“Expectations for personalized and convenient products and services are at an all-time high. With information at their fingertips, patients are now 100% involved in their healthcare choices.”
As consumer knowledge and expectations grow, healthcare companies have to expand and get better at not only promoting their services and building brand awareness, but growing their offerings to match a well-informed audience. Let’s dive into the marketing automation challenges facing the healthcare industry, and how HubSpot might be able to help.
Healthcare Growth Challenges
Healthcare companies are faced with a number of challenges. One of the most essential is making sure everything they do is compliant with HIPAA regulations. Additionally, they struggle with alignment of information across databases and teams. Equally challenging, many healthcare companies struggle to communicate in a timely manner, and to track and share key data that is important for growth and strategy development.
Compliance Challenges
One critical challenge within the healthcare industry is compliance. With HIPAA, there is tight regulation on what information can be used for marketing purposes. Fortunately, with HubSpot you can be HIPAA compliant as long as you aren’t collecting Protected Health Information. Only when your leads become patients (buyers) must their information be removed from your HubSpot Marketing CRM.
Alignment Challenges
- The healthcare industry is made up of many disparate parts that need to work together.
- Healthcare technology systems are often disconnected.
- Sales and marketing are often siloed and working on conflicting initiatives.
Many in the industry face outdated systems that don’t integrate with one another causing a lot of friction and disjointedness. Another big challenge is that sales and marketing teams are often their own little islands working separately on conflicting initiatives and not sharing information.
Communication Challenges
- Marketing departments are creating content and sales teams are unaware it exists.
- Service line growth and patient retention are inhibited due to communication inconsistencies.
- Legal and compliance reviews slow down the timing of communication.
Again, that issue between sales and marketing causes many healthcare companies growth to be stymied. Service line growth and patient retention are also hindered because of inconsistencies in communication. And, one of the key communication challenges is that legal and compliance reviews and processes affect the timeliness and relevance of communications.
Reporting Challenges
Reporting is also a common challenge for healthcare companies. Many are still relying on manual processes that require pulling data from various sources. They also lack real-time insights that prevent them from engaging authentically with consumers and making direct correlations between marketing initiatives and organizational KPIs.
Some additional thoughts before we dive into how HubSpot can help. Let’s consider that 5% of all searches on Google are about healthcare. While the average cost for leads is a shocking $286, only 28% of healthcare marketers have a content marketing strategy–which is good food for thought as you plan for the future.
Top Five Patient Expectations
- An easy-to-navigate website and ability to make appointments
- Services and pricing transparency
- Personalized communication
- Individualized treatment
- Improved accessibility with options
Considering what consumers want should always lead any strategy discussion. Today’s healthcare users expect easy-to-navigate websites that allow them to self-serve content as well as make appointments. They long for services and pricing transparency that is still ambiguous and evasive. As with most consumers and across industries, they want personalized communications, individualized treatment, and improved accessibility with options as well.
The HubSpot Customer Platform
HubSpot is an AI-powered customer platform that connects your marketing, sales, customer service, content, data, and revenue processes around one shared CRM.
Instead of forcing separate systems and disconnected data to work together, HubSpot gives your teams a shared view of your prospects and customers. Marketing can see what’s happening in sales. Sales can see the marketing activity that led to a conversation. Service teams have the context of the entire customer relationship. And automation can connect processes across all of them.
At the center of the platform is HubSpot Smart CRM, which connects your customer data across HubSpot’s products. HubSpot’s Breeze AI tools are also integrated throughout the platform to help teams automate work, create and analyze content, research prospects and customers, and use CRM data more effectively.
HubSpot’s six core products are Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, Content Hub, Data Hub, and Revenue Hub. Each can be used on its own, but the real power comes from using them together because they share the same CRM and customer data.
Sales Hub
Sales Hub is HubSpot’s AI-powered sales software for building pipeline and closing deals.
Sales teams can manage contacts and companies, build deal pipelines, automate follow-up with sequences and workflows, track sales activity, forecast revenue, score leads, create playbooks, and manage prospecting from one connected workspace.
Because Sales Hub is built on HubSpot Smart CRM, your sales team can also see the marketing, service, and other customer activity surrounding each relationship instead of working from an isolated sales database.
Marketing Hub
Marketing Hub brings your marketing data, campaigns, automation, and lead generation tools together with your CRM.
You can use Marketing Hub to create and automate email campaigns, build forms and landing pages, manage campaigns and social media, segment audiences, score leads, personalize communications, and measure how marketing activity contributes to leads and revenue.
HubSpot is also increasingly incorporating AI into Marketing Hub, including AI-powered lead generation, campaign creation, automation, and tools that help marketers understand how buyers are discovering their brands through both traditional search and AI-generated answers.
Service Hub
Service Hub connects customer service and customer success with the rest of the customer journey.
Teams can manage support through HubSpot’s help desk and ticketing tools, create a knowledge base, collect customer feedback, route requests, track service performance, and manage customer success and retention.
Service Hub also includes AI-powered tools such as Customer Agent, which can answer customer questions and take actions using your business and CRM data. Because service activity lives alongside marketing and sales data, your team has a much more complete picture of each customer relationship.
Content Hub
Content Hub replaced what was previously known as CMS Hub and expands HubSpot’s website tools into a broader AI-powered content marketing platform.
In addition to building and managing websites, landing pages, and blogs, Content Hub includes tools for content creation, personalization, repurposing, podcasts, video, reporting, and content management.
HubSpot is also bringing answer engine optimization into Content Hub with HubSpot AEO, which helps businesses understand how their brands appear when buyers ask questions in AI tools and identify opportunities to improve that visibility.
Data Hub
Data Hub is the evolution of what was previously Operations Hub. It’s designed to help businesses connect, clean, organize, and activate data across HubSpot and the rest of their technology stack.
Data Hub includes data syncing, data quality tools, automation, reporting, and tools for combining first- and third-party data. It can also help connect HubSpot with external data sources and maintain cleaner, more consistent CRM data.
This becomes increasingly important as businesses use more AI because the quality of the results you get from AI depends heavily on the quality and completeness of the underlying data.
Revenue Hub
Revenue Hub is HubSpot’s connected system for managing the revenue process, including quoting, contracts, billing, and payments.
Revenue Hub is the evolution of Commerce Hub, expanding HubSpot’s commerce tools beyond payments and billing into a broader quote-to-cash process.
Because this information lives alongside your CRM data, sales, service, and finance processes can stay connected to the customer relationship instead of operating from separate systems.
What about HubSpot’s AI tools?
AI isn’t really a separate Hub. Breeze, HubSpot’s collection of AI tools, is integrated throughout the customer platform.
Depending on the HubSpot products and features you’re using, AI can help with everything from prospecting and customer service to content creation, data analysis, automation, research, and CRM work.
HubSpot is also expanding its AI agent capabilities so businesses can use agents to perform work using the context and data already stored in HubSpot.
Wondering if HubSpot is right for your business?
Choosing the right HubSpot products and figuring out how they should work together depends on your business, your existing technology, and what you’re trying to accomplish.
If you’re considering HubSpot, I can help you determine what you actually need and provide hands-on HubSpot onboarding to configure the platform around your business.
If you’re already using HubSpot and need help with automation, integrations, CRM cleanup, custom objects, reporting, training, or another specific challenge, take a look at my one-off HubSpot projects.
And if you’re not quite sure what kind of help you need, schedule a 15-minute HubSpot consultation and tell me what you’re working on.