Frequently asked
questions

Healthcare marketing is the practice of connecting with and moving the behavior of healthcare consumers. This is done through outreach and communications programs designed to relate-to and guide patients and caregivers through their healthcare journey. Healthcare marketing done well will engage with and empower better decisions on the part of the patient while simultaneously positioning the marketer (hospital or healthcare brand) as the best choice for care when the time arises to seek care or help for a healthcare problem.

When done well, healthcare marketing is important for two reasons: It will help achieve the business and financial goals of the healthcare brand. And it will connect with, educate, and empower consumers to play a more active role in their own health and well-being. In seeking to serve the needs of the patient, a hospital or healthcare brand can build relationships that are grounded in trust—thereby creating a healthier community while simultaneously making a positive impact on business and clinical key performance indicators (KPIs).

Awareness. Engagement. Relevance. Accountability. These are the four most important priorities for hospital and healthcare marketers. Successful healthcare marketing should seek to serve the needs of the hospital or health brand while also providing value to the patient or customer. All hospitals and healthcare brands engage in marketing—those who seek to provide value and who hold their marketing investments accountable to business strategy as well as consumer needs will generate the most successful marketing outcomes.

One who puts the voice of the patient or stakeholder at the center of strategy and creative.

A contemporary healthcare marketing executive should seek to achieve three things:

• UNDERSTAND the community you serve through a lens of human understanding, empathy, inclusivity, and diversity.
• THINK about and maximize the impact your strategy can have on business goals as well as consumer competency, stakeholder well-being, and community health.
• IMPACT positive financial, clinical, and strategic outcomes while educating and nurturing a more competent consumer community.

Absolutely. At the heart of public and community health is the patient and a desire to lessen suffering and empower a better quality of life.

Like healthcare marketing, public and community health initiatives recognize that understanding the patient’s reality is paramount to empowering the patient in their own health and well-being. It’s equally important in building a better treatment experience for healthier outcomes. And clearly can lead to better business and financial results for the healthcare brand.

Selling healthcare is more difficult because it requires a deeper level of consumer understanding as well as a competent consumer in order to be truly effective.

Healthcare marketing is about more than just the promotion of a product. Healthcare marketing extends beyond the promotion of service lines, products, and services. Healthcare marketing is about human and cultural understanding. Healthcare marketing is about community and patient empowerment that’s intended to prolong life, promote good health and well-being, and empower behaviors that create healthier communities and more profitable hospitals and healthcare brands. Healthcare marketing is about solutions that both educate and empower patients while also promoting services and facilities for greater profitability to the healthcare system or brand.

Healthcare market research involves the process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting information about a product, customers who buy the product, and the market where a product is sold. In addition to focusing on customers, healthcare market research also focuses on competitors. In healthcare, research applies to hospitals, healthcare brands, healthcare products and devices, healthcare providers, patients who use healthcare services and products, and those who care for the patient. Healthcare market research always seeks to learn about patient sentiment, beliefs, motivations, and needs.

When done with a mission, there are two reasons hospitals and healthcare brands invest in research. To understand the stakeholders served, and to inform marketing and business strategies that not only impact business requirements but that also improve the health and well-being of the patient and the communities served. Understanding is crucial to business success in healthcare, and market research is the only way to achieve this understanding at-scale.

In short, qualitative. Both have their place—and each provide useful data for hospital marketers and healthcare brands. That said, qualitative research can provide a denser and more nuance data set than quantitative. Each collects different data and each uses very different methods for data collection—with quantitative studies relying on numerical data and inputs while qualitative studies rely on personal interactions with research participants. Simply put, quantitative research can tell us “what” or “how many” while qualitative healthcare research tells us “why” and the “reasons and motivations” for something. As marketers we seek to influence behavior, and so understanding the why behind the what is far more valuable than just understanding an empty statistical fact that is void of context.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality defines mixed methods research as “a methodology of research that advances the systematic integration of quantitative and qualitative data. The basic premise of this methodology is that such integration permits a more complete and synergistic utilization of data and is encouraged as a better approach to understanding.”
Mixed-methods research is an emergent methodology that is becoming especially prolific within the context of hospital and health services research. There is a growing literature on the theory, design, and critical appraisal of mixed-methods research.

