Enhancing healthcare services and brand engagement through social media marketing: Integration of Kotler's 5A framework with IDEA process

Social media marketing can be an effective solution for healthcare organizations to build long-term relationships with patients. However, previous studies mainly focused on isolated aspects of social media marketing. This lack of integration has limited the development and adoption of social media marketing. This study proposes a social media marketing methodology (SMMM) that incorporates Kotler's 5A consumer experience path with the IDEA (identify, develop, engage, and assess) content marketing process and well-known social media design principles in providing marketing roadmap and content design guidance for implementing social media marketing. Two cases (one for a medical center with 56 posts reaching 101,342 potential clients and another for a postpartum nursing home with 52 posts reaching 61,245 potential clients) are used to examine and evaluate the usability of the methodology. The results show that the engagement rate in both cases is well above the average level in Taiwan, and all users have a positive response to the use of the methodology. These findings support that the methodology provides a nominal process model for implementing social media marketing, facilitates the design of post content, and enhances patient engagement with healthcare brands and services.