In Health and Medical Tourism, your offer is the reason customers purchase and use your service, and the benefit they derive.
To support and sustain current business, as well as to attract new customers, it is important to clearly define your offer, and understand how this meets your customers’ needs. This connection between your services and what customers need is important to clarify before investing the time, energy, and resources to market your services.
If your organization provides local residents and traveling guests with relaxation retreats, your offer might be considered relaxation and/or wellness. If you provide high quality affordable dental care, your offer might be self-confidence. On the other end of the healthcare spectrum, if your hospital or clinic provides complex surgeries and medical treatments, your offer might be life-saving.
One Size Does Not Fit All
Health travelers have many different needs and motivations. What health travelers seek is not a one-size-fits-all approach. By separating (or segmenting) and objectively reviewing your service offer, you can better match the features, characteristics, benefits, and values to each market segment. Figuring out this offer / market match in advance is critical to successful marketing in health tourism.
For example, therapeutic hot springs treatments and infrastructure may be of great interest to a young couple traveling for a vacation, especially if this couple is traveling for reproductive or fertility treatments. For this young couple, the healing, relaxation qualities of the hot springs in your area are a good match to their needs and wants, but the complex medical services in your local hospitals or clinics are not relevant.
There are cases where there are synergies between and among providers, rehabilitation centres, and local hospitals. Balneotherapy providers and local hospitals may collaborate to create a package of services for persons with lower back or joint pain, combining sophisticated hospital diagnostic capabilities, with the therapeutic relaxation of evidence-based thermal/hot springs treatments.
To Further Define Your Offer, Ask Yourself:
What services are currently being used by travelers and foreign visitors? Do I need to innovate?
How do your services fit in this pattern?
Are my consumers afraid about COVID-19?
- What can we do to demonstrate – or show them – safety?
- How effectively do you serve travelers and foreign visitors now?
- What measures of customer satisfaction do you have?
- What other services could you offer?
- How do you reach travelers and foreign visitors?
- When they are at your destination.
- Before they travel.
- After they return home.
To succeed in serving any market, you must understand what you offer, or hope to offer, your customers, consumers, patients, or clients. This is Your Offer.
The Power Of Many
Marketing and development budgets are limited; therefore, business development plans must be built on realistic and achievable goals.
Collaborations between and among individuals, as well as commercial organizations (private sector) and governmental and nongovernmental organizations such as tourism and economic development agencies (public sector), are ways to increase the impact of marketing budgets.
By pooling efforts and resources, a group of businesses, or an entire region, can be more effective than individual organizations. These collaborative efforts are sometimes referred to as “clusters.” Marketing health tourism through clusters is covered in Chapter 10, Working Better Together.
Collaborative marketing may benefit individual organizations; however, collective efforts are not a replacement for individual marketing and sales effectiveness.
Familiarity Breeds Success
Repeat customers and visitors are very desirable. These so-called “loyal customers” cost less to attract after their first visit, often spend more, and act as goodwill ambassadors for your service and destination. Unlike one-time medical, dental, or surgical procedures, wellness visitors are often repeat visitors. There may be no need for a repeat hip replacement!
Any destination with an existing stream of visitors – for any reason – can begin the process of converting these visitors to loyal customers. Visitors who are familiar with the features and benefits of your destination can be converted into consumers of health, wellness, dental, and medical services.
Ask Yourself…
- How can we identify returning visitors?
- What types of services could we offer returning visitors?
- What type of collaborations and innovations would help promote health tourism?
Focus, Focus, Focus
Because marketing and communications budgets are limited, health providers, as well as the clusters and agencies which represent them, often try to offer everything in their communications. Unfortunately, in such situations, Your Offer is often lost. When that happens, everyone loses.
The most effective marketing communications delivers targeted messages. Your Offer will have the most impact when seen or heard by the most interested potential customers. General messages about the attractiveness of a destination will help support the overall tourism interest.
To promote interest in a specialty hotel, spa, or clinic requires more focused and targeted messages.
Features and Benefits
In marketing and sales communications, the difference between “Features” and “Benefits” is important. In general. customers are drawn in by “Features” but are motivated by and make purchase decisions based on “Benefits.”
If you can see it, touch it, taste it, or take a picture of it, it is a Feature. For example, the history of a location, the rigorous validated quality of the services being provided, and the outcomes (customer satisfaction, clinical treatment outcomes, etc.) are “Features.”
What consumers experience emotionally or psychologically are “Benefits.” For example, the validation of heritage, ethnicity, or culture, the relief of stress, and confidence of choice are Benefits.
Due to Covid 19, the benefit “safety” has grown in importance and should be treated as a feature via certificates, accreditations, and pictures or videos depicting cleanliness and sanitization.
CASE STUDY
A business and leisure resort in Costa Rica wanted to better understand its opportunity in the international health, wellness, and dental tourism markets. Rather than guess, management decided to survey guests.
To determine what the offer should be, the resort conducted a series of surveys among prior guests, asking if they had accessed wellness, medical, or dental services during their stays. The research showed that many guests were accessing local dental services in particular, even though management at the resort had been unaware of this. This discovery prompted management to develop relationships with local dentists and orthodontists. Together, the resort and dental community created dental packages to offer guests.
The offer became coordinated dental service packages ranging from cleaning and whitening to veneers and full orthodontic treatments for resort guests. These packages were offered by the resort to guests shortly after registering online. The convenience of arranged transport and trained supportive resort staff was appealing to the guests. Expanding the reach of dental providers in the area to frequent business and leisure visitors proved to be appealing to the local dental and orthodontic offices.
Points to Remember
Focus on the best, most specific match between your market segment of health travelers, and the services you plan to provide.
One size does not fit everyone, so narrow your focus to the best fit between what you offer and the customers who want or need that service the most.
- Start with the travelers who are already visiting and explore what additional health-related services they might want or need.
- Draft descriptions of your offer with specific people in mind; it will help you get the messages and images correct.
- People buy benefits, not features. Always include messages and images that convey the benefits that result from the features.
Download Exercise: For Your Offer, What are the Features and Their Related Benefits?
About the Marketing Handbook for Health Tourism
Health tourism and wellness travel markets are in turmoil. The marketing challenges and opportunities for health tourism destinations and providers of health, wellness, dental and medical services have never been greater – or more complicated! Established destinations and providers of health, wellness, dental and medical tourism are looking for ways to remain competitive, and new entrants to these competitive health, wellness and medical travel markets are looking for the path to success. The Marketing Handbook for Health Tourism offers practical, applicable insights for all these audiences.