Content
Hospice Marketing Strategies: How to Build Trust and Stand Out from Competitors
June 26, 2024
15 mins
As an ultimately compassionate care niche, the hospice industry is foremost about a patient-centered attitude. That fundamental understanding much predetermines the hospice marketing strategies you’ll apply to develop your local business.
In this featured blog post, Promodo marketers share the essentials of marketing for hospices to help you get more clients.
Like other healthcare niches, we emphasize an omnichannel marketing strategy as the finest approach to enhance the effectiveness of your sales funnel.
As a full-funnel performance agency with 20 years of hands-on healthcare marketing expertise, we know how to utilize multiple digital platforms to emphasize your core hospice services.
A strategic marketing approach is always a win-win compared to one-time irregular activities. With that, it is vital to maintain persistence in your marketing effort.
A well-thought-out marketing strategy for hospice care is your ultimate competitive advantage over the market rivals. A consistent strategic approach will position you as a reliable and trusted hospice brand name in the eyes of your current and future patients.
We highly recommend developing a holistic omnichannel hospice marketing strategy to deliver compassionate end-of-life care services to aged people in need. This is how you’ll synergize a human-centric approach with the finest digital marketing practices.
As a major takeaway, a competitive hospice marketing strategy will help you:
The biggest flaw possible is downplaying a plethora of online marketing opportunities. Even without an in-house marketing team, which is the case with most hospice businesses, you may partially deploy agency services in line with your budget.
Among the core strategic mistakes is solely relying on social networking on Facebook, Instagram, or other popular social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn. While your presence across these networks is important, many other market players are doing the same.
This means you’ll be no different from the crowd.
Most niche players fail to understand the strategic importance of marketing promotion in today’s digital landscape. To save marketing dollars, they try to communicate with their audience solely through freely available channels. Many even fail to create their own website.
Limited communication like this reduces your chances of reaching out beyond the local scale of your immediate hospice activity. This means you’ll remain known only to a limited amount of local patients without further scaling your wider presence.
You’ll hardly win a wider patient audience without paid media marketing campaigns.
Targeting a holistic omnichannel hospice marketing strategy will help you scale your local business to a state and nationwide level. With this strategic mindset in place, the network of your hospice facilities will deliver end-of-life care services to thousands of needy patients across the United States and beyond.
Otherwise, your physical facility will be able to serve the needs of aged community members solely.
One last strategic mistake is to save on marketing budgets perpetually. Hospice ventures without a long-term strategic vision mostly try to cut down on marketing costs or pursue their marketing journey on a shoestring budget.
That’s why most hospice facilities remain as local community providers of hospice care for aged people.
Rather than prioritizing the core benefits of your hospice, focus your marketing effort on an emphatic response to immediate care needs shared by your target patient audience.
Importantly, at the end-of-life decision stage, selling your hospice services is ultimately about patients’ trust in your facility.
Choosing an end-of-life facility does not come as an easy choice for most patients and their families. The core point here is how far your prospects trust your hospice agency and whether there’s a good word about you spreading around.
Your job here is to boost patients’ transition to your hospice by increasing the referral base. The more referrals you engage, the more patients you’ll get eventually.
Furthermore, most hospices rely on direct-to-patient marketing, which is a tough path. Rather than selling your care services to patients and their families directly, try to engage with reliable local mediums like the nearest, hospitals and third-party physicians.
The win-win approach against the commonest pitfalls in the hospice (palliative) care business is to educate your patients about the quality of the end-of-life by utilizing multiple communication channels.
Leverage the digital marketing landscape to get your message across. Your communication strategy should generate value and inspire your prospects to take action.
This section contains hands-on advice on the best-fit marketing strategies for hospice businesses like yours.
While starting your digital marketing journey, you should understand this sensitive business's nature.
Selling hospice services both offline and online requires an expression of empathy to your targets. While the hospice model is rather sensitive and depends on human emotions related to grief and the loss of loved ones, you should fully maintain a patient-focused approach.
That’s your first step to winning trust and building longstanding relationships.
