The way healthcare professionals interact with their patients and promote their practices and services has been much changed by technological developments, consumerism in healthcare, and the rapid increase in mobile and internet use. Audiences today demand, just as in any other sector, a technologically advanced and creative healthcare experience.
This implies that to remain relevant and competitive, medical professionals have to create a thorough healthcare marketing plan to meet the demands of this fast-changing scene. We have also requested our professionals to present an outline of the most successful marketing techniques in healthcare to assist you choose the correct course of action and carry it out brilliantly.
What Is a Healthcare Marketing Strategy?
Healthcare marketing strategies are most often digital marketing tactics that help medical organizations and practices promote their services and brands to their specific target audiences. These strategies are often created with the help of marketing agencies and usually include a combination of digital tactics that all aim to engage customer or patient engagement, drive qualified internet traffic, raise brand awareness, and enhance overall business performance within the healthcare sector.
A sound healthcare SEO strategy may involve social media, web development, search engine optimization (SEO), community outreach efforts, social media management, and other tailored efforts to cater to target audiences and meet the needs and regulations of the healthcare industry.
According to CallRail, the stiff healthcare competition/crowded marketplace is the second biggest challenge the industry faces, with 50% of respondents mentioning it in a 2023 survey. So, even If you are currently satisfied with your existing number of patients and customers, implementing an overarching strategy is still essential to ensure competitiveness and keep your healthcare brand visible in the digital landscape.
Planning Out Medical Marketing Strategies
Generally speaking, doctors will advise their patients that from a certain point of view, an ounce of prevention will always beat a pound of cure. Better still, have a solid marketing plan in place as a backup rather than wait till traffic and conversion decline.
Today, every medical practice and healthcare institution realizes the importance of marketing, from hospitals to solo practices and health consumer brands. Most of them integrate highly targeted, multi-channel tactics to drive engagement and foster growth, focusing on return on investment and key performance indicators. Partner with our Healthcare SEO company for optimized visibility and patient engagement.
When properly implemented, healthcare marketing can:
- Improve overall patient experience and keep them managed with personalized, relevant, and timely outreach during their patient journey
- Empower patients or consumers to make healthier and smarter life decisions improving their health and quality of life
- Help your healthcare brand increase its customer base, retain existing patients, and improve their loyalty, establishing your practice as a reliable and expert health institution.
- Generate more revenue by driving more qualified leads to your website.
- Establish your medical teams as experts in their respective fields in the market.
- Increase your relevancy in an increasingly competitive marketplace.
- Build your brand and improve your online reputation
On another note, healthcare SEO services are, like any other niche, subject to rapid changes, where a major algorithm update can have a significant impact on your practice’s online advertising strategy. As such, we highly advise partnering up with a seasoned niche-oriented digital marketing agency that can help you overcome any sudden shifts in the digital landscape.
Useful Medical Marketing Strategies To Attract Healthcare Consumers
Digital marketing is a multifarious process with many various techniques and approaches meant to keep your company relevant in the always-changing digital sphere. These are just a handful of the strategies you might take into account while developing your marketing agenda.
1. Keep Your Branding Consistent
It’s one thing to feel confident about your medical expertise and know that it sets you apart from other providers. However, for most patients, one white coat is just like the next and they probably won’t opt for your services unless they know and trust you.
Strong and recognizable branding can raise awareness of your practice and can go a long way in building trust with your target audience, or even help you grow your return on investment while decreasing your cost-per-acquisition.
To get started, first, you need to determine what your brand is about.
- What makes your practice or business unique?
- Does your establishment have a spa-like environment or resembles a clinic?
- Do your teams prioritize prevention and patient education or excel at diagnostics or other medical fields?
- Are you a family-friendly practice?
- What do you do to make your patients feel welcome and relaxed?
There must be at least one or two things that make your practice stand out and those are mostly the things that help patients and leads remember your brand. Promoting these values is a great way to raise awareness and build trust. Once you find what works best for your brand, strive for consistency in your brand voice and design language to increase your credibility.
2. Examine Your Patients’ Online Experience
Today, consumers engage with websites and brands in increasingly complex ways. As healthcare SEO company also shifts toward providing virtual care experiences (telehealth, virtual monitoring), practices are strongly encouraged to reassess the online experience they offer.
On that note, most often, your website is the first thing people see, and if it’s not optimized, it may also be the last time they come into contact with your clinic. Aside from easy site access and simple navigation, you should also strive to feature imagery and content that represents your consumer base and aligns with your branding.
Including value-added experiences like enabling your leads and patients to conduct high-quality conversations with your provider online, easy access to important information, and a comprehensive appointment-booking system can also lead to many happy website visitors.
