5 marketing essentials every HME needs to know

Every business leader faces a similar dilemma: How do I tell people about my business and share what makes us better than the competition with my audience? The answer is excellent marketing campaigns – but where to start?

One option is to hire an outside advertising firm to build your brand for you, but this approach can sometimes be cost-prohibitive for many HMEs. The good news is with the plethora of easy-to-access marketing channels, customer relationship management (CRM) systems, and analytics software currently available, even a small in-house team can make a big impact.

Before we dive into the five steps to getting started promoting your business, there’s one central idea to keep in mind as you strike out into the vast world of advertising and brand-building:

Marketing is every single touchpoint that you have with your customers.

Successful business owners understand that “marketing” a business in the HME field isn’t just ads or emails or direct mail; marketing is how you build relationships with your patients and referrers. When your customer service team addresses an issue for a patient, your approach to problem-solving should exemplify who you are as a brand. When you send reminders about prescriptions, resupply, or appointments through a patient portal, your messaging should reflect your business’s value. View every customer interaction as a chance to share your greatest benefits with your audience.

With that idea in mind, follow these five steps to ensure your marketing campaigns inspire action instead of falling flat.

Before we dive into the five steps to getting started promoting your business, there’s one central idea to keep in mind as you strike out into the vast world of advertising and brand-building:

First, identify your goals

If you’re new to marketing a business, it can be tempting to dive in headfirst with a project you think may help boost sales or look like something the competition is doing. For example, “The HME down the road has lots of social media ads, so I must need social media ads!” But savvy marketers know this is an easy trap to fall into, and it’s a potential money-pit if you do. To avoid putting time and effort toward directionless advertising, you need to identify what professional goals you want to reach and how you’ll measure success.

Instead of “I need social media ads,” start instead by thinking, “I’d like to use marketing to help me…”

Onboard X new patients this quarter
Increase my number of returning patients by X% this year
Maintain current referral sources and add X new referrals sources by Q4
Grow awareness of my new resupply services to drive X number of sales in Q3

Once you know where you want to end up, you can make smart decisions about which marketing channels will help you get there. Plus, you’ll be ready to accurately assess whether your efforts got you closer to your goal or you need to rethink your strategy.

Next, know your patient and referral audience

A cardinal rule of marketing is to speak directly to a specific audience with every promotion you create. Understanding your audience’s needs, characteristics, pain points, and preferred methods of communication is crucial to designing campaigns that hit home. As an HME, you likely have two main audiences: patients and referral sources.

If you really want to amp up the power of a marketing campaign, you’ve got to dig a little deeper. Within each of those two groups, you can address plenty of nuances if you take the time to outline what you know about your customers. Brainstorm characteristics like:

What are the demographics of my patient/referrer audience? (age, location, interests, etc.)
What are the biggest challenges my audience is currently facing?
Where is my audience most likely to interact with my business?

Establishing answers to these questions and more can help you create buyer personas – imaginary customers – that you speak to with each campaign.

Once you’ve established your goals and identified your audiences – even those imaginary ones from buyer personas – you can keep building relationships with your patients and referrers with these additional three marketing best practices.

Once you know your target, decide on your message

It’s time to think about what you want to get across to your audience. You may have tons of ideas about what makes your HME business great, why customers should choose you, and how you can help. Remember: marketing is a long game, and you don’t need to say everything all at once. Your messaging and calls-to-action (CTAs) should be focused on a specific goal for each campaign.

Which value propositions you focus on and what action you want your audience to take depends on the outcome you’d like to see from each campaign. You may even adjust your messaging across different marketing channels or when speaking to various audience personas. For example, you may decide to:

- Promote a new service or product
- Share a big benefit of your business for a certain audience, like being easy to work with for referrers or offering great customer service for patients
- Explain how you’re different (i.e. “We deliver within 24 hours of receiving an order”)
- Ask questions to understand your audience and market better
- Provide extra value to your audience through free content that builds trust in your business

Now that you’ve got your message, you’re getting closer to launching your campaign! The last step is to decide on the best platform for each promotion.

Pick the right marketing channel(s)

What’s the best place to send your audience the message you’ve decided on? There are plenty of options to choose from, both online and offline, and which one you select will really depend on your audience research and experience marketing to your patients and referrers. Your budget may also influence your decision, and luckily there are many digital channels that you can utilize for a low cost (or even for free) if you’re working with a smaller spending limit.

A few channels to consider for each campaign are:

- E-mail
- Texting
- Social media
- A patient engagement mobile app
- Websites and landing pages
- Search engine optimization
- Digital search or display ads
- Direct mail
- Local tv, radio, and print promotion

Consider how your audience uses each of these channels and where each type of marketing would be a good fit. For instance, a patient may appreciate receiving text reminders about upcoming deliveries, but would prefer to receive notifications about new products or services via e-mail. Social media can be great for visually-driven advertisements with a small amount of text, while a new landing page on your website might be perfect for diving into the details of your
offerings.

If you aren’t sure which channel to use, run a few experiments and learn from the results. Professional marketers are constantly developing tests to see which strategies have the best results, bringing us to our final basic marketing tip.

Measure outcomes and track performance

A common adage in the field of science is, “If you don’t measure it, it didn’t happen.” Marketing is a science itself, and measurable experimentation is key to understanding what’s working and what can be improved.

If your goal is to increase patient enrollment by 5% with a certain campaign, consider how you’ll attribute sign-ups to that promotion. Will you use a specific coupon code? Create a new landing page? Ask patients over the phone how they heard about your business?

Most digital marketing platforms offer free analytics tools that make it easy (even for beginners) to see how a campaign performed. Google Analytics is a cornerstone
in almost every marketing department, and many keyword research or CRM analytics tools are either offered at no cost or included in a business subscription. The biggest thing to focus on here is setting up a system for tracking your marketing campaigns and sticking to it! Maybe that looks like a spreadsheet that you update with each week’s metrics, a Google Analytics dashboard that you monitor regularly, or intelligent software that does the work for you

Whichever approach you choose, remember that evaluating your marketing performance is how you avoid “wasting” money on ads that don’t work. Even if a campaign doesn’t achieve your desired outcome, if you can identify why it failed, then you’ve set yourself up to improve your ROI in the long run.

Marketing advice for HMEs

You’re on your way to creating a strong foundation for your marketing efforts – and this is only the beginning. Get in touch with a Brightree expert today for a free consultation on how customized software can help you grow your marketing capacity and meet your biggest business goals.

Request a demo today for a closer look at Brightree.

See what Brightree can do for you

Brightree

Brightree enables out-of-hospital care organizations to improve their business performance and deliver better health outcomes. As an industry-leading cloud-based healthcare IT company, Brightree provides solutions and services for thousands of organizations in home medical equipment and pharmacy, home health, hospice and home infusion. Brightree is a wholly owned subsidiary of ResMed (NYSE: RMD, ASX: RMD). To learn more, visit www.brightree.com and follow @Brightree on X.