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What are best healthcare marketing case studies for increasing patient volume?
Hello! Thanks for your question about best healthcare marketing case studies for increasing patient volume. The most useful sources we found to answer your question are this compressed list of 12 case studies and this case study of Martin Health System. The short version is that digital holistic marketing is the most effective path for increasing the number of patients, followed by advertising in other local media. Below you will find a deep dive of our findings.
GENERAL FINDINGS
Before we go into the particular case studies, it is worth making a general summary of what we found. At the present time, 80% of patients decision to purchase is made online before the healthcare provider is contacted; thus, a strong online presence is mandatory in order to create growth. Additionally, knowing the target patients that are likely to use the provider's services, customizing the campaign towards that group, creating key calls-to-action and making it easy for the customers to get in touch also showed a direct correlation to an increased patient flow.
In the past, it was physicians who drove the brand; patients wanted to benefit from the services of practitioners they had heard of. That however has changed with the increased number of choices in healthcare, and today consumers are starting their journey by gathering online information that will shape their decision - healthcare providers should focus on making their website a part of that decision making, providing great content that helps consumers in their search, and establishing themselves as experts in their field.
Targeting a relaunch, Martin's Health website was SEO optimized plus it improved the user experience for patients, which lead to an increase of 30% for overall visits. Traffic to employed physician pages and key service line was increased by 300%.
They also had two additional online programs, one for a pilot lung screening and another for weight-loss surgery. By using Martin Health's website as the call-to-action for these campaigns, the marketing and web teams demonstrated a directly attributable new net patient revenue of hundreds of thousands of dollars. They created calls-to-action on key landing pages of their website, and offered prospective patients new resources when they took next steps to learn more.
The lung screening program benefited from an online risk assessment, while for the weight loss surgery program Martin Health created seminars that prospective clients could attend in order to learn more. The patients were also given access to "gated content" in exchange for sharing their details such as name and email.
The results for lung screening was $59,000 in net patient revenue (at the date the case study was made), and for the weight loss surgery program $150,000+ in revenue.
VONT recommended both a renaming and rebranding to differentiate OA's premier specialty orthopedic practices. The order of marketing was brand, service line and lastly physicians, rather than physicians first, service line second and brand last. The campaign's goals were lead generation and increased brand awareness; there was some radio, display, and PR, but the digital campaign's goal was to increase clients visits to a new website. Taking advantage of OA's already existing strong content, VONT optimized it for organic search with a concerted SEO effort. Remarketing was also used for the site's previous visitors as brand reinforcement. Target clients were researched - females make 80%-85% of medical decisions for their kids, boyfriends or spouses with sports injuries, and VONT also targeted specific times - they created a social media campaign for OA’s Saturday morning clinic for those that could have been injured on Friday night's games. The result of the campaign was a broad level of reach, with a sharp increase in patient counts, at a conversion cost of $25/appointment.
St. Luke’s Hospital had a dropping ER volume, even with several operational enhancements. Boosting this drop were reports by news media about patients that waited for hours in ERs even with critical conditions, which fueled prospective patients' anxiety and fear. BPD worked with the hospital’s leadership and created service level guarantees, followed by an integrated marketing campaign advertising the 30 minutes ER guarantee which was unique in the area. This created a 20% increase in ER volumes in the first two months, bringing significant downstream revenue.
Points Group took a neurosurgical practice that had zero marketing investment, with a 20 visits per day website of only a few pages. Points immediately designed a brand new website which was optimized for search engines, and the results were a clear increase in both patient conversion and site traffic in the first 6-9 months. This was followed with a continued expansion by enhancing the website, blogging, press releases, SEO and SEM, online reputation management, event planning, customer service training, and referral marketing. A 20% growth was observed over the period of one year for the practice, who also opened two new locations. Site traffic for the new website increased by 500%.
To wrap it up, an improved digital footprint is the best path to increasing patients volume, followed by local media advertising. Working with the healthcare provider in order to improve their weak points is also beneficial in attracting clients.
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