Marketing can be the most exciting part of a telehealth solution. It’s an opportunity to win followers and fans, take victory laps, grow your solution, and set expectations so that you have less headaches during the rough times.  However, marketing is sorely underdeveloped in telehealth.  This essay highlights the biggest marketing mistake people make in telehealth, and how to avoid it.

Cheers,

Nirav Desai

What is the #1 marketing mistake with telehealth? Not marketing enough!

Through effective telehealth marketing, people create opportunities to solidify their support base, overcome obstacles, and grow their programs.

So why don’t people market enough? There are 3 reasons:

I will explain how each of these “excuses” could be counterproductive to the telehealth solution, and share a strategy to move forward.

Why Marketing is Important to Telehealth

When people get into telehealth, they often spend their time and energy working through a medley of issues – clinical, technical, operational, economic, and legal.

Marketing is an afterthought.

Upon launching their solution, they suddenly realize that the “Field of Dreams” approach (i.e. “build it and they will come”) does not work and that they need to “sell” what they started. In fact, they should have started “selling” or “marketing” much earlier.

For example, when trying to get a telehealth solution started, the most important goal is to get buy-in from the people that will provide funding for, approve of, or execute on your solution. This requires a lot of communication to line up support from the right influencers and decision-makers.

If you “market” only to the people that are easy to speak with but who don’t have the right influence or decision making power, you are wasting time (theirs and yours).

Now let’s say you focus on working out the technological issues, but spend little or no time sharing with physicians how telehealth will benefit them, or discussing their telehealth concerns. You could end up purchasing the “best” equipment and find that it does not meet your clinician’s needs for mobility, ease of documentation, or clinical confidence for example.

Or let’s say that you do ensure that everyone in your organization is aligned to the benefits. But you fail to set expectations that there may be some technological hiccups out of the gate.

If a high visibility telehealth program does not launch flawlessly (and most do not), then if you haven’t sufficiently marketed the benefits and the possible issues, the consequences of bad PR from a problem during launch will be hard to overcome. You could suffer a significant setback with the referring facilities you want to join your network, with administration that funds your program, or with patients who are wary of being treated with new technology.

In summary, marketing is more essential to a telehealth solution’s success than people realize. As a result, marketing done well has the potential to help a telehealth solution thrive. On the other hand, marketing done not so well has the potential to accelerate the solution’s failure.

Making time for Telehealth Marketing

Some people, despite their understanding of marketing’s importance, don’t know how to spend their time going about it and as a result do less of it.

Telehealth professionals often come from backgrounds in academic medicine, technology, hospital administration, or clinical practice. They are typically not well versed in marketing.  Since they don’t know enough about what it takes to make a marketing effort successful, they conclude that it’s better not to waste their already limited time on a likely failure.  Unfortunately, as the earlier examples showed, insufficient marketing can come back to haunt the overall project.

Some professionals make time for marketing but without strategy or consistency.  They try a single press release, or try Google Adwords for a week, or email a prospect only once or twice.  This “random-whim” style of marketing, done when they find some time and want to try out a new thing is also ineffective. 

To maximize the effectiveness of the time they spend on marketing, people should also spend enough time thinking about how to tailor their marketing message to their target audience and get it out there through repeated efforts and multiple channels.  Otherwise, the marketing campaign can miss its mark.

If random-whim marketing causes lackluster results, the random-whim marketer may lose enthusiasm and spend less time and energy trying to make it work.

Again, this lack of strategy, consistency and follow-through can lead to poor results, limiting marketing’s ability to positively impact a telehealth program.

Investing in Telehealth Marketing

Another barrier to telehealth marketing is the perceived expense of marketing efforts. People think they have to invest heavily in big activities or events in order to get visibility and traction for their solution. For example, they may feel that the only way to have measurable impact is to have a large presence at trade shows, to place a lot of ads, or do expensive media buys.

As a result, they put their limited marketing budget into one or two large bets. When the bets don’t pay off, they sometimes conclude they should have gone bigger, and if they don’t have budget for the bigger investment, decide to stop marketing altogether.

Unfortunately, if they realized that the flawed results stem from a flawed marketing strategy, they might invest their marketing budget differently.

Moving forward with frequent, small bets

It’s clear that people are scared to commit the limited marketing resources they have on a less than sure thing. The harsh reality is that there are no sure things in marketing.

So how do you move your telehealth marketing forward when you have both limited time and a limited budget?

The trick is to make small bets. Small bets require less time, less effort, and less money.

Look at marketing as a science. Science requires hypotheses (e.g. this ad will increase my leads by X%) and experiments to prove or disprove the hypotheses. You need to design a very limited marketing campaign with a hypothesis (e.g. sending an email out to 5% of this mailing list I’ve purchased should yield a 1% response) and test that hypothesis. You can make a series of small bets and in doing so, learn what works and what does not.

So instead of stepping up to bat and swinging for the fences every time, you just need to keep getting base hits. Every marketing experiment that you run builds on the ones you’ve done before.

Some good small bets to take include:

Final thoughts

Investing time and energy in telehealth marketing will significantly increase your chances of success down the line. 

More marketing effort equates to higher chances of success.

You can increase your marketing effort and your learning by making smaller, less costly, shorter term marketing experiments that you can learn from and build upon as you progress.

Ensure that you have the ability to measure results from each marketing effort.

If you have other proven strategies for successfully marketing telehealth, please share your comments by email or on our web site athttp://www.handsontelehealth.com/