Marketing should be agnostic to media type, and so too should the strategist developing and implementing digital marketing campaigns.
As such, healthcare providers and medical tourism hospitality partners must take time to reconsider their aproach to digital marketing and other forms of marketing for medical tourism products. Digital marketing is done, but it isn’t don’t well, from what we’ve reviewed around the world.
Start with conducting a skills assessment of existing marketing teams to determine who may need training or who may need to be replaced with talent that natively understands both digital and print, media, and other analog worlds. This obsolete strategy is still an issue for a majority of digital marketing teams that have not focused on integration and will continue to haunt slow adopters.
What we know for sure is that website sales pages and campaigns that list services as if they are in a hospital surgery or diagnostic catalog have not worked. Not in Thailand, Turkey, or Tucson.
Up your game.
To begin,
- Describe the experiences you offer your health tourism “guests” from destination arrival to departure.
- Describe the unique solutions you will provide for their concerns, pain and disabilities, or ways that they can decompress and destress at your location. If you don’t your savvy competitors will.
- Describe the steps you took initially, and continue to take to improve quality, safety, and customer service. Engage consumers who have benefitted from this to give testimonials about their experiences, focusing on the parts that touched them personally, spiritually, and made them feel better. Describe what you learned along the way and how you learned it and how you applied the lessons learned to make guests’ experiences better and/or more meaningful. If it didn’t work, share why it didn’t work and how you improved it. There’s no shame in improving your operations or efforts on a continual basis.
These three simple points will give you hundreds of ideas upon which to create meaningful digital content that can be shared across platforms in social media, websites, interviews, videos, and articles.