Promodo suggests: We recommend prioritizing empathic communication at all stages of the patient’s journey throughout your sales funnel. In this case, this means you are winning the patient’s trust rather than selling an actual service. When marketing your hospice care center, respond to immediate patient needs rather than highlight the advantages of your facility.
Sharing tips and value-driven content on your hospice website and across social media platforms will win you a solid competitive edge. Getting more “approachable” and on people’s top-of-mind, more online users will take the desired action on your website.
The number one strategic task is to brand your hospice name as the best local palliative care center. It is vital to penetrate people’s minds as a top local provider of a vast range of hospice services.
Promodo suggests: We take brand positioning as an exceptional value you provide to your end customer. Establish your brand identity continuously by conveying your value proposition better than your closest competitors. Your prospects should know that there’s no better hospice service facility than yours for miles around. Eventually, you’ll win patient trust through solid branding. Once well-trusted, you’ll be able to expand your market positioning and gain a competitive edge.
In the hospice industry, it is critical to position yourself as a trusted provider of essential palliative services for aged people rather than profiting directly. Your strategic positioning besides making a profit will make people trust your center. That’s the path to establishing your center as a reputable care provider and earning a wider pool of loyal patients.
In this pursuit, communicate a strategic purpose to your target audience. Patients, especially aged people, most value trust-driven messages and meaningful long-standing relationships.
Always prioritize ‘Why’ over ‘What’ messages. In the “What-message” case you emphasize core benefits of your hospice care center. In turn, the “Why message” impacts preference-based judgments about your center:
Hello, we are a full-life hospice care center. Our agency was founded to uphold patients' dignity and empower them during their most challenging times. While we cannot say if there is life after death, we firmly believe in the importance of life before death. This is where we step in. We ensure a seamless experience for patients on their final journey. Join us in being there at the very end.
Articulating a ‘Why’ message will always give you a competitive edge by impacting individual patient preferences. With a purposeful message in mind, people will get used to your communication style over time
By targeting a patient’s limbic system, you’ll get to the part of the brain responsible for emotions and decision-making. While communicating with patients by messaging their limbic system, you send them essential trust signals and boost referral rates for your hospice care center.
While pursuing effective brand positioning, emphasize a dash of personality. Make people recall your brand name once they start their patient journey across your sales funnel.
With that, the success of your brand positioning strategy will depend on how far you’ve explored your target patient audience and how unique your value offer is. That’s how you make people associate your name with outstanding hospice services.
The core challenge on a strategic agenda is to spot the differentiator, the unique feature that will let you stand out in the competitive healthcare market. These strategic positioning components will serve you as a game-changer:
Even though you may be physically presented as the only hospice in your local community, there’s growing online marketing competition that impacts your scaling capacity.
An overwhelming amount of both organic and paid ad messages impact patient choices and predetermine your effectiveness in penetrating new markets.
An organic SEO marketing strategy involves:
Your ultimate SEO goal is to ensure a seamless user experience on your hospice website and make it rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs).
Here’s an example of an organic click-through rate (CTR). That is an essential percentage of searchers with the clicks on your website in search engine results. While organic CTR ultimately depends on the ranking position of your website, there are other factors of influence like your URL, the result's title tag, meta description, and rich snippets.
Paid marketing strategy involves:
Paid advertising will help you buy quality patient leads for your hospice website.
Much of your content marketing strategy will rely on the art of storytelling. That’s how you’ll inform, educate, and persuade your prospects about the benefits of hospice care.
With that in mind, it is essential to fill all the existing gaps and refute any misinformation about the major biases shared by people regarding hospice services.
A brand storytelling campaign is a chance to present your core hospice services in layman’s terms so that everyone understands the nature and purpose of your business.
Tell people real-life stories about the specifics of palliative care, your hands-on hospice experience, and how you satisfy hospice needs shared by individual patients.
At the brand awareness stage, digestible blog pieces will help people understand your business. It’s vital to enhance the level of your brand recognition. That’s important because the more consumers associate hospice services with your brand name, the more they will trust you and refer to your center eventually. Positive perceptions will help you distinguish your hospice practice from the rest in the competitive healthcare market.
Distribute your branded messages across multiple marketing channels to let more people know about your hospice center. Diversify your brand storytelling strategy with rich text, including eye-catching visuals and first-hand videos proving your daily practice.
