Health officials are calling on the public to embrace telehealth services as a safe means for the diagnosis of medical conditions and the on-demand delivery of medical services. As more companies include telehealth offerings in their employee benefits, there is a critical need to attract qualified healthcare professionals onto these platforms to match the consumer demand.
Leaders For Today (LFT), a national healthcare interim and permanent staffing company, just released a report regarding the perceived state of physician staffing. More than 200 hospital leaders from facilities of various sizes and locations were enlisted to take part. Upon completion, the report was entitled “The Candidates Don’t Exist.”
You can’t get much more blunt than that.
In a Medscape “One-on-One” interview with host Eric Topol, Ezekiel Emanuel, MD, PhD, argues that the direness of the physician shortage has been overstated. He believes the problem is, at its core, a time management issue. Dr. Emanuel cites additional contributing factors, such as maldistribution of rural versus urban markets and the misconception that once supply meets demand, everything will be okay.
The core purpose of marketing is to bring positive awareness to a product or service, with the hope that consumers will choose your goods or services over a competitor. Even if a brand doesn’t truly believe it’s the best, savvy marketers are still capable of convincing a portion of the public to buy.
It’s why some brands have the budget—and the chutzpah—to pay an insane amount of money for a Superbowl ad.
In part one of this blog, I explained why it’s imperative to ensure your marketing voice is heard above all the noise that accompanies healthcare recruitment. One way to accomplish that is through a strategic multichannel approach, which, when done properly, allows your voice to become the one of reason.
The first two traits of successful multichannel marketing I discussed were:
Did you know that the average person has up to 70,000 thoughts per day? That breaks down to approximately 50 unique cognitive functions every 60 seconds. Of course, most of them are useless and unimportant, passing through your brain at almost lightning speed. The human brain simply cannot process them all, at least without landing you in a straitjacket.
Modern society has only contributed to the rapid fire. CNN broke ground with its 24-hour news cycle back in June of 1980, which was only the beginning of the 24/7 trend. From social media and streaming content to virtual reality, there’s a lot going on.
An insightful Forbes.com article I came across discussed the difference between mobile-friendly marketing, what author Gabriel Shaoolian describes as “the bare minimum required in this day and age” and mobile-first marketing, which takes a step beyond the simplicity of mobile-friendly and standardizes mobile as the status quo in digital and multichannel marketing efforts.
The former had been acceptable, because until just a few years ago, desktop was the norm and mobile was the exception. The tables have turned.
“If you’re not talking to your customers, odds are your competition is.”
That’s a fairly common understanding in marketing. You drop the ball, someone else is sure to pick it up. Of course, for the purposes of hospital and health system recruitment, “customers” translates to “physicians,” but the core message still stands: It’s a competition.
Improvements in digital tactics have prompted email and web to fill in the holes left by traditional approaches to physician recruitment. This is not to say that “classic advertising” does not have a place in an overall marketing strategy.
A hybrid approach using all available channels—also known as multichannel marketing—can be very effective. However, there are challenges to consider.
Before I get to the potential hurdles of non-digital avenues, let’s examine the benefits of taking a multichannel route.
This is the sixth and final blog in our “Digital Marketing to Physicians” series, which has contemplated how health systems, medical device manufacturers, and healthcare recruiters can use digital marketing to engage specific physician audiences. Thus far we've focused on email deliverability, the importance of digital tools in physician outreach, using physician data to improve recruiting efforts, benefits of using digital tools over print, and optimizing campaigns by ensuring mobile-readiness. This installment explores how you can integrate multichannel efforts to better promote CME and other events.
Just as the physician recruiting landscape has faced challenges in the last few years, so has the arena of CME marketing. Physicians have experienced cuts in clinician educational budgets and some—in part due to the physician shortage—have had to be more judicious selecting the conferences they attend, with limited time allowed away from busy offices.