The Healthcare sector is witnessing a paradigm shift with the advent of Direct to Consumer (DTC) brands, which have been inspired by leading e-commerce brands that provide a fantastic customer experience. These brands have built innovative business models to address the primary challenges and make the most of the opportunities in the healthcare sectors. Some of the challenges that these brands help counter include rising healthcare costs, changing relationships with primary care, and access to telehealth.
Going a step further, these brands have emphasised building a strong brand image and adopted new and unheard-of marketing tactics in the healthcare industry.
Focusing on wellness
The global wellness industry was worth $4 trillion in 2019, and it's growing unabated. Healthcare brands have now started engaging consumers with topics and concerns relating to nutrition, fitness and preventive care with value-driven content.
Adopting a product or service-based approach
Just like DTC e-commerce brands, these healthcare brands have made it easier and acceptable for consumers to buy goods and services online. They have highlighted the problems faced by consumers and how their offerings help solve them. Taking a leaf from e-commerce brands, they make sure that consumers can understand prices and medications easily.
Building brands that having a high recall
Healthcare brands offered the same type of services and used to have a similar look and feel. Therefore, creating differentiation in the sector was a challenge. The new-age healthcare brands have gone bold with the use of bright colours and illustrations. The core thought behind this move is to make the brands stand out in the crowd and drive potential customers to make a purchase decision.
Laying emphasis on understanding customers
Healthcare brands nowadays offer quizzes on their websites and apps to better understand consumers and educate them about how their offerings help solve the problems being faced by them. This emphasis on care through quizzes is helping these brands maximise the lifetime revenue of the customer and allowing them to upsell their products. Through quizzes, cost calculators and virtual events as CTAs, they bring customers closer to purchase.
Offering service as a subscription
By repackaging their service as a subscription, brands have helped bring down the cost of their service for customers. This has paved the way to enhancing the lifetime customer value than standalone purchases.
Promoting offerings as gifting options
Similar to e-commerce brands, DTC healthcare brands are growing referrals through a gifting mechanism. For instance, diagnostics labs promote preventive healthcare packages as gifting options on Mother's and Father's Day in India.
Launching of ambassador programs
Influencers and brand representatives from different walks of life are a great way to amplify your healthcare brand image. Running influencer campaigns or contests to select brand ambassadors can help you scale growth at lower cost-per-acquisition than traditional paid marketing campaigns.
Creating Online communities
Online health communities promoted by healthcare brands are a hub of crucial information that patients need to manage their condition and connect with others with the same health challenges. Such communities create conversations and allow patients to discuss their problems without inhibitions or stigma. These communities enable brands to engage potential prospects and educate them by answering common questions and build competitive advantage.
Reinventing social media
The Covid-19 pandemic led to people spending more and more time on social media. They were looking for authentic and reliable information about their health concerns. With global and nation health authorities giving contradicting information, people turned to places to get authentic, reliable information from real people. In these circumstances, brands used influencers to disseminate correct information, enabling them to build strong connections with their potential customers.
Check out how we helped a healthcare brand reach out to its prospects spread across the world.
SAAR MEDICAL INDIA TREATMENT
SAAR is a medical tourism-based SME startup in India, which facilitates unparalleled medical treatment for people settled off-shore people and seeking world-class healthcare services in India. With the object of improving their brand relevance and elevating their ROI, we helped them create a well-structured website that was user-friendly, responsive and SEO friendly.
Armed with a robust front-end and back-end architecture along with a result-oriented SEO strategy that catered to users with relevant information, the website successfully generated leads in the overseas markets of the US, South Africa, Middle East.
DTC healthcare brands have changed the healthcare marketing game forever. Despite this, there a lot of room for them to innovate to engage better with their customers. By investing in marketing and technology, these brands are all set new success stories in healthcare in the times to come.