Ethnography is the process of learning about patients by learning from them. In healthcare, an ethnographic approach to qualitative research and insights gathering champions the observation of patients and healthcare stakeholders in their lived environment. The objective of ethnography is to understand the lived experiences, perspectives, needs, and beliefs of patients in their everyday lives. Until recently, healthcare marketers have lacked a standard interpretation of how ethnography and anthropology fit into healthcare marketing strategies. Now, understanding a patient’s reality and how we can leverage that understanding to build a better system of care and provide better education with marketing is fast becoming as important as technology and science in healthcare.

Ethnography illuminates the why behind the what in healthcare research. Many healthcare brands claim that they know their customers, but how many truly understand them? The gaps between knowing and understanding prevent us from achieving patient-centricity in healthcare marketing. Qualitative research tools such as ethnography provide us with the a framework for empathically engaging with patients and listening to their expert points of view. As a direct result, we’re able to use the insights gained in a way that bridges these gaps and leads us from simply knowing, to deeply understanding.

Simply put, research is the process of gathering data—quantitative, qualitative, or both—and organizing the data for interpretation. Insights, on the other hand, represent the actual useful by-product of research efforts—insights represent what we are able to discern and learn from the data. Insights represent the useful tools and resources that emerge from a careful evaluation and analysis of data. Insights are functional tools that healthcare marketers can leverage to build strategically sound marketing and patient support programming. Research gathers data that informs insights. Insights power better healthcare marketing strategies and outcomes—strategically, financially, and clinically.

The Five Dimensions of Emotional Truth is an insights framework created by LIFT founder David McDonald. The framework is intended to help organize rich and thick qualitative data into a manageable thematic order of insights that facilitate better outcomes when bringing research insights to life through strategy and creative implementation.

An emotional truth is defined by McDonald as a core experience or psychological state that lends insight into the deeply held beliefs and desires of an individual within a given situation. The five ’categories” or “Dimensions” are:

1. Needs
2. Motivations
3. Fears
4. Hopes
5. Beliefs

Emotional truths are the “DNA” of healthcare patient stories and inform every aspect of how healthcare marketers should consider their strategies and creative approaches.

Intersections of Common Human Truth is a framework created by LIFT founder, David McDonald, to help strengthen patient engagement and messaging tactics by leveraging known dimensions of understanding and shared beliefs among cohorts with whom healthcare marketers need to communicate.

Given the inherently difficult task of changing or influencing human behavior for better healthcare outcomes and patient experience results, intersections of common truth provide a starting point for optimal communications when it is necessary to communicate with a more than a single stakeholders—such as a pediatric patient and parent; or a cardiac patient and his or her immediate caregiver; or the patient and his or her provider. By speaking a language that each cohort is known to relate to the usefulness, viability, and impact of a message has a better chance of comprehension and therefore a positive outcome from a marketing or education perspective.

Think of velocity like this: Speed is the time rate at which a healthcare marketing program is moving along a path, while velocity is the rate and direction of a healthcare marketing program’s movement.

When done well and with purpose, healthcare marketing is demanding and requires optimal use of resources and dollars invested to achieve goals at the speed of business. Efficiency and accuracy are very important assets to a healthcare marketer—and velocity the key to success. Moving quickly and accurately towards targets and goals is a tremendous priority for healthcare marketers—accuracy of focus and pace of action can make or break a marketing investment.

At LIFT, we nurture strategic and creative velocity for our clients by leveraging insights, patient-centricity, and the tools and protocols of design thinking—the most important being insights. We like to say that insights fuel strategic thinking which in turn fuels marketing impact—the stronger the insights, the more velocity we create in strategy and creative.

