Determine Your Vascular Marketing Potential

After you have created a vascular patient portrait by analyzing your vascular market, you can begin determining your vascular marketing potential. This is done by asking:

These questions help you expand the patient portrait by creating a hospital landscape. It begins to provide you with a whole picture. After this step, you will know your patients, the hospital’s capabilities and the hospital’s limitations. From there you can begin a plan to increase vascular volume.

Determining current market service area. Market analysis scrutinizes current hospital data by zip code, county, and physician office helps determine the origin of current patient volume or types of procedures. This will begin to show which areas draw more patients than others. Are there areas where you could draw patients but are not?

It also helps you understand where partnerships may exist with providers that service patients within your geographic area. Understanding these trends helps identify the underserved counties that are in need of educational enrichment.

Analyze competitors. If you are in an area with other hospitals close by, it is essential to know what type of vascular marketing they are doing. In most cases, it is probably little to none. They may market a comprehensive cardiovascular program but this leaves you with the opportunity to become the leading expert in vascular care. Knowing what competitors are doing allows you to strategically market in a way that helps you stand out and reduces redundancy for your target patient population.

Determine potential market share. The next step is to identify those areas that have the potential to increase patient rates of treatment by educating underserved populations that are at high risk for vascular disease. Awareness of services, community education and alignment with physician groups in these areas may increase patient rates of treatment in these underserved and communities.

Get to know providers. In many cases, providers are the ones that refer patients to hospitals. That’s no secret. So how do you appropriately encourage providers to refer patients to your hospital? You help them reach their goals and help them educate their patients. You can do this by sponsoring co-branded collateral and marketing efforts. Most importantly, you must make sure your program merits the referral. Then simply raising awareness about the excellence of your program and giving providers tools that help them educate their patients will go a long way in creating more referrals from providers in your geographic market area.

By determining your vascular marketing potential, you bring ideas about vascular marketing into focus. Ideas start to become tangible plans backed up by data that determine where and to who your focus your efforts.