Healthcare Marketing to Millennials
Your healthcare marketing strategy needs to change depending on the demographic that you are marketing to. Millennials, or anyone born between 1981 and 1996, are a particular demographic with specific needs that you can appeal to for your healthcare practice. Why is this generation different from Baby Boomers or Generation X? Millennials are the first generation to have broad and seemingly endless access to information, so their generation is the starting point for new consumer needs.
In what ways can you pivot your healthcare marketing strategy to appeal to millennial demographics? Whether you are running a dental group, starting up a general practice, or relaunching your clinic, this guide can help you better understand how to change your healthcare marketing strategy to appeal to the millennial generation. Read on to find out five ways millennials are influencing healthcare marketing.
1. Millennials Orchestrate Their Care, Not Their Primary Care Physicians.
Millennials are looking for information constantly, so their medical advice doesn’t always directly come from a physician. They like to make choices about their healthcare and facilitate their own health experience, rather than being led by a physician’s recommendation. So what does this mean? This means patient advocacy is a critical element of how millennial consumer behavior operates. Millennials require a unique form of communication and marketing.
Millennials are deeply concerned with the ethics and validity of Western medicine and have extensively shown interest in holistic medicine, unrooting traditional reproductive medicine, and many different industries.
2. Millennials Want Healthcare Accessibility Through Digital Platforms.
A factor that we can’t forget when marketing to millennials is instant healthcare. Millennials choose to focus on digital communication in their daily lives from Facetime and texting for socializing to ordering on Grubhub or Doordash to grab groceries or food. This can be optimized in many ways, such as introducing booking appointments online, HIPPAA-compliant email and text notifications, inquiry communication over social media platforms such as Instagram or Facebook, and much more.
The value of convenience and ease of communication is a top priority for millennials. Online scheduling is one of the best ways to connect with millennial patients because younger generations are more likely to connect with providers that have digital capabilities and instant access. Another positive aspect that your practice can offer is same-day appointments. With same-day appointments, you increase accessibility to patients and allow clients to make appointments before regular business hours, or schedule on weekends. Having 24/7 access to on-call doctors and convenient after-hours care or scheduling goes a long way.
3. Millennials Heavily Rely On Reading Reviews.
The standards of healthcare are changing due to higher expectations of care. Millennials rely on online patient reviews on websites such as Zoc Doc, Yelp, Google Business Reviews, and Trust Pilot. When millennials engage with any industry, their first point of contact is typically through social media or online reviews. It’s a good idea to focus on feedback for your practice to create potential millennial patients.
If you spend time reading through your reviews, promoting positive feedback across your social media platforms millennials who are browsing social media can come across your brand and gather positive information about your practice.
By using reviews you can optimize your practice and utilize this valuable resource to learn more about how patients view your practice, what needs improvement, and the overall tone of how you are doing as a business. Spotting trends on review platforms can improve patient retention and turn around a negative experience by personalizing care and responsiveness to boost patient satisfaction.
4. Millennials Want Technology Integration for Healthcare Marketing.
Not only do millennials focus on digital accessibility for their healthcare needs, but they also focus on staying technologically relevant for all the industries they interact with. With the introduction of ChatGPT, Chatbot, AI, AR, and VR, millennials find themselves utilizing technology as soon as it hits the market. There are many ways where you can provide that same feeling to your patients by allowing your practice to move forward as technology advances.
A great example of how your practice can appeal to this demographic starts with simple in-office accessories that will provide value for millennial patients such as check-in kiosks or appointment check-ins through an app on their phone.
Patient Facing
- Telehealth options
- Digital prescription refills
- Text message reminders
- Social media presence
Practice Facing
- CRM automation
- ChatGPT text response
- AI for talk desk or help desk response
- Chatbot
5. Cost Transparency Matters.
When it comes to creating a healthcare strategy that is in line with millennial consumers, price transparency is the best way to express honesty and create trust between you and your potential patients. Showing your patients that you believe your customers should know pricing way before they look at their bill after their medical experience, is a patient-first model. Millennials are conscious of their purchasing power, and many experts explain that millennials show loyalty to brands that provide transparency.
Not only can this transform your patient experience, but it can also contribute to the overall ease at which a potential consumer can engage with your services as opposed to getting halfway through the process, being made aware of the cost, and deciding to drop the product or service and move to a different brand.
How NewGen Can Upgrade Your Healthcare Marketing Strategy
Meeting different patient expectations can be daunting especially if you are starting up a new practice or relaunching your healthcare marketing strategy. Hitting each demographic note for your healthcare marketing strategy doesn’t happen overnight. That’s where we come in. Here at NewGen Marketing, we make sure that we are not only pulling in leads for our clients but converting them into patients.
We’ll be honest with you, great marketing doesn’t always convert to great patients, and just because an agency hands you leads…doesn’t mean you’ll always know what to do with them to convert them to actual patients. Attracting a broad audience is often what healthcare marketing agencies do (and that alone doesn’t always work). Not for us. At NewGen we are different.
We don’t stop at lead gatherings. We want to make sure we are sourcing qualified leads, with campaigns that convert due to our years of experience with actionable healthcare. When it comes to millennial healthcare marketing, we know how valuable this customer demographic can be. In the current competitive market, your practice might need a hand. Message us today to learn more about how you can partner with us.
“I want to expand my demographic reach and push my business forward, but I’m not sure where to start/I don’t have time.”
“My brand is marketing to millennials but our marketing campaigns aren’t working. We need help!”
“I’m launching a business and need the tools to establish my healthcare brand in the digital space to create leads.”
Sounds like you? We can get you started. Leave us a message and we can get to work.