Insights provide crucial context that healthcare marketers can confidently leverage into focused strategic conversations.

When leveraging insights (especially qualitative or mixed-methods insights) into a healthcare marketing strategy, marketers will possess a rich and highly-validated picture of reality at ground level—this provides validated areas of focus and important confidence when thinking strategically. Leveraging the voice of the patient and other stakeholders into strategic conversations is akin to tossing gasoline onto a fire—very powerful and compelling. Remember, insights fuel thinking which in turn fuels marketing impact.

When done well, a qualitative or mixed-methods insights report will be chock-full of stories and truths that can immediately be pulled through into creative strategy.

Creativity is at the core of any marketing endeavor and is particularly important when implementing patient-centered healthcare marketing. There is no richer ground to explore than that of the patient’s lived experiences—to capture patient stories and leverage those stories into relatable creative content is very rewarding. Great stories emerge from great insights and contemporary healthcare marketing requires stories that are relatable and in the voice of the patients and stakeholders we intend to move in our direction.

Maps are used to document and then contextualize research findings so that healthcare marketers can ultimately aligning strategy and creative solution design with the most critical needs and values of the patient and stakeholder audience. Mapping is an activity that leverages patient insights and understanding to systematically map the patient or related stakeholder’s functional, cognitive, and emotional experiences along a healthcare and/or well-being journey. Maps provide an excellent visual representation of our findings and realities at ground level. As marketers, we use mapping to better understand the data we collect and to help illuminate the path forward.

There are seven types of maps healthcare marketers might use—journey, expectation, language, context, message, needs, and asset maps. All are equally useful yet varied in their functions. The use of mapping tools and illustrations are extremely helpful when presenting patient and consumer insights to clients and related stakeholders. Healthcare marketing, education, patient engagement and experience professionals play an important role in a brand’s success, and mapping is a crucial component. Every action a marketer takes is intended to empower patient behavior and improve their health.

A patient (or stakeholder) journey map is a visual representation of the process that he or she goes through to achieve a goal with your hospital or health system. With the help of a journey map, healthcare marketers can chart stakeholder behavior over time and glean deeper insight into the motivations that drive those behaviors. This allows healthcare marketers to design and target interventions, experiences, or messages that will influence a positive outcome.

Expectation mapping is a way of visualizing the patient or stakeholder’s emotions within the context of a healthcare or wellness journey. Expectation maps are an excellent way to explore and understand the dynamic and ever-evolving expectations embedded in the reality of what a quality healthcare experience or interaction should look and feel like.

A language map (or more properly called linguistic map) is a thematic map illuminating the geographic distribution (internally and externally) of the various speakers of certain languages within your healthcare delivery environment or the community you serve.

A context map is the high-level view of a service environment or healthcare ecosystem as a whole. Consisting of various micro—or bounded contexts (at home vs. in a clinic), the collection of bounded contexts fits within a formal healthcare context map. This kind of map illuminates how communications might be shared or implemented across the entire marketing or communications landscape.

A message map is the basic framework used in creating compelling, relevant, and engaging messages for various healthcare audience segments (patient, caregiver, internal stakeholder, etc.). A message map can also serve as an organizational alignment tool to ensure message consistency. These maps are excellent for designing and implementing messages across multiple stakeholder audience landscapes.

A needs map is generally intended to help map the needs of various stakeholders and identify ways to impact stakeholders in a productive manner. There are many needs at play within a given encounter, and all stakeholders have primary and secondary needs. A needs map focuses on “behavior levers” that can impact behavior change. Primary needs can be appreciation, acceptance, and approval. Secondary needs might be admiration, pity, intelligence, or power— these needs are often hidden desires that the stakeholder wants to keep private.

Asset mapping is a way of understanding the strengths and resources of a department, cohort, or the community at large. It’s an excellent way to uncover potential solution designs. Once stakeholder strengths and resources are illuminated and depicted in a map, healthcare strategists and designers can more easily think about how to leverage the various assets to address organizational or community needs and improve health and well-being.