Good competitive research can assist you greatly to position yourself in the medical tourism market, while poor or inaccurate research can lead you to make bad and expensive market decisions that will never thrive.
List your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats and consumer substitution potential in five columns on a white board. This information can help you to understand your actual positioning in the marketplace., how easily one could imitate your offer and then provide a compelling substitution argument. Use this information to develop a strategy that rivals cannot duplicate with ease. Find unique offerings that are ONLY available at your destination, and then use them to enhance your position using criteria such as price, inclusions, exclusions, customer service, pre and post care, and destination experiences only available through your offer. Above all, don’t imitate others!
Take time to analyze through different perspectives, such as political, economic, socio-cultural and technological environments. Medical centers that fail to take time and effort to analyze these principles “sell beds and surgeries and tests”, not not as many as they could if their strategy was more comprehenaive. Instead of focusing on a comprehensive selling strategy that activates the same consumer more frequently over a longer time line, they get lucky on a few random patient acquisitions. Ultimately, this hollow, short-sighted strategy quickly fizzles – and the supplier ends up blaming the industry and that it is not a viable market. What medical centers in this industry do not understand have complete understanding of the market as well as competition to create a product that is conducive to the industry as well as competitive in the local and regional markets and easily created from existing elements without having to spend lots of investment capital to get started.
Understanding the competition is a process of planning, collecting and analyzing information that is available around us and decisions that we have to make. The competitive analysis is vital process which provides medical centers with the specific information about the market, allows you to develop specific market targets and helps in positioning your medical practice relative to your competitors. Use Pinterest, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram to gain consumer and competitor insights and trends. With more than 550 million photos shared every day, a visual conversation is taking place. We help clients to monitor photos and videos shared about your brand, industry and competitors in real-time and organize by popularity, trends, content creators or time. When we do this for our clients, they receive flash alerts that enable them to react and respond to emerging trends, so they never miss an opportunity to maintain their competitive edge. We also measure their share of voice on the Internet. When they understand their brand’s share of voice within the medical tourism industry and competitive set, as well as consumer sentiment, purchase intent, time of day and geography they have powerful data to guide strategic decisions and adjustments. Every photo consumers share provides insights as to their affinities, motivations and interests. We encourage clients to engage us to include all content creators or follow a subset of their customers or influencers from targeted markets for a highly curated list of content and rich insights upon which to draw inferences and action plans. This includes requesting rights to feature these consumer generated content including photos, videos and posts and then publish it across all of your marketing channels – whether owned, earned or paid.
Before setting prices, be sure to know your fixed and variable costs of each procedure you offer for medical tourism. Be sure to include incremental direct costs associated only with marketing the medical tourism services, contracting with insurers, attending conferences, travel, fam tour hosting, and all the costs associated with developing, staffing and operating an international patient department, and building its website or micro site, along with translation and interpreter services.
Good competitive research can assist you greatly to position yourself in the medical tourism market, while poor or inaccurate research can lead you to make bad and expensive market decisions that will never thrive. If you need assistance, hire an expert to assist you and bring objectivity and comparative market knowledge your team may be lacking.
Learn how Mercury Advisory Group can automate your visual and social media /Internet marketing – from uncovering consumer and competitive insights, to managing visual assets, to publishing content to your medical tourism websites, social channels, ads and trade show /trade mission organization and participation.
