4 Tips for Healthcare Providers Considering Salesforce Marketing Cloud

How does your practice attract new business? If you’re already using Salesforce, you’ve probably figured out that it functions well

3 min. read

How does your practice attract new business? If you’re already using Salesforce, you’ve probably figured out that it functions well as a referral management tool. With all your data in one place, you can see exactly which cases referring physicians are sending your way — information that, in turn, determines how you market to those physicians. If they’re only sending very basic cases, for instance, you might need to run a campaign designed to educate them about the full spectrum of the services or procedures your practice offers.

But referrals are only one way to earn new business. There’s also direct-to-patient marketing, a kind of outreach designed to target individuals who are living with an illness or condition, but aren’t currently seeing a physician. These people are off the grid, so to speak, and traditionally hard to reach.

Enter Marketing Cloud, another Salesforce solution that more and more healthcare providers are choosing to adopt. Marketing Cloud gives you the power to run strategic digital campaigns and automate custom journeys that ultimately lead to new patient conversion — a powerful tool, when you’re using it right.

If your practice is thinking about implementing Marketing Cloud, here are 4 key tips to keep in mind as you prepare. We hope they’ll help set you up for success.

{{cta('b2f22b97-01c0-4065-8c2f-9a91a2a644bb')}}

4 Key Tips to Help Healthcare Providers Prepare for Marketing Cloud

Tip #1: Develop the right personas

You’ve got to understand your market, right? What kinds of patients tend to represent the highest conversion rates? What kinds of cases bring your practice the greatest profit? As mentioned above, all that data is already in Salesforce. Now you just need to use it to develop the right messaging.

We recommend you start by writing a number of personas: Fictional, generalized representations of your company’s ideal patients. Each persona should include some rough demographic data — age, location, income — as well as information about the person’s condition and, if you’re able to speculate, their reasons for not currently seeing a doctor. Having these personas on hand when you’re creating emails, social posts and web content will make your life much, much easier — and your efforts that much more successful.

Tip #2: Plan the proper journeys

When I say journey, I’m not talking about Frodo’s quest to Mordor. In Salesforce terminology, a journey is essentially an automated sequence of events, delivering specific content to specific people at a specific time. For instance, let’s say a potential patient clicks on one of your social ads, which leads to a landing page designed to educate them about one of the procedures you offer. There, they enter their email address to receive more information — an action that automatically triggers the requested email. Past that point, you can decide what kind of follow-up messages will be sent based on whether or not the person opens the initial message.

With Marketing Cloud, you can pre-build any number of journeys. Meaning you can automate much of the difficult work that goes into finding and nurturing new patients.

Tip #3: Optimize your social media presence

As you probably gleaned from above, effective journeys often start with effective social posts — and that means you need to know what kind of messaging is going to appeal to your target audiences. Those personas you developed will be super useful here, but don’t be afraid to experiment. Try posting to different channels, with different cadences and using different media. If you have the necessary resources, give video a go.

This experimentation will net you some more all-important data. And once you have some numbers to back up what works and what doesn’t, you’ll be able to narrow in on a few go-to strategies.

Tip #4: Audit your appointment reminder process

Okay, let’s say you do everything right: You deploy a social campaign that encourages someone to visit your website and, eventually, schedule an appointment. But before that person can convert to a patient, they actually have to show up.

How well is your current appointment reminder process working? Maybe all those phone calls are netting you the results you’re looking for. If that’s the case, great. But if your practice is constantly dealing with no-shows, it might be better to lean on Marketing Cloud’s capabilities here. In addition to running campaigns of all kinds, the platform allows you to send automated appointment reminders via email and text.

Curious to learn more about how Marketing Cloud can work together with your existing Salesforce instance and EMR to fully modernize the patient experience? Check out our latest webinar on the topic.

Avatar

AUTHOR

Danielle Sutton