Marketing to Miracle Workers: Are we employing the best practices for communicating to health care professionals?

Marlene Nelson, Partner, Healthcare

More than half of the communications we send on behalf of our customers each year are directed to physicians. Needless to say, we take a lot of care when we create messaging for this audience. We consider the tone of the communication, the channel in which we deliver, the time we distribute, and even the precise amount of time for follow-up.

We are learning, through the course of using integrated, measurable methods, that many of the traditional beliefs about marketing to physicians aren’t accurate. The lag time in which communications are viewed, the information physicians gravitate toward, and the channel by which they consume information has evolved.

To be sure, our understanding of how to effectively communicate with physicians has expanded largely due to our focus on sensing and responding. We have learned never to assume when embarking on an initiative targeted toward physicians.

A recent article published by Stackpole & Associates on the role physicians play in referring care facilities, reminded me, yet again, of how obtuse our expectations are regarding a physician’s function.

A recent study for the Massachusetts Extended Care Federation (MECF) found that 73 percent of physicians surveyed said they were routinely asked to recommend a nursing facility regardless of whether they had any involvement in caring for long-term residents.¹

When I consider this from a personal standpoint, it seems as absurd to me as someone asking me, a marketer in the medical device arena, to recommend a defibrillator.

We ask a lot of physicians. We want them to listen, to recommend and most importantly, to understand our individual needs. And yet, when we want to market to them, we don’t always reciprocate.

Perhaps it’s time we start.

¹Cultivating Physician Referral Sources Irving L. Stackpole, Elizabeth Ziemba