Behind the trillion-level medical market, how can companies conduct private domain operations correctly?

This article delves into the private domain traffic operation strategy in the medical industry, solving the problems of market competition and customer maintenance. Through two cases, it introduces how medical institutions and medical platforms can successfully apply private domain traffic. For medical industry practitioners and readers interested in the development of the medical field, this article provides valuable ideas and strategies to help them better understand the potential and methods of private domain operations. If you want to understand how to use private domain traffic in the medical field to improve customer stickiness and performance growth, this article is worth reading.

It is no longer a new thing for medical companies to enter the private domain.

On the one hand, the service environment of the medical industry is complex and non-standardized, which puts a great test on the maintenance capabilities of institutional operators. As the demographic dividend disappears and platform competition intensifies, the cost of acquiring customers in the public domain has surged, and corporate profits have been severely compressed.

On the other hand, with the upgrading of technology and the quarantine of the epidemic, some people have developed the habit of online medical treatment. Currently, more than one-third of patients believe that the Internet + medical channel is very suitable for treating minor illnesses, chronic diseases, or post-illness monitoring and rehabilitation. Compared with the cumbersome outpatient registration, medical treatment and medication in traditional hospitals, Internet medical treatment is more efficient and convenient.

Today, I have selected several representative companies in the medical industry, including both institutional companies and platform companies. Taking them as examples, let's see how companies in the medical industry can use private domains to steadily obtain customer traffic and effectively increase repeat purchases?

1. Why should we develop private domain in the medical industry?

According to the latest census data, there are 191 million people aged 65 and above in China, accounting for 13.54%, a significant increase from 8.9% in 2010.

Data from China Business Intelligence Network indicates that there are as many as 300 million chronic disease patients in China. In 2021, the scale of China's chronic disease management market was 110 billion yuan, and it is expected to increase to 162.2 billion yuan by 2030.

Source: China Business Information Network

However, even with the steady growth of the market size, the medical industry is still facing many difficulties:

Market competition has intensified and corporate profits have been squeezed; public domain costs have skyrocketed and the quality of customer acquisition is not high; the epidemic has made many users develop the habit of online medical consultations; and some negative events have affected the trust relationship between doctors and patients.

In this context, the medical industry urgently needs to use private domain transformation to achieve store performance growth. In the final analysis, it can be summarized into two points: how to obtain stable customer flow and how to efficiently increase repeat purchases?

This is also the problem that private domain operations solve:

1. Significantly improve performance and achieve accurate traffic diversion

As mentioned above, there are as many as 300 million chronic disease patients in China. These patients have long-term medication needs. If they can be targeted, it can help companies significantly improve their performance.

One of the great benefits of private domain traffic is that users introduced from the public domain to the private domain can be reached repeatedly without paying. In addition, most patients often have their own patient groups. If companies can impress them and refer patients to other patients, the quality of customer acquisition is significantly better than public domain advertising, which can help companies occupy a higher market share.

2. Build closer customer relationships and increase repeat purchases

Generally speaking, users who are willing to add your WeChat account to the private domain pool are those who have a good "first impression" of you. Private domain operations help build closer customer relationships.

Through customized products and meticulous services, we have fully won the trust of our customers, allowing patients to continue choosing to see a doctor here, effectively increasing repeat purchases.

3. Refined operations to generate more related consumption

Enterprises can carry out "fine-grained operations" in private domains, such as labeling private domain users, establishing in-depth social relationships, and comprehensively covering the user's entire life cycle of "lead generation - transaction - repeat purchase - referral" to tap into user value.

And based on user needs, we promote traditional Chinese medicine, health care, medical beauty and other products to generate more related consumption.

2. How can medical institutions develop private domains?

So, how should medical institutions develop their private domain?

Let’s take the dental institution Jinsong Dental as an example. Through private domain, they not only established long-term relationships with 200,000 customers, but also achieved a good performance of 90% conversion rate of private domain customers to the hospital and 50% return visit rate.

What did Jinsong Dental do right?

1. Actively guide users to settle on WeChat for Business

Jinsong Dental has tried many ways to acquire customers, such as doing door-to-door sales in surrounding communities and arranging sales to make phone calls, but the results were generally not ideal.

Since the average price per customer for dental projects is generally high, it is often not something that can be decided all at once. So many times, customers call and say they will consider it, but after a long period of consideration, they may choose another company.

As for telephone marketing, the leads are often not accurate enough and are often treated as nuisance calls and hung up.

Through reviewing Jinsong Dental, we realized that for projects with high customer orders and long decision-making cycles such as oral health, it is very important to have continuous pre-sales communication and answer questions.

Therefore, they began to use small gifts as hooks in offline activities and information flow advertisements to actively guide users to add the company’s WeChat.

Not only that, Jinsong Dental also imitated the method of cashback for reviewing and taking photos, and launched a "surgery cashback" activity, guiding users to write good reviews on Xiaohong, in a "planting grass" way, to attract customers with similar oral health needs to come for consultation.

2. Use tags to solve customer problems with targeted care

Of course, simply solving the problem of customer acquisition is far from enough.

As platform competition intensifies, the cost of acquiring customers for agencies continues to rise. In order to cover the high cost of acquiring customers, it is extremely important to turn "first-time customers" into "returning customers".

Through research, Jinsong Dental found that most people have a rigid demand for [teeth cleaning], which is also the first step for many people to start oral care.

So Jinsong Dental used "teeth cleaning discounts" as a hook to attract users to add corporate WeChat. In this way, a large number of potential customers were obtained very smoothly. In fact, for institutions, the profit of tooth cleaning projects is relatively thin, with a customer unit price of less than 200 yuan.

