4 Ways You Can Use Big Data in Healthcare Marketing
Healthcare marketing is the use of marketing strategies by healthcare service providers to promote health information and treatment options to protect and improve a population’s health awareness and overall health. Unlike traditional commercial marketing, healthcare marketing is focused purely on providing value to the customer or patient rather than making money. The bottom line of a healthcare service provider is an improvement in the general health situation of the population. This makes marketing in healthcare a complicated process with many blind spots and pitfalls, especially with the confidential nature of medical records and data.
However, with the advent of big data operations, it has become easier to obtain data on a population’s health situation as a whole and develop a strategy that can promote the most appropriate healthcare services to those in need of it. As a healthcare marketer or service provider, you can collect data on treatment trends, the prevalence of a particular condition in a population, people’s opinions on popular treatment options, etc. These data sets allow you to identify possible gaps in healthcare provision to fill with your services.
Also, by collecting and analyzing your target audience’s health data, you gain more insight into their dream health situation and how you can help them achieve it.
In this article, we’ll take a look at the importance of data in the healthcare sector, how and where to obtain data for marketing purposes, and the best ways to use big data for marketing in healthcare industries. Feel free to use the table of contents to skip to the part that most interests you.
Table of Contents
The Importance of Medical Data Analytics for Marketing
The healthcare sector produces an inordinately large amount of data. It is a powerhouse of data. However, due to the face-to-face quality of healthcare services, healthcare data’s digitalization has taken longer than it should have. Also, medical records are mostly confidential (with good reason, of course). As such, individual health service providers are usually unable to share data with one another. This leads to the formation of data silos. A data silo is a set of data collected by a section in an organization or industry that is not available to other sections. This leads to redundancies. Patients sometimes make use of various service providers. The inability to share data makes it impossible for service providers to take advantage of tests and diagnoses already conducted by other service providers. If a patient tries a treatment option from one hospital that does not work and the patient goes to another hospital, they might be given the same treatment again, simply because the new hospital does not know it has been tried already. This leads to a waste of resources and possibly a decrease in the patient’s confidence in hospitals’ ability to cure him.
The delicate nature of healthcare marketing makes it necessary to try to know as much as you can about potential patients. Your ideal patient persona must be fully developed without accessing private medical data. No one wants to put their health in the hands of someone who can’t even be bothered to find out if his services fit their needs.
With the advent of medical data analytics and big data operations, the need to properly document and share data in the healthcare sector has become clearer and more imperative. But there remains the problem of obtaining needed data and the best ways to utilize data collected. Let’s take a look at the best way and places for health service providers to obtain data on their target market.
Using Web Scraping to Collect Healthcare Marketing Data
The most efficient way to collect big data from the internet is through the use of web scraping bots. Web scraping is simply the act of collecting data from the web. When you do a Google search and gather information from the results, you have scraped the web. However, web scraping bots allow you to collect data in large volumes. Web scraping bots work by parsing the HTML code of a website page to collect data and then using a data extraction tool to collate and organize the data into a useful format. By using web scraping bots, you can extract large volumes of data from the internet in a very short time by entering a URL, a few parameters, and clicking a button. Web scraping has revolutionized the data collection and management industry. And this is good news for you.
Despite the peculiarity of healthcare marketing, the kind of data required to build a successful marketing strategy is quite similar to commercial marketing. Even in health matters, people tend to have preferences and follow trends. Also, more people are increasingly turning to the internet for information on their health situation and how to manage it. According to statistics, 77% of patients are using search engines to research healthcare options. This means that your potential patients are increasingly providing data on their health preferences on search engines. There are also healthcare platforms that collate data on industry trends and prevailing patient preferences and make this data available for public use.
How To Use Data for Healthcare Marketing
Now that it has become increasingly easier to collect healthcare marketing data, you have no excuse for not implementing a data-driven healthcare marketing plan. However, to make it even easier for you, here are a few ways you can use data to get a leg up on your competitors in the healthcare industry.
1. Hire a marketing data analyst
More often than not, the healthcare sector’s problem is not the absence of data but rather the overabundance of data. The more data available, the harder it is to manage it. Many healthcare service providers still use traditional data collection practices and do not have designated personnel for managing their data. This makes it hard to analyze data to obtain useful information properly. By hiring a data analyst, you are already one step ahead of the competition. Your analyst helps you manage your data acquisition, processing, and distribution processes, freeing you and other members of your staff to focus on delivering premium service. Having a data analyst also allows you to eliminate data silos in your organization by putting one person in charge of your entire data operations.
2. Developing a patient persona
With data on industry trends and search engine data on healthcare solutions being searched for, you can build your ideal patient persona and identify the best places to find them. For example, say you are a gynecologist. By scraping search engines for the exact questions people are asking about pregnancy in your location, you can determine your potential patients’ age group, say young women having their first child or middle-aged women on the second or third child. Also, with resources like Google Locations data, you can determine exactly where people are asking these questions from.
3. Competitor analysis in healthcare digital marketing
Like commercial marketing, you can use data to determine what your competitors in the industry are doing to attract patients and the gaps they are leaving unfilled. By collecting data on people’s opinions about your competitor’s services, you can determine if they satisfy their patients or if there is a chance for you to provide a better service.
4. Patient retainment and upselling
Health management is a continuous process. If you sell multiple healthcare services in a particular niche, there is a probability that you can convince a patient that has bought one service to buy others. With the patient persona that you developed above, you can easily predict your patients’ future health needs and help them fulfill it even before they request it.
Using Scraping Robot To Build a Healthcare Marketing Strategy
Using Scraping Robot as your web scraping tool allows you to scrape data whenever from wherever you want. Once you sign up for our scraping service, you get 5000 free scrapes to scrape any website of your choice. You have no obligation to continue with us after using your free scrapes, but if you choose to do, every subsequent scrape only costs $0.0018 (like I said, free).
If you’d like to automate your data scraping process completely, you can implement our API technology. With APIs, you can automate your scraping requests and get data in real-time. And you can also submit an unlimited number of scraping requests.
Conclusion
The increasing popularity of big data analytics for businesses has not left the healthcare sector behind. Healthcare marketing has gotten a large boost in recent years with the ease with which data can now be collected and analyzed. At Scraping Robot, we aim to make it even easier for you to collect the data you need to provide optimum healthcare services to your patients.
The information contained within this article, including information posted by official staff, guest-submitted material, message board postings, or other third-party material is presented solely for the purposes of education and furtherance of the knowledge of the reader. All trademarks used in this publication are hereby acknowledged as the property of their respective owners.
