TV Ads Driving Patient Volume Will Soon Be Highly-Targeted
DirecTV Group Inc. is planning the biggest rollout yet of “addressable ads,” allowing advertisers to reach close to 10 million homes with commercials tailored to each household. Dog owners, for instance, will see ads for dog food, not kitty litter, while families with children will watch minivan spots.
As a practical example for healthcare marketers, when ads are based on hospital CRM data, skinny people would not see your bariatric ads and morbidly obese people would not see your sports medicine orthopedic ads.
The practice of online data-gathering has been featured in The Wall Street Journal’s What They Know series, which documents the use of Internet-tracking technology and privacy implications for consumers.
The future is here. How are you going to respond?
What You Should Learn From Diapers.com About Driving Patient Volume…No Kidding.
Amazon just beat out Wal-mart to buy Diapers.com for $540 million. Really?!? Do they sell that many diapers? No. But they have an amazing database of new parents with money. And so do you.
Here is the point: You have a huge database of high-contribution clinical intake now. You can use a CRM to sort it. Or if you don’t have a CRM system, just send out direct mail to existing patients to drive screening events.
For example, did you know that normative databases (“normative” meaning what is “normal”) show that if someone is at risk for¬†cardiovascular¬†issues they also have a 30% chance of needing an orthopedic procedure? Or a 10% chance of having undiagnosed cancer? AND the majority of these patients need bariatric procedures or sleep machines.
Why is diapers.com so valuable? Because of their database. You should have a great database of patients with co-risks.  If you have such a database, you are sitting on a goldmine of high-contribution margin.
Do Patients Know Why You Are “Different?”
The key to growing patient volumes is selling something “different” so that prospects can make a choice. But the things we think are different are usually irrelevant to patients seeking a medical provider.
“Best Doctors” is not different. “Our New Da Vinci,” or any other medical technology, is not different enough.
HealthGrades…not really different. ¬†(Nobody removes the oxygen mask in the ambulance to ask the EMT what the “grades” are of the nearest hospital.)
Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd, by Youngme Moon has been getting some raves in the consumer marketing world. We sometimes learn important lessons from consumer marketers.
Check out this video about Moon’s book. It may start an important conversation within you…and around you.
