In sports, understanding your competition is the key to defeating them. You need to know their potential moves and how those moves should adjust your own approach to the game. The same is true for marketing for healthcare companies.
In the healthcare industry, you are often competing for the same local clients with other skilled providers. In order to stand out so you are the one people call, you must have something to offer that your competition doesn’t. So, how can you know what this selling point should be? Determining this starts with a competitor analysis.
What Is a Competitor Analysis?
A competitor analysis for healthcare providers is a deep dive into your competition to see what their strengths and weaknesses are. In most cases, a competitor analysis places a heavy emphasis on branding, but it will also look at factors such as value propositions, service offerings, and pricing. It also looks at customer satisfaction to determine if your competition is outshining you in this area.
What Is the Purpose of a Healthcare Industry Competitive Analysis?
By performing a healthcare industry competitor analysis, you can determine what you could be doing better to reach your target audience. The analysis allows you to see where you stand in the market, how well your marketing is working compared to your competition, and what you can do to improve your marketing to outshine the competition.
How to Perform a Competitor Analysis for Healthcare Providers
In order to perform a competitive analysis, you will need to do the following:
Find Appropriate Competitors
First, you need to identify your competition. Consider other providers in a similar niche and with a similar clientele. If you run a boutique medical spa, do not compare yourself to the multi-million-dollar hospital network. As much as possible, compare apples to apples. This type of competitor is known as a direct competitor.
That said, it can be helpful to look at indirect competitors. These providers reach a similar audience to yours but offer a slightly different or even complementary service. They should still be fairly similar in size and scope, but they may offer a different service that you do not. If you’re providing massage therapy services, then a small clinic offering holistic wellness may also be a competitor worth evaluating, even though you don’t provide the same service.
If you’re struggling to find good competitors to research, try searching for your type of practice in your geographic area. Those businesses that are listed first are your competition. Because they are marketing well online and getting listed high in the search engines, this is likely the individual your potential clients will call to book a service.
Evaluate Your Competitors
Once you know who your competition is, it’s time to evaluate them. Start with a look at each company’s website to get a feel for their services and pricing. Then, find opportunities to engage with and follow them online. Determine how they are using their social media pages, whether or not their SEO is working, and how they provide something of benefit to their audience members. Make a note of what they are doing well, and consider if you want to add those tools and features to your own marketing plans.
You can also use this analysis to look at non-marketing factors, such as:
- Unique selling propositions
- Number of employees or service providers
- Pricing strategies
- Location and market size
- Demand for services
- Market saturation or share
A SWOT Analysis is a tool you can use to evaluate your competition as well as yourself. This acronym stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Analyze each factor for your competitor to determine where they stand, and then compare your own efforts to see where you need to improve to remain competitive.
Look at Marketing Tactics
Now, you are ready to analyze the marketing efforts your competition puts in. You’ve already taken a broad overview of their online presence, but you now want to dig a little deeper. Analyze their social media, website, and blog content. If you see paid ads, analyze these as well.
Ask yourself if you can identify key marketing tactics like a brand voice, company mission, or story they are trying to tell. See if you can view their marketing and choose their target demographic. If so, then you can have a good picture in mind of what the competitor is attempting to do with their marketing.
Organize Your Data
The best way to organize the data you collect in your competitive analysis is in a table. Determine the metrics you wish to evaluate, such as customer satisfaction, SEO effectiveness, weaknesses, and strengths, and then compare them side-by-side, comparing yours as well, in a table format. This table will show you, at a glance, what is and is not working to reach your target audience.
Draw Conclusions
After you’ve evaluated your competition, draw some conclusions. Where does your competition stand in the market? How do you compare? Do they have a standout service or a feature, such as more staff members, that stands out from you? The answers to these questions will help you utilize the data you track during this process.
How to Use the Data
Once you have results from a healthcare industry competitive analysis, you must use them to make your practice more effective. To do this, follow these steps:
Determine Your Unique Selling Proposition
First, determine what makes your business unique, and then compare that to the unique selling proposition of the competition. Is yours better? Does it attract people who may not be attracted to the competition? If you need to, take some time to create a better USP to draw in more potential clients.
Create Competitive Pricing
A competitor analysis lets you set pricing that is first your target audience. If you find that you are far below or above your competition, you can make an adjustment to remain competitive while also ensuring you are bringing in enough income to remain profitable.
Build Marketing Strategies Based on Audience Insights
One of the main reasons why doing a competitive analysis makes sense is because it shows you what resonates well with your target audience. If you find that one of your competitors is doing well at gaining traffic or interactions on social media, you can see what type of content your potential patients want to see. While you do not want to copy directly what your competition is doing, this understanding will help you build your own marketing strategies that will also impact your audience.
Find a Gap in Your Industry
Your competitor analysis may show you a particular gap in your industry. For example, if you offer massage therapy, and find that your market does not have a good location for prenatal massage, you can focus your marketing efforts on advertising that service. Since you know your competitors aren’t meeting this need, you can step in and find an opportunity for your own growth. Similarly, if you find that there is a target demographic who is not finding a service provider, you can tailor your marketing efforts to that demographic to meet their needs and draw in their business.
Set Measurable Goals
Now that you’ve seen what the competition is doing, set some goals for yourself. What is your goal? What do you want to accomplish to make you stand out? Make sure the goals are something you can measure, whether that is a specific increase in traffic or a number of new bookings, and put a time limit on it. The data from your competitive analysis will help you determine if those goals are achievable based on what is happening within your target market.
Implement New Marketing Strategies Using the Right Tool
Now that you have goals in mind to improve your marketing so you are more competitive, it’s time to implement the strategies that will help you meet those goals. If you are like local health and wellness practices, you lack time to focus on your marketing. That’s where Surefire Local comes in.
Surefire Local is an all-in-one online marketing platform that gives you all of the tools you need in one place. Whether you are going to focus on better SEO, want to improve your content marketing, or wish to update your pricing structure with clearer, more effective web pages, Surefire Local lets you do it. In addition, the platform puts your analysis all on one page, so you can see at a glance what is and is not working for you. You can then compare this data to future competitor marketing analysis so you can see where you need to make changes and where you can keep focusing your efforts to reach more people.
If you have performed a healthcare industry competitive analysis and found that you need to improve your marketing game, Surefire Local can help. Contact us to schedule a demo of our software today.