Finding the Sweet Spot in Consumer vs Referral Marketing

When marketing within the home health space, both direct-to-consumer marketing and referral marketing play an important role. However, trying to focus on both might feel like quite a chore if your organization’s marketing resources are limited. The good news is there is way you can find the sweet spot in consumer vs referral marketing—and it has a lot to do with the digital tools within your reach.

Defining the difference between consumer and referral marketing

Finding the sweet spot between consumer and referral marketing starts with defining the difference between the two. Consumer marketing involves delivering the message about your service or product directly to consumers who can benefit. In the senior and home health care market, this may be seniors themselves, caregivers, or others who care about them.

Referral marketing involves delivery of your message to those who might send new prospects your way. Such “referral partners” may be hospitals, social services agencies, other healthcare providers, or satisfied past or current customers. If you’re someone who reads product reviews prior to making a purchase, you know how important and powerful it is to ensure that customers are not only satisfied with your services—but will rave to their friends and families about your organization.

Finding the sweet spot between the two

To make the most of precious time and resources, it’s essential that organizations adopt a marketing approach that will help them achieve the best return on investment (ROI). That begs the question: If both consumer and referral marketing are important, how can you do both?

One key is to understand the power and agility of digital marketing. Informed by data-driven insights that are often measured in real-time, a digital marketing approach allows organizations to understand what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to be changed to create the most effective approach.

In a Forbes post, members of the Forbes Agency Council provide a list of digital marketing tips to help organizations gain the name-brand recognition they’re looking for. Here are just a few:

• Be creative in your content approach. Embrace an innovative communications strategy with unique content that will help you stand out from competition in the digital media space.
• Be focused in your efforts. That includes understanding and focusing on the message you want to deliver, the audience you want to deliver it to, and the channels that will help you achieve the best results.
• Know the specifics about your audience. The better you know who you want to reach, what their needs are, and how you can provide value for them through your offering, the better your ROI.
• Fuel positive word-of-mouth marketing. This powerful tool is also good for your budget, since satisfied customers are doing the marketing for you—so be sure to make it easy for them to share about you via social media and other digital outlets.
• Make the most of the data at your fingertips. Whether you have marketing data available—or want to acquire that which will support your efforts—both can be applied to digital tools that use analytics to help you optimize your results.

 Stepping into the sweet spot

The sweet spot of digital marketing makes it easier than ever to reach diverse audience populations—which can include both consumers and referral partners. Digital marketing tools are the most effective way to accomplish this, since they provide:

• An agile and adaptable mode of delivery for marketing messages across a variety of channels
• Strategies that are informed by real-world and often real-time data
• Measurement of results via analytics that help to optimize marketing efforts

While all of these functionalities are essential, an effective marketing campaign must begin with an understanding of your audience in the local market—who they are, what they need, and how to best reach them. Fortunately, the digital applications consumers use today provide an abundance of data by which to gain insights into their needs—which supports AMG’s ability to pull audience lists according to specific conditions using our HIPAA-compliant data gathering process.

In addition to knowing what your prospects want and need, it’s important to know how to most effectively communicate with them—and data analytics can provide insights into which channels your prospects prefer.

One of the most important aspects of finding the sweet spot in digital marketing is finding the right partner to help you do it. AMG owns the largest healthcare audience in Alabama through our own online sites and publications, and we have unique insights into the local patient market through a disease-specific lens.

With such an approach, we’re able to provide digital marketing solutions that will help you find the results you need from your marketing efforts. If you’d like to learn more about how we can help your organization, let’s talk.