There are several different ways to approach healthcare marketing. One of the more popular approaches is the “5 P’s of healthcare marketing. The five P’s are: Product: The service being offered to the patient. Price: The amount a patient is willing to pay for the service. Place: How the patient can access a treatment, be it at a facility or remotely.   Promotion – The marketing and advertising involved with promoting a healthcare service Process: Various ways a medical practice can effectively market its target audience. Medical practices are just like any other business. They need to remain profitable and grow to succeed. Using a marketing strategy like this allows them to stay competitive and attract more patients to their front door. The healthcare industry is moving towards patients being more empowered to make their own healthcare decisions and play more prominent roles in their treatments, services, and overall health. Medical practices need to incorporate these concepts and themes into their marketing efforts to remain competitive.   The 5 P’s are also known as a Marketing Mix. It is a set of actions and tools available to a medical practice to promote its business and reach its target audience. It was developed over 50 years ago and originally only had 4 P’s, product place, price, and promotion. Other versions sometimes add 2 or 3 additional elements, but the 5 P’s is currently the most popular version of the Marketing Mix. The experts at PatientGain.com have years of experience in implementing the 5 P’s for many different healthcare practices. The 5 P’s: Product – Refining The Services Available At A Medical Practice “Product” may seem a relatively straightforward concept when it comes to a medical practices. The product is generally the variety of provider services offered to a patient. However, this concept can be deceptively simple when it is a complex available that medical practices must completely understand. Not having the correct selection of services available to a target audience can stunt the growth of the patient counts at a medical practice and make it difficult to succeed.   A medical practice needs to know its target audience and its marketing toward them. Unless a medical practice is a large, all-encompassing business, a medical practice will not be able to offer everyone in the community the same service they need. They should define their target audience and then refine their services to best fit their needs with that in mind. Starting from a place like that will allow a medical practice to get a firm footing and grow from there. With that set, marketing campaigns can then be developed to appeal to that target audience directly.    However, a medical practice should be open to expanding its services to fit new needs in a target audience or add another target audience to its marketing efforts. Determining what services to offer or what services need improvement can be accomplished by carefully studying a patient’s pain points in terms of health. It is helpful to review services and see if they are still beneficial to a target audience or if refinements are needed. This analysis can allow a medical practice to capture missed opportunities and continually improve what they offer to their communities and neighborhoods.  The 5 P’s: Pricing – Adjusting Prices To Meet The Needs of a Business & a Community  Setting prices for services is a challenging endeavor. It is challenging to find a price point that will keep a medical practice profitable with room to grow and a price that makes services affordable to a target audience. Unlike other industries, other elements influence the pricing structure for services. These can include insurance reimbursements, government regulations, and other regulatory limitations. Some pricing factors are within the control of a medical practice, but others are not and can change rapidly, requiring a medical practice to adjust as needed.   A medical practice should keep screenings and preventive medicine costs as low as possible. It will encourage patients to come in and receive these tests or treatments to stay healthy. Regular, affordable visits will build trust between a practice and a target audience. Many insurance companies also offer incentives for preventive care, and medical practices can take advantage of those by promoting those in their marketing campaigns. For example, many insurance companies will cover the cost of an annual flu shot or a wellness physical. Those should be heavily promoted to encourage patients to come in for checkups. Suppose there is a medical issue that is discovered during these routine appointments. In that case, it is often more affordable to treat them early than to wait until it develops into a more serious condition.  The 5 P’s: Place – Make It Easy To Visit a Medical Practice  In a Marketing Mix framework like the 5 P’s, the place is less about the physical location of a medical practice but more of a concept about how easy it is to access the services available at a medical practice. With that said, the location of a medical practice can provide it with numerous advantages. Suppose a medical practice is located near public transportation, on the street with ample parking, its own private parking lot, or is close to a major highway. In that case, it can certainly benefit from being more accessible to a community. With that said, COVID-19 has proven that online connections between doctors and patients are not as complicated as it once was and can be incorporated into a medical practice’s procedures. In fact, with the adoption of online services, the availability of medical treatments and services can now reach a much wider target audience, and the actual geographic location of patients is less of a concern.   There are several other ways a medical practice can increase accessibility to the target audience of their services: • Same-Day or Walk-In Appointments –  Popular with urgent care centers, same-day or walk-in appointments allow patients to get treatment when they need it. Same-day and walk-in appointments are helpful to attract patients before they turn to an emergency room or urgent care center for treatment. • Social Media –  Social media can make it easier for patients to communicate with medical practices. Monitoring this communication and engaging with patients can facilitate a patient’s decision to make an appointment. • Directions Page –  Providing a page on a website with directions to a medical practice can help others easily find the facility. Providing written directions and an embedded Google Map can boost Local SEO rankings, making a medical practice appear higher in listings.   • Digital Intake Forms – The easier it is for patients to submit information to a medical practice, the quicker they can get services. Online or digital intake forms reduce frustration, and patients are less like to abandon treatments or search out competitors for medical care.  The 5 P’s – Promotion: Using Modern Digital Marketing Strategies To Reach A Target Audience Promotion is a crucial part of marketing. Those new to healthcare marketing may think promotion and marketing are interchangeable, but they mean different things. In this context, promotion is part of healthcare marketing. Promotion involves communicating to current and potential patients the value of a medical practice and its services. The idea is to convey why they need to select a medical practice for services or why they need to use the services to keep themselves healthy. Offline or traditional marketing methods are generally considered less effective than today’s digital marketing strategies, with the only notable excepting being direct mail marketing in some cases. Digital marketing allows a medical practice to more narrowly focus on a target audience, stretching their marketing dollar to make their budget more effectively. Below are some popular digital marketing strategies that medical practices successfully use.   • Responsive websites –  A medical practice without a website is a practice that has been stuck for several decades in the past. The website will be the first thing that many potential patients will interact with when considering it for medical care. It needs to make a good impression and function on any screen. A responsive website will rearrange itself to fit on whatever screen it is displayed on. A good, responsive website will have every bit of functionality on a mobile device as it does on a desktop computer. Over 70% of website designers believe a site visitor will leave if a site is not responsive.  • Social Media Profiles – Social media today is almost like a business card. People expect serious businesses to have them. Social media allows current and potential patients to stay up to date with announcements from a medical practice and other health-related news. Sharing reliable information about current local, regional, or national health concerns will help establish trust and authority with a community and target audience. Medical practices can also help connect with their target audience by sharing photos and updates of staff and providers. Functional medicine practices should consider having profiles on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram and share updates through their Google Business profile. • Geofencing –  This marketing tactic is relatively new in digital marketing and is not always fully understood. Geofencing is the process of creating a “digital fence” around a specific geographic location. When a potential patient is within that fenced-in area or crossed the border, a marketing campaign triggers for them. These campaigns are usually aimed at mobile devices since they travel more than desktop computers. This tactic uses GPS to determine where a phone is to see if it crosses a geofence border or is residing in it. GPS is good most of the time, but it may not always be able to determine precisely where someone is. Geofencing is good for specific campaigns targeting specific people, such as people attending a sports event or parents waiting in line to pick up children from school.     • Search Engine Optimization –   Known as SEO, search engine optimization helps build the organic rankings of a medical practice’s website. A medical practice should focus on the keywords its target audience uses to find the services they provide. Good SEO work will use both short-tail keywords and long-tail keywords. Short-tail keywords are generally three words or less, cover broad topics, and have higher site traffic but lower conversion rates. Long-tail keywords are four words or more, focus on specific topics, have lower site traffic but higher conversion rates. Long-tail keywords also play a more significant role in voice search, utilized by smart speakers and personal digital assists like Siri and Alexa.  Mobile SEO is also important and requires constant attention to ensure it is being effective.  The 5 P’s – Process: Creating Regular Marketing Routines For A Medical Practice Marketing a medical practice is a continuous task for a business. However, marketing campaigns do not need to be created from the ground up every time. A marketing expert for a medical practice can create routines to make their time much more efficient. Time can be saved if regular marketing routines and automation can be set up to save time and still deliver valuable marketing activities. Below is some common marketing processes that can be set up to trigger automatically. • Welcome & Birthday Emails – When patients submit paperwork, they will give their date of birth. Email campaigns can be set up to send them birthday greetings every year. These annual emails are an opportunity to market regular testing or screenings to keep them healthy. A welcome email can introduce new patients to the staff and providers treating them and provide them with important information, like phone numbers or specific site pages, to help keep them healthy. Studies show that over 20% of welcome emails are usually read. • Appointment Reminders – Missed appointments make it harder for a patient to maintain their good health and impacts the bottom line of a medical practice. An automated appointment reminder will help cut missed appointment rates and ensure there are fewer gaps in the schedule for a medical practice. 75% of patients find these reminders to be very useful. Appointment reminders can be sent via text or email to patients. While emails are usually the less expensive choice, text messages have a much higher open rate and are more likely to ensure a patient will receive the message. Be sure to include ways for patients to confirm, cancel, or change an appointment if needed.