8 Trends Healthcare Marketers Should Track In 2023

Customers are getting more and more digitally savvy. And they want greater control and autonomy in their engagement with healthcare brands as well. They now demand personalization at scale. Due to this change in customer behavior, traditional and unidimensional marketing models have become unsustainable.

Healthcare brands realize the need to drive deeper, personalized engagement with customers across channels in an integrated manner. Here are 8 key trends healthcare marketers should focus on in the new year to enhance customer experience.

Continuous push for personalisation at scale: Marketers must look at ways to deliver personalized content that resonates with their target audience whilst maintaining consistent brand identity across geographies. According to McKinsey, 71 per cent of consumers expect personalized interactions with companies. Of these, 75 per cent of consumers said they will switch brands if they are unsatisfied with the experience. Therefore, healthcare marketers need to rethink their content operating models and engagement strategies to enable a robust global-to-local content supply chain.

Prioritisation of omnichannel engagement: A series of good quality yet disconnected experiences can create more confusion than clarity among customers. Omnichannel engagement has the power to unify interactions across channels throughout the customer journey without making them repetitive.

According to a Salesforce report, 83 per cent of customers say that they're more loyal to companies that provide consistency across touchpoints. So, healthcare companies need to prioritize delivering connected experiences to their customers through omnichannel engagement.

Scalable web and video to drive engagement: Websites have emerged as a key gateway through which consumers can have two-way interactions with the brand. 47 per cent of consumers expect websites to load in 2 seconds or less and 62 per cent of consumers expect companies to understand their personal and local context, as per an Indegene study.

When it comes to healthcare professionals (HCPs), 59 per cent prefer engagement via websites to receive medical and promotional content. A scalable web platform will help tailor the messaging across geographies and customer preferences while keeping the brand experience consistent.

Videos will continue to emerge as a key format to drive brand visibility and increase customer engagement. Integrating video, text-to-speech, voice assistants, AI bots as part of your customer engagement story will help create lasting digital experiences and help retain this new breed of consumers.

Enterprise-wide scaling of AI/ML initiatives: Healthcare organizations have been expanding their investments in AI in recent years, owing to the growing demand for modern healthcare systems and personalized customer experiences. The massive increase in the number of AI algorithms approved by the US FDA has also encouraged more investments in this space.

About 474 AI algorithms have been given the green light since 2017, a whopping 900 per cent increase in the number of approvals recorded between 1995 and 2016. We already see many organizations prioritizing their AI investments toward personalizing customer engagements, enabling virtual patient monitoring platforms, designing digital therapeutics and surgical robots, driving drug discovery, streamlining patient identification, recruitment, monitoring clinical trials, and more.

Next immersive engagement with Metaverse: The metaverse has the potential to bring remarkable value to healthcare and the life sciences industry by augmenting current go-to-market strategies and enabling the next frontier for Health 4.0. Successful early pilots will pave the way for wider adoption and production and eventually play a critical part in healthcare companies' omnichannel engagement strategy overall. Some of the early use cases of metaverse we are seeing include applications in patient networks, telemedicine, training and simulations, brand marketing events, medical congresses, patient simulation, and immersive learning.

Powering the next version of connectivity and interactions: The next globally connected healthcare network could be based on blockchain with smart contracts. Early use cases of blockchain could include applications in areas such as drug traceability, clinical supply chain, clinical trial supply chain, patient data, bioinformatics, and verification and credentialing. Further, Web 3.0 and blockchain-powered Decentralized Apps (Dapps) will shape the future of digital interactions.

The rise of digital and social channels: The use of social media platforms and other channels to consume and engage with healthcare content is on the rise - giving companies access to an exponential amount of data that indicates drivers of social media conversations, trending topics, content preferences, and more.

Data shows that 43 per cent of patients leverage online information (such as OTC medication reviews) to inform their buying decisions. On the other hand, HCPs are increasingly using digital channels to discuss healthcare policies and therapies, learn about innovations, and create awareness about diseases and treatments.

About 52 per cent of HCPs said they prefer to receive medical and promotional information from pharmaceutical companies on social media. 48 per cent of physicians in China primarily use WeChat for access to healthcare information. Even closed-community groups like Sermo and Doximity have well over 1 million HCPs active.

Unlocking the true potential of Martech: Healthcare organisations have been upping their MarTech investments - but keeping pace with the evolving MarTech landscape and the complex available options can be challenging. The key to a high-performance tech stack doesn’t only lie in its parts, but also in the experience and expertise needed to get them working as a cohesive unit with clear organisational and growth goals.

With customer expectations rapidly evolving, organizations must shift from the traditional inside-out brand strategy to an outside-in customer-led one. Personalisation alone makes 47 per cent of patients choose a particular healthcare provider. Organisations will need to build an ecosystem of the right data, technological integrations, and processes coupled with people skills and leadership vision to achieve these benefits.