare advertising and marketing is the latest avenue to reach more and more consumers, and emerging m-commerce technologies will require even more technological upgrades in the near future to fit this platform.

I recommend: Go the traditional route with marketing publications, print advertising, television and radio production in your medical marketing plan with an advertising agency listed with Healthcare Advertising Agencies. If you run a small agency or office, hire DoctorsManagement to handle marketing, marketer recruitment and even physician credentialing. Use Healthcare Web Solutions to design and maintain a website to establish a presence on the Internet.

Target your primary market using health care marketing services for research

Today's health marketing services must take into account national initiatives offering pay for performance. In other words, doctors and hospitals get paid according to how well they do their jobs. Target your hospital's specific patient market, and then assess what those patients -- and your own doctors and staff -- think of the hospital using satisfaction surveys.

I recommend: Hire Strategic Healthcare Communications to evaluate your current marketing plan. Get specific answers about your facility's target market with patient and staff satisfaction surveys from Press Ganey.

Tips & Tactics

Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

• •  There's no need to reinvent the wheel to make marketing in the health care industry run smoothly. Find a campaign you like and head straight to the source -- meet with health care marketing agencies and auxiliary service providers who developed the campaign, and adopt it to fit your company's needs.