User experience has become a cornerstone of good web design and it’s a crucial aspect of SEO too. Designers aren’t only focused on making a website look good anymore — making it usable and intuitive is just as important.
Positive user experiences aren’t only about design. You should also analyze how your typical visitor engages with your website, social media channels, paid ads, and more. You need to understand that consumers interact with your brand on their terms, and your medical marketing strategy should separately assess every patient touchpoint, giving you a better understanding of what will trigger conversions and what won’t.
3. Design a Responsive Website
Site responsiveness directly ties into user experience. Around 95.8% of searchers use their mobile phones to access the internet, and having a website that won’t load properly on all screens (laptops, desktops, tablets, phones) can directly lead to lost business.
Responsive design also plays a crucial part in search engine optimization, as major players such as Google have had a mobile-first approach when indexing websites since 2020. This means that a responsive site will automatically rank higher. However, you will also need to ensure that links, videos, text, and images load correctly with the same data structure across every mobile device.
4. Site Speed Testing
Usually leaving a site if it loads more than three seconds, visitors therefore Google considers loading speed as a crucial ranking criterion. This means that a slow site will lower your search engine result page rankings in addition to increasing your bounce rates.
Fortunately, there are several things you can do to get your site to load faster, so don’t hesitate to talk to a web development company or a digital agency about that.
5. Invest in SEO
Is SEO worth it? Search engine optimization is an incredibly useful tool for boosting your visibility online. However, it’s a complex and time-consuming process.
SEO involves several approaches that address various aspects of your site. As mentioned earlier, responsiveness, speed, and user experience are just some of the things you need to address. You also need to work on keyword research and content optimization.
The latter involves using the right keywords and phrases to help Google understand the intent of the content on your site. Keyword research and content optimization can help you rank for relevant medical-related terms. However, search phrases must appear naturally in your content, as Google also cares about readability.
In addition to this, your SEO strategy will probably also include:
- Developing optimized pages with optimized content and keywords
- Having several internal links that point back to relevant pages on your site
- Getting reputable backlinks from established healthcare sites
- Creating a structured and easy-to-understand sitemap
- Creating a Google Business Profile with accurate and complete information
- Optimizing for local keywords
- Submitting your site to Google
6. Consider Paid Advertising
Search engine optimization is a great tactic for creating lasting rankings. However, while you may rank first for a specific keyword, chances are, you will see a few paid ads that appear above your organic position.
Pay-per-click or PPC ads are meant to appear on the top of the SERPS for specific search terms. In contrast to SEO, PPC lets you decide on a budget which will determine the duration of being at the top of search results. The return on investment is defined and clear with paid ads but this strategy lacks the longevity and sustainability of SEO. As such, most experts will recommend using both strategies together.
7. Become an Expert in Your Field
Your brand will be remembered better and for longer if you establish your team as authoritative figures within your medical specialty. To achieve this, implement a public relations strategy that involves reaching out to specific media outlets if you have something important to share or comment on specific medical advancements and findings.
Be active on healthcare industry-related forums and groups, follow specific sites like HARO to learn more about possible interview opportunities, and consider releasing free press materials to help boost your visibility both online and offline.
8. Approach Social Media the Right Way
As a healthcare institution, your brand shouldn’t solely rely on organic social media in your strategy. While posting updates, photos, and events directly on social platforms is a valid way of building your brand online, there’s more to social media than just raising brand awareness organically.
Paid social media advertising can help you gain more qualified leads who may be looking for your services. You can also reach those people whom you aren’t connected to yet.
9. Focus on Patient Reviews
Customers enjoy doing some research and learning from the experiences of other patients before they plan a visit. Online reviews are therefore a terrific approach to increase reputation among present and future patients.
About half of 1,141 Americans said they rely on internet reviews and almost consider them as personal recommendations from friends and family.
Most people, though, only submit evaluations if they are quite happy or quite unhappy with the treatment they have received. This implies you will have to aim higher and make sure you approach getting as many evaluations as possible proactively to cover every conceivable experience, not only the extremes.
Make sure you also routinely address every issue or question and follow up on these reviews. If you receive a negative review on Yelp, Google, or Facebook, for instance, you should reply to show others you are open to hearing and addressing such issues. Frequent follow-ups could also inspire patients to change their ratings with something more favorable.
Takeaways
Like many other sectors, the healthcare one has not been exempt from the changes brought about by the digital revolution. People’s interactions with healthcare brands and practices have so changed fundamentally as well.
Clinics and healthcare institutions can remain relevant and even out the competitive playing field with the help of niche digital marketing agencies that understand the specific needs of healthcare businesses and know how to create content that resonates with patients, addressing their concerns and educating them at the same time.
