Branding with Vanity Phone Numbers: Marketing Strategies for Health Care

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With increased competition, it is more important than ever for hospitals and healthcare providers to rethink their healthcare marketing and branding strategies. For your business to grow, you must have coherent vanity phonenumbers  in place to attract patients, retain the patients you have, and maintain the relationships between your staff and your patients.

Planning

Good healthcare marketing and brand building starts with careful planning. Assess your practice’s strength and core values to help you determine how best to communicate them to your clients. Many communication technologies are available to create your healthcare marketing strategy, from sophisticated marketing analytics to the relatively simple but very effective vanity phone numbers. As time goes by, your business will likely evolve and grow and your brand should be flexible enough to change with it.

Implementation

Once the planning stage is complete, you can begin promotion and education. One critical part of a marketing strategy is patient interaction. Your efforts to build your brand are reinforced or undermined by the quality of the interaction between your patients and staff. Indeed, it is the quality of this interaction rather than glitzy ads, flashy spreads, and lengthy mailers that will help your business achieve its desired marketing goals. The nature of the healthcare industry is such that vanity 800 numbers succeed more as marketing tools here than probably in any other industry.

Vanity Toll-Free Numbers

A vanity number is a special toll-free telephone number that reflects the product or service your business offers. In general, toll-free telephone numbers are free for the calling party. Toll-free numbers are identified by a service access code such as “800” that can vary by country. One specific advantage of a toll-free business number is the possibility of creating a toll-free vanity number that reflects the product or service your business offers.

Building Trust and Growing Your Customer Base

As a health care provider, your business identity is represented by your brand and having a toll-free number associated with your brand can help new businesses attract attention, build its brand and present itself in a professional manner. Communicating a professional and trustworthy presentation is a particularly important element of a healthcare company’s marketing strategy because the profession of medicine and healthcare is built entirely on trust. A health care professional advertising with a custom 800 number exudes such a favorable image. Vanity toll-free numbers give new businesses the appearance of being more credible and trustworthy than those with just a cell phone or local number.

Vanity toll-free numbers can also help new businesses build a customer base. Vanity numbers help your clients associate the number with your business and have been shown to receive significantly more responses that numeric 800 numbers. Customers will associate the number with the name of the business making them more likely to call the number again.

Tracking

A vanity number is critical to the ongoing success of your marketing campaign because it can help to track marketing campaigns and streamline call data and advertising performance metrics. Healthcare providers can use vanity numbers to benchmark advertising campaign performance, access tangible data associated with their campaigns, and evaluate media performance. In this way, providers can learn how effective their ad campaigns are, how accurately they are targeting the audiences, and how well the business is serving their clients and patients.

Case Study: Crossroads Hospice

Crossroads Hospice is dedicated to being at the forefront of the hospice care industry, to provide comprehensive and compassionate care to terminally ill patients.The hospice provider has 10 locations, in 10 metro markets. Each location was executing their own advertising campaigns, and taking incoming calls to their individual local phone numbers. To centralize the process and communicate a coherent brand, Crossroads Hospice decided to use one vanity 800 number to target the consumer segment, and one to target the healthcare provider segment. Since Crossroads put the vanity numbers and tracking services in place sales have dramatically increased. This is just one example of how a vanity number can help a healthcare provider reach a larger customer base.

Vanity numbers as part of a comprehensive marketing strategy not only project a brand image and help healthcare professionals reach clients and build lasting relationships based on trust—the key to succeeding as a health care professional and helping your practice or facility flourish even during challenging times.