Marketing telehealth services to seniors – all you need to know

Are you launching a new telehealth service for seniors? Here is everything you need to know about promoting it. 

Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine has taken center stage. The ongoing pandemic and its effects, from lockdown restrictions to social distancing measures, have changed a lot of things around the world, from how we work to how we learn and how we get access to medical services. This is where telemedicine shines. 

Telemedicine is basically the modern, virtual way of getting medical services. Although the concept isn’t new, it was vastly underutilized before the outbreak of the pandemic. Yet, COVID-19 changed that as it has created a major public health issue. In just a few weeks after the Coronavirus epidemic was given the statute of a pandemic, telemedicine became the norm for getting medical services from disease prevention to diagnosis and treatment and rehabilitation. 

Today, with more and more people trusting telemedicine for their conditions, this concept of virtual medicine is becoming a huge market opportunity, especially if you’re offering these services to seniors. Statistically speaking, elders are more likely to be in need of medical services than adults, young adults, teens, or kids.  In the US, there are over 50 million seniors that need more healthcare services with age. Teleservice is the solution to reach and help seniors from all corners around the country. This is what your potential patients should know. 

Challenges in marketing telemedicine to seniors 

The importance of telemedicine and its benefits are pretty obvious. Yet, the hard part is to actually promote these services and convince your target audience that your telemedicine services can improve their health and their quality of life. 

Promoting any kind of medical service is somehow a bit more complex than promoting, say, a pair of funny socks. That’s because the patients’ conditions and the treatments they need are very personal stuff that not everybody feels comfortable talking about. For this reason, as a marketer in the telemedicine industry, you should understand that there are going to be some challenges as well. 

Here are the challenges you may encounter while marketing telemedicine services to seniors: 

— Hesitance in accepting the change 
— Lack of the appropriate technology
— Medical conditions that impede the use of telehealth
— Technology, but no digital literacy 

Tips for promoting telemedicine services 

Since you’re promoting medical services, which can be a sensitive subject to some people, your marketing strategy needs to sell and do it in an empathic way. Your marketing needs to help people understand why your services will help them before they get convinced to purchase them. 

Here are a few tips for creating an effective marketing strategy for your telemedicine services for seniors. 

Define your target audience 

You’d think that your target audience for promoting your telemedicine services for seniors are, well… seniors. Well, while this isn’t wrong, it is also incomplete, and you may miss out on opportunities if you limit your strategy to seniors only. 

The good news is that seniors are now easier to reach as they are becoming more skilled at using devices and the Internet than ever before. We’ll discuss more on that later. 

Yet, even if you can reach a lot of seniors directly, you also need to include their adult kids in your target audience scheme. 

Most adults today care for their aging parents, meaning that a great deal of the adults in your area are looking for the type of services you offer. What’s more, with the whole pandemic situation, as adults can’t visit their aging parents due to restrictions, they’re likely looking for snf telemedicine services to know that their parents are taken care of even when they are not around. 

So, you may have to keep in mind two types of ideal buyers when building your content.  

Think of the proper marketing channels 

As a marketer, you should know that no matter how engaging and extraordinary your content is, as long as it doesn’t appear where your target audience spends time, be it offline or online, you won’t see any results. Well, for this reason, you need to ensure that you’re using the right marketing channels to promote your services. 

When it comes to promoting to seniors, offline channels such as TV ads, newspaper ads, or flyers are typically the best way to reach them. However, this doesn’t mean that you should focus your marketing efforts entirely on offline channels. More and more seniors are becoming active on social media channels, mainly as a result of the isolation imposed by the pandemic.

With senior consumers forced to stay at home and away from their younger relatives, they have become more and more active and engaged on social media to keep in touch with their loved ones. So, you can implement both offline and online marketing strategies in your promoting efforts. 

Teach them why your services are good and how to use them 

As mentioned earlier in the article, there can be many challenges when it comes to promoting your telemedicine services to seniors. While some fear accepting the change, others struggle with getting on board with using technology to get medical assistance. 

Your job as a marketer, if you want for your strategy to be successful, you need to offer solutions to these challenges that may be in seniors’ minds. For example, to those who fear accepting this new way of getting medical assistance, remind them that the 21st century is all about convenience and how your service can help with that. 

To those who are reluctant about using technology, or don’t know how to do it, or don’t have access to it, offer solutions. For example, you can adapt your offering to provide them with solutions. More precisely, you can promise to them that a specialist from your company will take time to teach them how to handle devices to stay in touch with your healthcare professionals. Or, to those who don’t have access to the necessary devices to communicate with your medical specialists, you can offer the technological tools as part of your service.