3 Mobile Strategies for Growing Hospital Market Share

If your organization is still dragging its feel with the mobile marketing game, you may unintentionally be alienating a large group of patients.

Young adults are much more likely than their parents and grandparents to own a smartphone and to use it to look up health information, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, The New York Times reports.

Need more evidence? Three of the top five health-related searches for Yahoo Mobile in January 2012 were early pregnancy, herpes, and HIV. The most popular symptom searches on PCs: gastroenteritis, heart attacks, gout, and shingles. Draw your own conclusions there.

The younger audience, future patients all, have their eyes glued to their smartphones, and hospital marketing strategies must adapt. It can be a daunting prospect, especially to those of us who didn't come out of the womb knowing how to use a touchscreen, but if you start with the basics, your mobile strategy will fall into place.

Create a mobile-optimized website
It is nearly impossible to create any kind of mobile marketing strategy without first having a website that's optimized for viewing on mobile devices. Subsequently, you'll be able to host mobile marketing campaigns on it.

For most companies, a mobile-optimized site has the same branding and layout as its regular website, designed in a way that makes it easier to view and navigate for smartphone users. As such, when you're on a good mobile site you may not even realize it—but when you visit a non-optimized site on your smartphone, it is strikingly obvious.

If you have a mobile site, more people are likely to find and engage with you via their mobile devices. This has been the case for Indiana's Columbus Regional Hospital, which launched a mobile version of its website in October 2010. Since then, more than 13% of hospital website visitors are connecting with mobile devices.

"That number will continue to steadily increase as more and more people are using smartphones and tablets," Denise Glesing, director of planning and marketing for Columbus Regional Health, the hospital's parent organization, told The Republic. "The mobile website has been well received as people now expect a mobile version of a website when they access from their smartphones"

Compatible with iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry phones, the hospital's mobile site is currently a simplified version of its full-fledged website, but the hospital isn't stopping there.  It is in the midst of a redesign that will retool the site to include more information about individual services and feature a new interface that will be easier to use.

Columbus Regional has the right idea—if your mobile site design or navigation are out of date, it's almost as bad as not having one at all. Plan to review and possibly update the site at least annually.

Experiment with QR codes
Once your mobile site is in place, an innovative way to direct patients, employees, and other community members there is by using strategically placed QR codes. A QR code (Quick Response Code) is a two-dimensional barcode that, when scanned by a smartphone, links to a specific webpage.

Many QR scanner applications are free (just search your app store), as are several QR code generators. Simply paste the address of the webpage you want to link to, such as QRstuff, and the site will generate a code that, once added to a print ad, will be a scannable link. Then, the possibilities are endless.

About one year ago, Athens, GA-based Regional Health Services began using QR codes in its print ads to encourage women to sign up for mammograms. Once scanned, the QR codes led users to a web page that allowed women to request a mammography appointment.

"It came down to wanting to be able to track where people were reading about our services and pulling up our services on the website," Courtney Alford-Pomeroy, eHealth Director for Athens Regional Medical Center told the Athens Banner-Herald. "I want to make sure that we're targeting people in the places that are most convenient for them."

Alford-Pomeroy was then able to determine the number of visitors coming from a newspaper ad, magazine ad, or direct-mail postcard. Though most people still scheduled their appointments through the hospital's main website, about 15% of request forms came from QR codes.

Marketers also found that women visiting the page via QR code were more likely to complete the request than women who found it from another route.

Use geotargeted mobile display ads
The real value in mobile marketing is using geotargeted mobile ads. That means beyond targeting users based on their demographics, you can target them based on their current location.

Baltimore's MedStar Harbor Hospital recently launched a mobile display ad campaign targeting 20 local zip codes in order to increase awareness of the proximity of its ED to the downtown and surrounding neighborhoods.

"Time is of the essence when finding emergency care and we want to educate Baltimore area residents and business professionals in a compelling and innovative way that quality emergency care is only minutes away at Harbor Hospital," Jean F. Bunker, AVP, Marketing, Community Relations & Philanthropy of Harbor Hospital, told trade website BizCEOs.

The 12-week campaign combined mobile web advertising with geolocation of iPhone, Blackberry, Android, Windows, and Palm smartphone users. During this time, anyone in the designated zip codes visiting certain websites via their smartphones may be greeted with a Harbor Hospital web banner displaying information about its ED.

The banner ads linked to the hosptial's mobile-specific landing page where the user could enter an address through Google Maps and get door-to-door directions to the emergency department. The user also has the option to call the ED with one click.

These three examples are just a sampling of the many mobile marketing initiatives that may be beneficial to your organization. It may seem intimidating, but get out there, get involved, or get left behind.