Digital Marketing in Healthcare

You need to remember the fact that healthcare is a unique type of service that cannot stand the test of conventional marketing strategies. Unless you are a plastic surgeon, it is unlikely you can use pictures of beautiful, smiling people in your medical marketing campaign.

Furthermore, unlike other industries such as restaurants and hospitality there is nothing “cool” or “good” about sickness. And of course, you have to deal with the HIPAA Compliance that restricts the use of patient photographs and testimonials.

After this long list of things that you are not supposed to do, you must be thinking about how hard it is to drive people to your healthcare business and convert them into clients. No need to worry, we are here to help you.

Leveraging tactics such as local search engine optimization, social media marketing, paid search, and custom reporting can help you transform the healthcare experience and foster richer patient engagement. Below are some of the best digital marketing strategies for healthcare practices.

Optimize Your Website for Local Searches (Local SEO)

Today, search engine optimization (SEO) plays a critical role in lead generation. Research shows that search engines drive up to three times as many visitors to hospital websites than any other source.

The same research also proved that at least 44 percent of patients who research healthcare providers on a mobiledevice such as a smartphone end up scheduling an appointment. The idea of local convenience is the most important point here.

This is the primary reason why modern healthcare providers must help search engines recognize and rank their content by optimizing every page with relevant keywords. Look for relevant keywords that are currently driving traffic to your site as well as your competitors’ and capitalize on them to drive up your organic traffic.

Healthcare medical centers must also pay great attention to essentials, such as being clear about the type of treatments and services that they offer while creating an online business listing. Consider working with a reputable healthcare marketing agency that will take care of the technical aspects of local SEO to help you rank better in local searches. 

Make sure that your business website displays your business hours, a valid phone number, and street address to help search engines position your pages right in front of potential clients whenever they search for health topics or services in your location.

Create an Easy-to-Navigate Website

Your business website serves as the welcome mat to your healthcare practice. Typically, this is the first impression your business will make to potential clients. Therefore, you need to do everything possible to ensure that it convinces the visitor to choose your facility.

An easy-to-navigate website plays a critical role in healthcare advertising because there is a high likelihood that if someone is on your website, they are looking for solutions to their problems. So, it is crucial to ensure that they can easily find what they want so that they can take appropriate action.

Make your healthcare practice website patient-focused and easy to use. It should also be user-friendly, visually appealing, and keep it up-to-date to motivate visitors to make an appointment. Your contact information should be strategically positioned on the homepage and make the entire site look as simple as possible.

Be Proactive in Online Reputation Management

As a healthcare provider, your reputation means everything. Negative reviews can easily drive potential clients away, and you do not want such a thing to happen. Research shows that when it comes to marketing in healthcare, more than 72 percent of patients rely on online reviews to make up their mind while looking for a doctor.

In fact, many people out there tend to trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. The same research established that more than 48 percent of patients are willing to go out of their health insurance network for a doctor with excellent online reviews

As a healthcare provider, make sure that you are proactive when it comes to getting more positive reviews from your clients. First, you need to provide exceptional service. From there, do not be afraid to ask for reviews from your clients.

You can even go a step further and send out polite emails requesting for patients to leave reviews for the services that you have offered them. Once you receive the reviews, be proactive with them. Do not just sit back and think that everything is done.

Respond to all of them and let your clients know that you appreciate the feedback. One last thing that you need to keep in mind is that reviews - whether positive or negative -can't be deleted by a company once they have been posted on review platforms such as Yelp.

Therefore, to build a solid online reputation, consider using an effective reputation management tool that helps you to solicit genuine positive reviews from patients. This will significantly improve your reputation and boost your local search rankings.

Create Valuable Content

Today, a significant part of a decision to engage with a particular healthcare provider is made even before the patient contacts you. We are past the days when potential clients (patients) had to book an appointment with a doctor to find information.

Marketing for doctors and medical practices is changing rapidly, and content-rich information is right at the center of it. Hence, it is critical to ensure that you are part of the decision-making process earlier on by presenting your target audience with information that will drive their decision. 

Earning the audience’s attention by providing great content can help you to capture prospective patients. But how do you ensure that your content is valuable?

If you are a doctor, there is a possibility that you have already worked for many years and gained extensive knowledge that your patients don’t have. Do not be afraid to share this knowledge with them and establish yourself as an expert in your field. 

If you are a healthcare practice owner, make sure that you have faith in your doctors. Sit down with them and listen to what they want to offer. From there, work together with them to create exciting content that your audience will be happy to engage with and share.

Content plays a critical role when it comes to digital marketing in the healthcare space. However, before you start creating content, take time to analyze your patient-driven data to fuel your content strategy.

Share your informational blogs or articles on various social media sites to increase engagement and reach out to potential clients. It is also critical to ensure that your content is centered on specific targeted keywords to boost your online healthcare marketing efforts and rank your practice higher on search engine queries.

Make Analytics and Custom Reporting a Top Priority

To ensure that your digital healthcare marketing strategy produces the returns you expect, you must implement robust analytics tools.

Whether you partner with an online healthcare marketing agency or acquire a suite of in-house software, the most important thing here is to measure the success or failure of your healthcare marketing strategies.

Furthermore, leveraging a mix of healthcare key performance indicators (KPIs), insights, and online custom reporting tools, can help you to obtain accurate data that will benefit your practice immensely. 

Analyzing this data can also help you to discover great insights that can eliminate inaccuracies and inefficiencies in your workflow processes. This will ensure that you offer better health services and focus on what matters.

With such data in hand, you will be able to make meaningful adjustments to your marketing strategies that will attract more patients to your facility.

Leverage the Power of Social Media Marketing

A recent report by PwC revealed that social media sites and tools influence up to 41 percent of a patient's choice of a medical facility, hospital, or doctor. In fact, it is one of the most valuable business development tools in online healthcare marketing.

Insights from social media provide you with immediate feedback on your products or services, along with fantastic ideas for innovation that could lead to more loyal customers, improved efficiency, and revenue growth.

Healthcare providers must effectively use social media to enhance their communication with patients, collaborate, share knowledge, and work together with different players to improve the quality of healthcare services offered.

Final Thoughts about Digital Marketing applied to Healthcare

The truth is that digital marketing in healthcare is evolving and it has hugely changed the way healthcare providers operate. You must always innovate to stay ahead of the competition and satisfy your patients’ expectations. These are just some of the best digital healthcare advertising strategies that you can use to take your practice to the next level. Contact us today for top-quality digital healthcare marketing services that will provide you with real results.

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