Indian healthcare marketing is becoming increasingly unique as it provides with the most cost-effective way to reach relevant customer or patient at the most relevant time. For the better communication between patients, hospitals, clinics, insurance agencies, medical suppliers and doctors, it has become really important for the industry to plan a budgeted healthcare marketing.

Healthcare marketing involves a lot of investment and branding, and so startups in India are particularly becoming more focused on improving access to healthcare.

Lena Bose, DGM- Marketing, Medall Healthcare, Chennai said, "Today people are looking at one-stop-shop where they can get all their health-related queries addressed. Healthcare service providers have realised that is more important and relevant than ever before to create top-of-mind recall among people for their brands and service offerings. Like any other consumer brand, the healthcare sector too has realised that it is important to 'engage' with consumers through relevant mediums and content."

Focusing on Physician marketing

With the increasing demand for healthcare marketing, companies have come up with initiatives to support pharma brands reach their business outcomes and connect with physicians. Doceree is one of the first in India to come with physician only platform and is introducing new digital technologies to evolve the physician marketing category.

Dr Harshit Jain, Founder and Global CEO, Doceree commented, "At Doceree, we continue to explore new solutions to support pharma brands reach their business outcomes and connect with physicians in an informative and non-coercive manner - effectively and efficiently. The solutions that we’ve built focus on providing an ecosystem for pharma marketers to better understand physician behaviors and bring transparent measurement capabilities for organisations to increase the ROI of digital campaigns. Also, ESPYIAN, our identity-resolution technology, uses AI, data segmentation and analytics to identify physicians with more than 95 per cent accuracy on physician-only platforms."

He added, “We raised an undisclosed amount in pre-Series A funding, led by existing and new investors, in June this year. The plan is to utilise the fresh capital to expand the platform’s programmatic offerings and advancing the efficiency and effectiveness of physician marketing.”

Planning the right strategy

Commenting on the rise in healthcare marketing expenses, Runam Mehta, Chief Growth Officer, Healthcube, Begaluru said, "The spends on marketing from healthcare players are skyrocketing. From a 0.5 per cent of a total expenses the marketing budget is now already up-to 7-8 per cent in some cases. With a lot of startups entering in this segment the budget that the marketing department gets is only going to up. Traditionally India's healthcare system was dominated by hospitals and healthcare clinics, and while that’s still a dominating feature in the healthcare system we are now seeing a rapid increase in health beds, in devices, home care and diagnostics.”

With the advent of technologies people are relying on google reviews and the voice of strangers to decide where to go for the healthcare need. Talking directly to consumers in many ways is going to come up, and so, a lot more is going to happen with brands talking directly to consumers which can be concerning in many ways. So, planning a healthcare marketing strategy can help the startups lead the way.

Pooja Yadav

(pooja.yadav@mmactiv.com)