Marketing and Positioning in the Health Care Market

Last week’s discussion was about understanding the desired market and positioning your social venture within the targeted market. The article “10 steps to a successful health care marketing plan” provides details on what to look at in a health care market in order to position your service to be successful. The standard steps for establishing a marketing plan is to assess the market, study your competitors, target the desire segment, build support for the organization and measure and evaluate the organization’s performance in the market.

An interesting rule that the article discussed was the 80/20 rule, which states that 80 percent of you volume will most likely come form 20 percent of your customers. When providing a health care service, you want to make sure that you are serving the needs of the community. If you are providing services for an unmet market, your social venture will make the most impact, as patients will continue to come back for your services when needed. In order to keep up with the demands of the market, the organization has to make sure to keep track of certain metrics such as volume data to see what are the actual demands of the community and if they are changing. Maintaining information on patient preference will give your organization an edge as it will help you target the customers in the market. My question is though, how much should you spend on marketing if the organization is a not-for-profit health care organization? Would that money be better spent improving the services provided?

Source: http://www.healthcarecommunication.com/Main/Articles/10_steps_to_a_successful_health_care_marketing_pla_9450.aspx