To make your outreach wider, engage local physicians to educate your targets on the awareness stage. That will help you boost your referral rate while more prospective patients will develop a greater trust in your hospice facility.
Regarding your marketing plan for hospice, you may launch a successful hospice marketing journey even on a shoestring budget of some $1,000 a month.
Before hiring a marketing agency to help you prompt your professional services online, check out the capacity of your in-house marketing team.
Here are 10 strategic approaches to how you can boost your hospice care at a minimum marketing cost:
1. Ensure a seamless patient experience on your website
Create a user-friendly, mobile-responsive website optimized for search engines. Incorporate clear navigation, captivating visuals, and informative content to improve accessibility and boost engagement.
2. Forge emotional connections with your audience by sharing powerful and meaningful stories
Harness the potential of diverse digital platforms to showcase real-life experiences by illustrating the compassionate care provided by your hospice organization. Use video content, patient testimonials, and staff spotlights to craft compelling messages that deeply resonate with your target audience.
3. Enhance your local presence to connect with individuals seeking hospice care across your local community
Update your Google Business Profile with accurate information, integrate local keywords, and ensure precise contact details to boost visibility in local search results. Encourage satisfied families to share positive reviews, thereby building a strong and reputable online presence.
4. Establish your hospice organization as a trusted resource for information and support
Organize webinars and virtual workshops covering hospice care, end-of-life planning, grief support, and other relevant topics. Invite experts to provide insights and interact with the audience through Q&A sessions. Record these sessions to make them available for on-demand viewing.
5. Build a strong social media presence to raise awareness about your hospice services
Utilize social media platforms to create a network of clients, prospects, and advocates. Share educational content, interact with followers, and join relevant conversations. Use hashtags and paid social ads to amplify your message and reach a wider audience.
Social media marketing will help you connect with your audience, increase referrals, and bring more traffic to your website.
6. Launch telehealth campaigns to raise brand awareness
Highlight the advantages and accessibility of telehealth services in hospice care. Deploy digital marketing awareness campaigns to inform the community about telehealth options. Highlight the ease of virtual consultations, remote support, and online resources. Address common concerns and emphasize the personalized care your company delivers through telehealth interactions.
7. Enhance partnerships with healthcare providers to ensure smooth patient transitions
Build strong collaborations with hospitals, nursing homes, and healthcare professionals. Provide detailed information about your hospice services, referral procedures, and integrated care approaches. Participate in healthcare conferences and networking events to grow your professional network.
8. Cultivate trust and credibility through patient testimonials
Collect and highlight testimonials from patients and their families who have benefited from your hospice care. Display these testimonials on your website, social media platforms, and marketing materials to offer authentic insights into the compassionate and supportive services you provide.
9. Expand your hospice care to encompass holistic wellness beyond medical assistance
Implement initiatives that prioritize the overall well-being of patients and families. Provide complementary therapies, virtual support groups, and resources for emotional and spiritual care. Foster partnerships with community organizations to enrich the holistic support offered by your hospice organization.
10. Boost your marketing effectiveness through data-driven decision-making
Deploy advanced analytics tools to monitor the performance of your marketing initiatives. Analyze metrics such as website traffic, social media engagement, and campaign success rates. Utilize these findings to optimize strategies, allocate resources efficiently, and achieve a solid return on investment (ROI).
Once you need full-funnel digital marketing assistance beyond your in-house capacity, you are welcome to leverage professional healthcare marketing services
Promodo healthcare marketers are here to help you develop a step-by-step hospice care marketing plan individually tailored to your current business needs.
Our niched experts will increase the credibility and visibility of your hospice center on a state and nationwide level.
With our digital marketing expertise, you’ll meet the sensitive needs of your target patients and their families.
Content Marketing Manager at Promodo
Taras has 16 years of hands-on copywriting experience overseas with 3000+ unique copies.
Accredited with Certificate of Proficiency in English (C2 level) by Cambridge University. Studied at Writing Launch Academy (United States) and owns an Academic Writing Certificate from Oregon University. Author of 12 dictionaries with Apriori Publishers.
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