BLOG: Marketing changes needed if you are serious about patient experience design
If you are not familiar with the concept of a marketing funnel, I will be going into more granular detail in future posts.
But for the purposes of our discussion, a marketing funnel collects prospective patients at the top of the funnel, thanks your marketing efforts, and (hopefully) produces a happy patient at the bottom of the funnel. Along the way, the multiple “touchpoints” that prospect experiences will either engage them or turn them off. Typically, only a fraction of patients make it from one stage to the next.
What is a marketing flywheel?
A marketing “flywheel” might be a new concept for you. Funnels are easy to understand and explain. But they have limitations because they are linear. For example, once a prospect becomes a patient, all of the effort begins again with filling the top of the funnel, which is the most expensive and least successful step for adding new patients. The flywheel, on the other hand, maximizes the goodwill and relationship investment with every new patient so that their referrals and endorsements result in inexpensive practice growth. The funnel ignores how patients can help you grow, and in today’s digital marketing environment, everything should focus on the center of the flywheel: the patient experience.
It is an acknowledgement of the importance of the customer (in our case, patient) experience. Regardless of the marketing channel through which a new patient finds your practice or your offer, what they experience from initial contact to exam to surgery to follow-up care will determine whether they become a promoter or a detractor.
A marketing flywheel puts the patient at the center of the marketing effort. The three phases of marketing drive the marketing messages, and the flywheel compounds the effect of your brand story with a remarkable patient experience. Side note: Do you know who Seth Godin is? If not, I’ll leave it to you to Google him. He is one of the best marketers alive today. Read his article on “How to be remarkable.” According to Seth, “Remarkable doesn’t mean remarkable to you. It means remarkable to me. Am I going to make a remark about it? If not, then you’re average, and average is for losers.”
If your messaging is delivered correctly, it feeds the progress of a patient’s purchasing decision while it positions you as the practice to which they love to refer.
The importance of patient experience design
Patient experience is a buzzword that’s heard a lot these days. It’s a concept borrowed from business, and we know it as patient experience design. I wonder if it became prominent because of all the effort in explaining the change from fee-for-service to quality of care and outcomes-based payment?
Patient experience, in short, aims to align your brand promise with the quality and thoughtfulness of every treatment touchpoint from first inquiry call to postop follow-up or annual exam reminder. In Shareef Mahdavi’s book on patient experience, Beyond Bedside Manner, his chapter “Everything Communicates” is an excellent example of what is possible when you add flywheel marketing. There is nothing worse for a patient than to be wowed by slick brand marketing only to suffer through indifferent reception staff, brusque technicians and long wait times for a doctor (who show up 45 minutes late to clinic). It is not uncommon for me to see a patient for whom I am the fourth or fifth ophthalmologist they have seen, with poor service being an often-cited reason.
Flywheel or funnel: Which one is right for you?
Well, this is really a trick question because the reality is that you need to employ some of each. After all, how do patients get dropped into a flywheel if not for a “top of funnel” offer or announcement? In addition, marketing funnels are critical for visualizing your marketing conversion points and intelligent subprocesses (based on branching logic that follows actual patient/prospect trackable actions). Only by mapping and tracking them can you optimize your efforts and ensure their effectiveness. But while we’re busy measuring and analyzing marketing metrics, we cannot minimize the importance of the patient experience. Effective marketing must lead to the experience promoted. A compelling marketing message followed by a less-than-desirable experience is worse than a mediocre experience that was never advertised at all.
References:
https://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/our-flywheel
https://medium.com/@IliyanaStareva/the-funnel-is-dead-long-live-the-flywheel-e9d6c75248e4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=180&v=XHssj4qdAdc&feature=emb_logo
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