However, through a simple teeth cleaning service, the customer gained a basic understanding of the hospital's professionalism, environment, and services, and added the doctor's corporate WeChat.

Because of the basic trust, when we recommend a project to a customer at this time, they will not regard it as an annoying harassment call, but rather as a concern for the customer's oral condition.

Of course, each customer cares about different things about their oral health, and different customer needs lead to completely different service items. For dental hospitals, accurately discovering the pain points of users is the key to their successful sales.

Jinsong Dental's approach is very simple. It cleverly uses the tag function of WeChat to record key information such as the customer's age, medical records, transaction status, and potential needs through communication. For example, a young woman has a strong demand for "beautification". She is an office worker and wants to correct her teeth and improve her face. The budget is less than 40,000...

For this type of customer, the client will focus on the corrected effect, using photos comparing the face shape before and after orthodontics, as well as the latest preferential prices as selling points to attract her to buy.

As for the adolescent group that is still developing, the focus of customer service sales will be on health, mainly emphasizing the importance of the correction period and the consequences of not correcting it, in order to impress the children's parents to pay for their health.

It is precisely this refined label classification operation that allows Jinsong Dental to communicate with customers accurately and efficiently, reducing interruptions. For example, whenever there is an orthodontic promotion, the label "Orthodontic Unsuccessful Transaction" can be filtered out and "mass-sent" to remind customers in need.

By rediscovering customer needs and conducting targeted communication, they have now increased the repurchase rate of old customers to over 50%.

3. How to create a private domain for the “medical platform”?

If Jinsong Dental represents medical institution-type enterprises, then Dingxiang Doctor represents another type of enterprise. A more accurate positioning for them should be "medical platform."

Dingxiang Doctor's predecessor, Dingxiangyuan, is a medical and health platform covering health science popularization, online consultation, and academic exchanges.

In 2014, the DXY team founded DXY Doctor and built a matrix across the entire network. By 2019, the total number of fans of the matrix had exceeded 50 million, making it the leading new media in the field of medical health. In addition, whenever a major event occurs in the health field, DXY Doctor always speaks out at the first time to answer questions and solve problems for the public.

So, what’s the advantage of Dingxiang Doctor’s private domain?

1. Content is king, make health science popularization fun

Before Dingxiang Doctor, there were many medical accounts in the industry, but most of them were serious and old-fashioned, and the content was either so professional that it was incomprehensible, or it was offensive drug advertisements.

Dingxiang Doctor, which is also positioned as a medical account, has turned serious and boring doctor's papers into interesting health science popularization. In its own words, "Dingxiang Doctor is a new generation of mass health media that is professional, fun and has attitude."

To this end, on the first day of the account's establishment, the Dingxiang Doctor team set a rule: the topic selection must be "human language". The so-called human language means translating professional academic content into content that even a junior high school student can understand and find interesting.

For example, in an article about the dangers of looking down at a mobile phone, Ding Xiang Doctor did not follow the conventional wisdom and say that "playing with the mobile phone will increase spinal pressure and harm the health of the cervical spine."

Because such content is rather vague in description, it is difficult for users to clearly perceive how "harmful" it is to look down at a phone.

So how does Dr. Clove do it?

Dr. Ding Xiang calculated the cervical spine pressure by converting the data, and concluded that when we lower our heads 60 degrees, the cervical spine has to bear the pressure of about 27 kilograms.

In order to show the weight more intuitively, Dingxiang Doctor visualized the data and made the poster shown above. After seeing it, users immediately realize the harm of looking down at the phone, and the visual impact is very strong.

In addition to the lively and humorous writing style, people who often follow Dingxiang Doctor will find that almost every one of their popular medical science articles will be marked with the words "reviewed by a certain doctor or nutritionist" at the end. If there are references, a list of references will also be provided, just like writing a graduation thesis.

In this way, Dingxiang Doctor has increased its credibility among fans, making them feel that its content is professionally guaranteed.

2. Service first, to be the best Q&A community

In addition to popular science content on its self-media platforms, Dingxiang Doctor also has its own APP.

Compared with other medical platforms, Dingxiang Doctor's APP interface is simple and clear, and user operation is simple.

The consultation process is refined, and you can directly enter symptoms to recommend departments for quick consultation and streamline the consultation process. It also supports the traditional mode of selecting departments, doctors, and consultation methods for consultation. Most of these doctors are from tertiary hospitals, and their expertise is guaranteed.

Taking "consultation" as an example, when the patient inputs the symptoms and the doctor communicates with the patient, the Internet hospital can prescribe medicine and provide mailing service. At the same time, for patients who need medicine, prescription medicine service can be provided.

The discovery section is very similar to Zhihu or the early Baidu Tieba. Patients and doctors can post their personal experiences or medical records in the form of posts. The more detailed the posts are, the more likely they are to be recommended by the platform. Other patients can collect and comment on them.

Currently, this section is open to users free of charge, which means that even if patients do not pay for one-on-one communication with doctors, they may still find some medical and health knowledge in the discovery section and gain some self-help treatment methods.

All of the above functions greatly meet the needs of users and are sufficient to solve more than 60% of the problems of users. The remaining problems require testing, face-to-face consultation, etc., which can be told to users online where to solve them.

And by building such a health science popularization and online consultation platform, Dingxiang Doctor can make money from the client (online consultation) and also extract commissions from doctors for each consultation service, so both sides can make profits.

This is also the direction that I think medical platform institutions can refer to when transforming into private domains.

Author: Yan Tao, WeChat public account: Yan Tao Sanshou