Caroline Ratner from IMTJ interviews Vivek Shukla, Healthcare Strategy & Business Development Consultant, on the importance of marketing for hospitals that are involved in medical tourism.
Vivek Shukla is a healthcare marketing professional, based in India. Vivek completed his MBA from Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management, New Delhi in 1998. With over 6,000 hours of research and study, he provides valuable insight into the challenges faced by the medical tourism sector.
Marketing and PR are vital to successfully attracting foreign and home based patients and the implementation of a professional and innovative marketing strategy is essential if you want to stand out, attract patients and be one step ahead of the competition in the crowded medical tourism market place.
Over the past ten years, Vivek Shukla, a healthcare marketing professional has helped over twenty four leading hospitals and organisations across India and elsewhere devise highly successful marketing strategies ensuring healthy profit margins and strategic growth for his clients. The IMTJ spoke to him on his return from a recent business trip to Dubai about the importance of marketing in medical tourism.
Shukla explained why marketing is so important in medical tourism and how important it is to develop, implement and invest in a robust marketing plan in order to ensure a hospital’s success: “Marketing is a crucial element of any hospital, clinic or spa’s business development strategy. One of the fundamental keys to success is to identify your potential customer base and present your product in an innovative and appropriate way. If a company wants to successfully reach new and existing patients they need to take risks, try new approaches and come up with innovative and integrated marketing strategies in order to increase awareness in this growing industry”, says Shukla.
He went on to explain that hospitals need to employ an ongoing business development strategy that includes effective communication of positive information through the full mix of marketing, internet presence, advertising, PR, including patient endorsements. This needs to be done in order to build a brand and establish an excellent reputation both at home and abroad.
Healthcare marketing needs to improve
Shukla says that in his experience, the quality of marketing to prospective foreign patients is very varied and while there are some good examples many hospitals make common marketing mistakes. An example of a commonly employed but ineffective marketing strategy is that many organisations do not regularly revise and review their PR and marketing plans, maintaining outdated strategies that are not in step with changes in the fast moving world of medical tourism and the demands and expectations of prospective patients.
“When it comes to business development, most hospitals keep repeating the same old practices and then question why results are not changing. A typical marketing department today engages itself over and over again in the same practices. They are short of any new ideas and there is no plan or strategy for the long term. Here is the thing - no matter how many times you repeat these activities, extraordinary results will not come. It is time to break the barriers of our thinking - or the lack of it. As the competition intensifies and the choices increase, the entire marketing function needs to be designed afresh with new scopes and new responsibilities. Not only what is being done routinely has to be looked at, new disciplines need to be also added”, comments Shukla.
He says that one way of changing and improving on a marketing strategy is to invest in an experienced specialist marketing consultant who can devise a new marketing plan which will help define and devise new marketing strategies and goals.
One size doesn't fit all
Another common mistake is applying a “one size fits all strategy” when marketing internationally and it is important that hospitals and clinics research their markets and tailor campaigns appropriately.
Shukla says that the best way to market a hospital is through PR, and that 70% to 80% of all marketing should be focused on public relations. The challenge when marketing abroad to different markets is that campaigns need to reflect local needs and different PR “stories” need to be utilised to attract different nationalities.
“It is important to remember that what might attract prospective African patients to an Indian hospital will not necessarily work for prospective American patients. It is important to research the local market and find out the appropriate way to market to them and what a medical tourist’s priorities are when choosing a destination for treatment. For example, African patients will want to know about the high standards of clinical excellence and medical practice in somewhere like India while a prospective American patient will need to be marketed to in a different way. American patients will want the reassurance of a destinations reputation for clinical excellence but they might be more incentivised to travel abroad for treatment because of the cost differential between US treatments and foreign treatments and the opportunity for post-treatment tourism” says Shukla.
Some hospitals are successfully reaching potential new overseas patients by placing appropriate medical tourism news stories in the foreign press. It is vital for a hospital to keep its PR antennae attuned to opportunities to use to its advantage and there are always PR opportunities to be exploited. Sometimes it is possible to engineer a story, especially when a patient has come to your hospital because they could not get the treatment they wanted in their home country where there is often “bad news” about a particular country’s health service.
An example of a good PR story would be of a British patient who has travelled to your country for treatment because of long NHS waiting lists or the high cost of private healthcare in the UK and has had a positive experience at your hospital. This could be a news story for the British press and good publicity for the hospital.
While advertising is an important element of any strategy Shukla believes it is a mistake to spend a large portion of the marketing budget on advertising. Greater marketing success can be achieved by focusing on PR, a well-written, informative and useful website and providing exceptional customer service while advertising should be there to support other marketing efforts, especially PR.
The importance of word of mouth in medical tourism
Word of mouth and patient endorsement is a vital element of any marketing strategy and it is essential that hospitals understand this and train their staff to give excellent customer service to patients. It is also essential for a hospital to communicate to prospective patients that its staff understands their needs and have good communication skills and that they are fully geared up to treat and communicate with foreign patients. This can be communicated to prospective patients through online patient endorsements on the hospital website and good PR.
There are many different elements to successfully marketing a hospital or clinic and Shukla believes that; “until recently marketing and business development have long been forbidden words in healthcare. However, the recent surge in industry growth has made business development more relevant than ever before. Brand building, marketing strategy, ROI, customer retention and market penetration, are the new buzzwords of the industry and new ways of planning and executing marketing strategies are essential for medical tourism business to survive and thrive in today’s market”.
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Vivek Shukla is a leading healthcare marketing professional in India. Vivek completed his MBA from Lal Bahadur Shastri Institute of Management, New Delhi in 1998, a premier management institute in India. With over 6,000 hours of research and study, he has gained an ingenious access to tackle the challenges faced by the promoters and top management of hospitals.
