Reading Time: 5 minutes

Since the world has gone mobile, it is offering tremendous ROI to almost every industry. Businesses are leveraging mobile applications to attract new customers and retain existing ones. Seeing this, the healthcare industry is also trying to leverage the mobile platform.

The healthcare industry has truly taken off in the past decade. With multispecialty hospitals, clinics, state-of-the-art medical equipment, and whatnot, treating and caring for patients have become more easy and accessible. But since patients have more options than ever before, they can easily access information online. As a result, they no longer feel the need to visit the clinic or healthcare facility unless it offers what they need.

This is where establishing a brand is important. In this digital age, you need to have a planned targeted healthcare marketing strategy that can reach patients. Healthcare mobile app developers can help you reach new and returning patients with quality mobile applications.

Mobile applications are distinctly changing the methodology in healthcare, providing the highest quality and safest care to patients while reducing cost.

With that being said, let’s discuss how a mobile app can help you establish a brand and retain customers in the healthcare industry.

Related Article – Considerations a Healthcare Mobile App Developer Must Keep in Mind

Value of Healthcare Apps

Healthcare mobile applications can provide a major boost across the whole platform of brand equity values:

• Your mobile app can be a powerful two-way communication channel with your target audience
• Most healthcare institutions have low marketing budgets than organizations in other industries. Healthcare mobile applications can improve your brand equity in a cost-efficient manner
• Through your mobile app portfolio, you can augment and extend your hospital’s unique personality
• With about 70% of the US population owning smartphones, healthcare applications can offer basic services, education, and timely information directly from the palm of your patients’ hands
• It takes at least 6-8 exposures for people to see and remember a brand’s marketing message. Healthcare apps can act as catalysts in making an amplified and consistent brand experience.

Healthcare Mobile App as your Brand Marketing Channel 

With a healthcare mobile application, you can enhance your patients’ offline experiences, connect with your audience, and boost sales. Healthcare mobile app developers know what the industry needs. With their knowledge put into your requirements, you will have a mobile app that will cater to your audience’s needs. However, it is easier said than done. Healthcare Mobile App Developers will make you what you ask them to. In order to establish a brand through a mobile app, you need to take further steps to analyze the healthcare field you are in.

The following are the best practices for creating amazing healthcare applications that will help you establish your brand and retain customers.

#1 Identify your target audience 

The healthcare industry is extremely vast. There’s a whole lot of things going on. Thus, each aspect has a different audience. Healthcare, in particular, runs on referrals. The patients are the key to the success of a doctor. For example, if a patient is experiencing complications with his health. He sees a doctor, and with the doctor’s advice and prescription, the patient starts feeling better. Now, what are the chances that the patient will refer his friends and family to the same doctor when something like this happens with them? We believe 100%. So it is all about finding the right audience and work with them so that they will always come back to you.

Now, since the healthcare industry is vast, you can’t just create an app that does everything for everyone. It only gets diluted and difficult to manage and is not user-friendly. So, create an app after finding your target audience.

For example, if you create a doctor referral app for the general audience with key functionalities like physician profiles, physician lookup, and request appointment, among others, people will use your app, it doesn’t matter whether they are just having a minor disease or a complex one. They will want to find a good doctor who can cure them, so they will trust your app for that.

#2 Do your research 

After finding your audience, you need to determine what functions your audience will actively embrace in your healthcare mobile app. At this point, healthcare mobile app developers can help you get ideas from previous experiences. Suppose you are creating a pregnancy app for mothers-to-be and those who are trying to conceive. So you need to add functionalities that encompass all of the pregnancy aspects. For example, you can add functionalities like an interactive pregnancy calendar, contraction timer, daily journal and 3D animated videos, and education content on birth, pregnancy, newborn care, and post-partum. A pregnant woman will be highly benefited with these functionalities. It will allow you to establish your brand among a specific set of audience.

Related Article – 5 Ways Mobile Apps Will Transform Healthcare

#3 Think multi-app strategy 

Having multiple apps than one general app is way more authoritative. With the right positioning and placement, multiple targeted apps can reach your target audience more efficiently. Now, when we talk about multiple app strategy, it is about not bottle-necking your healthcare app project through one department. You can create multiple apps for the same audience with different functionalities or you can create multiple healthcare apps for different audiences. It will help your brand get the exposure it needs to attract people.

For example, if yours is a hospital, you can have one app that revolves around your hospital like registration, booking appointments, calling an ambulance, availing at-home healthcare, gives a virtual tour of your hospital, the location where your hospital is situated, and more. On the other hand, you can create another app that revolves around all your doctors and their specialities. You can add functionalities like real-time call or chat with the concerned doctor, get a prescription without having to visit, and more.

#4 Consider versioning 

Before you tell your healthcare mobile app developers to start building the app, you need to design a versioning strategy. This is because the needs of the patients and users will evolve with time and therefore, your app should be well-equipped to accommodate the evolving needs. This is how you will be able to retain your existing users. The healthcare mobile app developers can help you with developing a versioning strategy so that you can upgrade your healthcare app accordingly.

Final Words 
Creating a healthcare app requires proper research and an experienced team of healthcare mobile app developers. Once you know what you want to offer to your targeted audience, you can create a prototype test it out.