Health Care Analysis
The United States has an incredibly complicated and expensive healthcare system. Many health insurers and other organizations across the country have dramatically changed the way they do business in order to stay competitive, especially with the new climate that laws such as the Affordable Health Care Act have created. These organizations have developed new strategies and processes in order to participate in the insurance exchange program and other features of the federal healthcare law intended to make it cheaper and easier for individuals and small businesses to purchase health care (Benson, 2013).This essay discusses how a healthcare organization such as a hospital would develop a comprehensive marketing plan that will allow them to stay competitive and keep growing. Specifically this essay will cover the four Ps of marketing (product, price, place, promotion), the relationship between the hospital’s marketing, its partnerships, and it will discuss the target market and why understanding target market is vital to a successful marketing plan.
The Four Ps Incorporating the Four P’s in the organizations marketing strategy is important for the success of the hospital.The hospital must be able to respond to the customer’s needs and wants. “To respond to customers, an organization must develop a product, determine the price customers are willing to pay, identify what place is most convenient for customers to purchase the product or access the service, and finally promote the product to customers to let them know it is available. ” (2006) The hospital must determine the service or product and this must be chosen carefully. The hospital should use a combination of marketing research and intuitive decision making to help identify what service or products the community needs.The next step will be to determine the correct price for this service or product.
The price can be determined by many factors such as third party payers, what patients can afford to pay out of pocket for the service and the availability of the product or service in the area. The next step is determining where the service will be offered. It is important to understand where the service is needed. A hospital can do this by finding the most convenient place of an area, such as a place with a lot of public transportation available. The hospital should also determine where else these services are being offered in order to not saturate the market.The last step is the promotion of the service.
The promotion can be in many different forms, such as television, radio, newspaper, billboards, and flyers. Although, very often, marketing is thought of as just this segment of promotion, these other steps are crucial to making sure that the promotion in targeted and effective. Relationship between the Organization’s Marketing and Its Partnerships Berkowitz (2006) suggests there are eight major marketing segments that assist an organization to market the product or service the organization provides.Read also CRASH MOVIE ANALYSIS ESSAYIdentifiable, accessibility, members are inclined to buy, ability to buy, profitable, desirability, consistency, and availability are the eight marketing segments.
Specifically, a hospital that is trying to become both identifiable and accessible need partners in order to help them accomplish this. “Establishing alliances is a common strategy employed by organizations to cope with technological changes and competitive environments, to achieve firm goals, and to adapt to external pressures that might place stress on firm resources” (Yarbrough ;amp; Powers, 2006, p. 46).A hospital will attempt to create a partnership with another healthcare organization when resources are limited or unavailable for a specific service. For instance if a hospital want their patient to complete blood work before coming in for their appointments, partnering with a lab company will make it more convenient for the hospital and create new business for the lab company.
There are two types of partnerships to include “strategic alliances that are defined as partnership arrangements that do not involve ownership and mergers and acquisitions that are ownership-based arrangements” (Yarbrough ;amp; Powers, 2006, p. 52).This allows the health care organization to achieve high quality patient care to many patients rather than to only those patients with illnesses that one hospital can provide. Partnerships allow hospitals to build relationships with other hospitals or health care organizations to provide an all-inclusive course of treatment to all patients. The end result is that the hospital can serve more patients and increase access to more patients.
If you were to take a healthcare system, for instance, where numerous individual hospitals will form partnerships in order to make the resources of each hospital available to all of the patients. Health care organizations hope to increase access to capital, gain access to management expertise and other knowledge, and benefit from expanded human resource programs through partnership strategies” (Yarbrough ;amp; Powers, 2006, p. 51). For many healthcare organizations partnerships can benefit both the organization and the patient. Target Market Identifying and understanding the target market is crucial to the success of an organization’s marketing plan. A hospital organization has an especially tough job at identifying the target market because of the amount of services it has to offer.
In order to begin identifying the target market a hospital organization must break down the factors of what makes up the target market. These factors include the area, demographics and psychographics of the population a hospital organization is trying to reach. A hospital organization can use a number of ways to breakdown these factors and define their target market. Specifically, a hospital organization can use data of the customers that are currently using their services by surveying them through customer satisfaction surveys.This can help the organization determining which services are being used the most and by whom. The hospital organization can also use mailer surveys to help find out why or why not consumers are coming to use their services as well as which competitor they use instead.
By collecting this data a hospital organization can start to pinpoint their target market. For instance, if the area the hospital is practicing in has a large population of young families and the hospital has a new pediatrics department, these parents may be a large part of the demographic in the hospital’s target market.Using a target-marketing strategy is vital to the success of an organization marketing strategy. “Solid target marketing is a method to more efficiently reach your customers. Target marketing is a better use of your most valuable resources, i.
e. time and money, to generate additional revenue” (Healthcare Success Strategies, 2013). An organization must be smart about their marketing plan, using their limited resources to reach the most people with as much relevant information as possible.Using a target-marketing plan helps ensure that this goal is accomplished and that the marketing campaign is focused and driven. Conclusion Developing a marketing strategy for a hospital or any other sort of healthcare organization is important to the success of that organization. Implementing the Four P’s, establishing a target market and forming partnerships all play a key role in the marketing strategy.
A marketing strategy that does not have the research and work effort behind it is set up for failure. These components help keep the marketing strategy focused, efficient and effective.References BENSON, B. (2013). Nonprofits’ new world. Crain’s New York Business, 29(28), 13.
Berkowitz, E. (2006). Essentials of Health Care Marketing (2nd ed. ). Jones and Barlett Publishers. Yarbrough, A.
K. , ;amp; Powers, T. L. (2006). A Resource-Based View of Partnership Strategies in Health Care Organizations. Journal Of Hospital Marketing ;amp; Public Relations, 17(1), 45-65.
doi:10. 1300/J375v17n01_04 Healthcare success strategies. (2013). Retrieved from http://www. healthcaresuccess. com/blog/healthcare-marketing/what-is-marketing-plan. html
