Healthcare marketing is an important tool for any business in the healthcare industry. Whether you are a medical practice, a tech startup in the healthcare industry, a biomedical company or a hospital or patient facility, marketing is an important aspect to any organization or business. Growing and expanding in the medical industry is becoming more competitive than ever, with healthcare companies spending increasing amounts on marketing and putting more thought into their marketing strategy and planning.
Having worked with healthcare providers ranging from major teaching hospitals to medical device startups to nonprofit public service announcements, we wanted to put together a basic list of core healthcare marketing plan components.
Is your website response and mobile friendly?
Your first priority, and frankly nearly any bueinsses’s first priority should be to make sure that their website is responsive and mobile friendly. Over 50% of web traffic is mobile, the worst scenario would be to receive good word of mouth recommendations, then a would be customers is turned off by your website that either doesn’t work or looks like something from 1999.
Hopefully your website is fully responsive and mobile, but if it isn’t, this needs to be the number one priority for your marketing team and will generate the best ROI. Since so much of your marketing content will be tied to your digital presence, this is the central pillar to your online image and first impression. It needs to be good!
Basic SEO is also import to make sure you capture keyword searches that would be relevant to your services. When a patient or customer searches you, you need to make sure you are on the front page of google particular for a local medical practice or hospital. SEO doesn’t have to be hard, and we can certainly give you a hard at optimizing your SEO and web content to capture more inbound healthcare marketing leads. Keyword optimization and analysis is a great way to find keywords you might not have thought of, but are generating search volume and can be successfully deployed on your website.
Digital Marketing
Once your website is functional on mobile and SEO content is built, paid ppc is a great way to further expand your digital reach. PPC gives you the ability to target keywords, geographical areas, detailed demographics and more. For local practices this is an important tool that can generate great ROI with proper optimization and testing. Like any paid advertising, PPC is not a set and forget type of marketing if you do it correctly. To get the best ROI and results from your PPC campaign, a/b testing of ad placement, copy, visual design and keywords are needed to tweak the campaigns based on data analysis. Overtime your campaign will continue to be optimized and generate better results for each dollar spent. Besides google, facebook, linkedin, youtube etc are all great outlets depending on the type of business and market that you operate in.
Social media
Social Media is a very important platform for your brand. Even for b2b companies, using linkedin extensively will pay dividends over time. For b2c firms, having a tailored social media presence gives you more inbound leads and can lead other to share your content resulting in even more brand exposure. Patient success stories and testimonials are one of the most important pieces of your social media content, resulting in a high share rate. Keep in mind many people search for a service or product on something like facebook, which in effect turns it into a mini search engine. You want to make sure you rank for relevant geographic and keyword search terms.
Reviews
You should be sending follow up emails to all your customers after they are in your office or buy something etc. Encourage them in this message to leave you a customer review on facebook or through google. These reviews make a big difference to your online perception and ranking. Businesses that prioritize building their review numbers can generate substantially more inbound business than ones that don’t. Especially for a medical or dental practice, having more reviews over time will make a big differences as potential patients search local providers and can easily be the difference between winning or losing business. If you get in a habit of asking for reviews via email and through your office staff, you’ll get a surprising number of reviews within the first 9-12 months.
Email Marketing
We’ve mentioned email marketing in the above sections, but a focus on email marketing is needed in any business. Your competitors will all be using some kind of email marketing strategy, and you need to as well to compete. For patients, automated appointment scheduling emails should be a focus, as should followup emails after a patient visit. In addition, monthly newsletters are a good practice, particularly if you build engaging and interesting content for your readers. This will keep your audience engaged with your brand and helped to build a last relationship. Using email marketing software you can easily segment your audience to send relevant content to viewers that will be most likely to have an interest in it.
Content Marketing
The content that you use on your website, blog, social media articles and in your email marketing needs to informative engaging content that your customers would find interesting. Many times the best form of content for healthcare companies is educational content that is tailored to your audience. These can be all sorts of topics, but should be somewhat related to the services that you provide. For example a dentist might create a piece of content about the “best ways to whiten your teeth” or “ how much do braces cost”. Both would be engaging and could easily be targeted via email marketing software to segmented audiences.
Video Content
The more engaging and entertaining the content you produce, the better retention, shareability and engagement is has. Healthcare marketing video production is one of the best ways to drastically improve retention and click through rates. Research points to video content raising click through rates on digital ppc, blogs, and email by around 40%. This means that by incorporating video onto your website you can effectively increase website ROI by 40%. More and more organizations are heavily incorporating some form of video content, and if you want to compete effectively you’ll have to as well.
Video content, like written content, can vary wildly, and changes depending on your goals and type of services or products you offer. We’ve had firsthand success by using video testimonials both as web content and as components of broadcast tv advertising, branding videos, blog videos, VR content and treatment overviews. The final We’ve found as well that many times a video explaining a treatment using through a combination of live action doctor interviews, animation and visuals can help patients to understand and feel more comfortable before agreeing to or receiving a treatment.
Broadcast tv spot should be considered depending on the scope of your marketing plan or goals. For hospitals and practices that want to grow, broadcast tv and radio is an important tool that can generate immediate results. For smaller businesses, broadcast can be tailored to remain at an effective ROI at a lower buget level as well. Typically broadcast healthcare marketing would be a combination of branding and testimonials. We’ve worked with healthcare companies in the Knoxville area and nationally to build healthcare video content.
Volan Media is a full service marketing and advertising agency in the Knoxville area. We’ve provided many Knoxville healthcare marketing services and worked on many Knoxville healthcare video production projects over the years. Our first step is always to have a long discussion about your goals and analyze your current marketing processes to better understand what needs work the most. Whether you need a website, Knoxville branding services, virtual reality video production or broadcast content, we’ve got you covered!
