Marketing to Support Increased Revenue for ASCs
The healthcare industry has endured a significant transformation over the past few years, encountering challenge after challenge. From Covid-19 to staffing shortages to supply chain issues, increased costs, and decreased reimbursements – the last few years have not been easy for most healthcare organizations, clinics, and hospital systems.
So it’s no surprise that ambulatory surgery centers are also beginning to encounter some headwinds. Rising costs, in particular, have begun to cut into traditionally healthy profit margins, which means that ASC administrators and physicians are looking for more ways to increase revenue and serve patients.
Achieving growth in the ASC arena requires some careful planning and a concerted effort. But it’s something that your marketing team may be able to help you with–sometimes in surprising and powerful ways.
Use Marketing to Help You Grow
That marketing is designed to help your ASC grow is, perhaps, not surprising. After all, you likely already pay a marketing agency or marketing team to help bring in new patients and raise awareness of your brand.
That’s what your marketing team is already doing. The problem is that many ASCs are looking for growth beyond those routine parameters. Here are ways your marketing team can help you achieve that additional growth.
Marketing Can Help You Set–and Meet–Expectations
A good marketing campaign can help your ASC set, manage, and meet patient expectations. That’s because great marketing can help you create a positive overall experience for your patients. PatientX, for example, accomplishes this for healthcare clients by:
- Creating content that answers patient questions.
- Crafting digital interactions that are easy for patients to navigate.
- Helping you manage the workflows of your organization in a way that puts patients at the center.
- Communicating your brand and values to patients.
Here’s the thinking that underpins this strategy: if patients go into an appointment with wildly outdated or uninformed expectations, they’ll leave unsatisfied even if you did everything right.
This means that your marketing team should focus on establishing those expectations from the first interaction with patients (usually, but not always, on your website). This means presenting accurate, easy-to-understand information to patients in a way that’s easy to understand.
It also means understanding that every time patients interact with your brand, it makes an impression. Patients using your web portal to make appointments and pay bills, for example, judge your healthcare brand according to their experience. Investing in this experience can lead to higher patient satisfaction–and more revenue in turn.
Marketing Can Help You Recruit Talent
One of the primary challenges faced by modern ASCs that want to expand services is as simple as it is frustrating: staffing. If you don’t have the staff to expand safely, you will simply be stuck. This is a widespread issue, largely because there are systemic staffing shortages throughout the healthcare industry today.
And these shortages exist at nearly every level (from entry-level to highly experienced).
A concerted marketing strategy can help you reach out to and attract high quality talent. The vast majority of healthcare workers choose where they want to work based on a few different criteria:
- Your organizational reputation.
- Your overall work culture.
- Benefits and compensation.
- Room for growth.
Even if you’re a great place to work, however, hiring will remain challenging if no one knows about those great working conditions. A great marketing campaign can help you reach highly qualified candidates for receptionists, nurses, physicians, and more–and tell them what makes you special. In today’s hiring climate, you must market to potential staff to succeed.
When you can more easily hire staff, bottlenecks impacting growth will be eased, and you’ll be able to expand and increase your revenue.
Marketing Can Help You Understand Data
There’s a myth that marketing is performed mostly on gut instinct (in the Mad Men mold). That might have been true decades ago, but not today. In fact, these days, marketers tend to be intense data analyzers.
And it’s precisely this type of data analysis that can help you increase revenue from your ASC. With strong analytics, you’ll be better able to understand:
- Your market–and where you sit within it. (This can help tell you how much room for growth your current strategy has.)
- Where your patients are coming from. This can help you see which patient referral networks are helping you most and where you might find opportunities.
- Which patient groups are most in need. This can help you see opportunities for expansion of services or locations.
It’s important to emphasize that data analysis is not something that should be only done once. Instead, you should be looking at your numbers on a regular basis. It’s not enough to know if something worked once–you need to consistently evaluate whether something continues to generate solid benefits.
As your marketing team helps you analyze which marketing strategies are working (and which ones aren’t), you’ll be able to attract more patients who need your services. This can be especially handy if you’re announcing a new service, procedure, or want to attract a new category of patient. Increasing your revenue can move hand-in-hand with your marketing strategy, guided by good data.
Make Sure You’re Getting a Return on Your Investment
Growth typically requires an underlying investment. Sometimes this means deploying new technologies, training for new systems, or funding a marketing push. It’s essential that your ASC tracks these investments, using analytics and solid data to evaluate the return on your investment.
Your marketing team can help you capitalize on any expansion you may have planned, ensuring that you have the best chance of success.
Increasing Your Success
At the end of the day, you want your ASC to provide high quality care to your patients. Growing your revenue is one way to continue delivering care. With more revenue, you can better absorb rising costs and your ASC will be on a firmer foundation.
A great marketing strategy can help your ASC grow in a way that’s sustainable, repeatable, and good for patients.
If you want to know more about how marketing can increase your revenue, contact PatientX today!