Healthcare marketing is a bit different than most forms of marketing, with such specialized services, clientele, and geographic reaches and can vary heavily depending on your specific niche and area of focus. Developing long term marketing plans to grow the patient base can be a challenge and takes experimenting
The most successful health firms and practices continuously maintain a marketing plan. Typically most research and studies conclude that most medical practices spend between 8-15% of total revenue on marketing. This of course depends drastically on your location, goals, market niche, and positioning.
What are your goals?
This is the first step to building a marketing plan, deciding on your goals! Make a list of your priorities and outcomes. This could include anything from simply building your patient volume, marketing certain procedures or products, communicating offers to current patients, or new online scheduling tools.
Your entire marketing plan will be heavily based on what your goals are a
Who is your audience?
Once you determine your goals, you can further flesh out a marketing plan by looking at your current audience and desired audience for any marketing content. Often for healthcare firms or medical practices, the geographical location is a heavy factor in determining how your marketing plan will be built and what outlets you will engage customers on.
Take into account COVID19
Covid19 will be an ongoing reality for marketers of all kinds well into 2021. Build COVID19 messaging into your marketing plan, you absolutely must engage your audience on topics they care heavily about such as “How safe is your office?”, “What precautions are you taking?” etc. You need to provide reassurance to your patients that you are doing everything possible to make your office safe for patients. Incorporate coronavirus content into all channels of marketing. Also consider making a blog or social media content that explains coronavirus, how it infects people and makes them sick and also the best forms of treatment, and the importance of social distancing and masks. Not only will content like this be popular, but it will also be highly informative and searchable to your audience.
Reviews are very important
Reviews have become more and more commonplace on nearly all websites and search platforms. You need to give thought to capturing more positive reviews and hopefully having more and better reviews than competitors. After patient visits, you can schedule automated email or text messaging to ask patients to consider reviewing their visit. This is a common way to within a month or two generate a large number of reviews. More and more so, search engines heavily take into account reviews and will rank accordingly. Reviews should be an absolute top priority for your practice and be a focus of your marketing and messaging. If your competitors don’t have the number of reviews or as good of reviews that you do, that is a MAJOR advantage, but by the same token, if they are ahead in the review game, then you need should make that potentially your top marketing priority.
Remember, Google actually uses the words inside your customer reviews for ranking keywords!
SEO game needs to be on point
SEO is another major differentiator between marketing wins and failures. SEO is not optional for a business that wishes to be successful in a competitive environment. You need to work with SEO experts to capture relevant search terms including location and geographical terms. You are most likely competing heavily against other local competitors.
Google’s search console and keyword planner along with other third-party software can be a great help in determining what keywords you should push. We always recommended working with your marketing firm to make a list of 20-50 keywords, then rank them based on importance, competitiveness, and relevance. This will form the backbone of your SEO keyword strategy with these keywords being used and focused on in your blogging and media content.
Make sure that your website is properly set up for SEO. Work with your marketing team or web team to double-check that your website Is helping not hurting your SEO ranking.
Mobile accounts for 50% or more of web traffic and will only grow. Your website is hurting your brand if it doesn’t work well on mobile. This is a quick way to lose around 50% of web traffic that clicks on your website then is turned off by a bad mobile experience.
Use Video Content Throughout your Marketing Channels
Would the average person rather read or watch a video? That answer is now overwhelmingly video. The average person watches at least half an hour of video online daily. If you want to stay competitive, you need to lean on this and create various types of video content. Particularly for ppc and social media marketing, videos are much more sharable and have a 40-60% higher CTR rate than static images. Many firms are realizing even with production costs, videos drive a much higher ROI for online digital marketing.
Video blogs are also an increasingly popular way to create shareable content that is both informative and sheds your brand in a positive light.
We’ve seen great success with patient testimonials to build credibility and better convert marketing leads. By using patients to tell their story, not only are you borrowing their credibility, but also creating a human connection that can’t be achieved by written reviews.
360 VR videos and Virtual reality experiences are the next steps in video content taking interaction up a level. We recently with Emory University to create a 360 virtual reality experience highlighting a form of radiation treatment from the patient’s perspective. This gives patients a firsthand look at what to expect, helps to answer any questions they have and alleviate anxiety about the treatment.
360 videos will become the next step and currently represent a major competitive advantage as many firms have yet to create anything utilizing that form of media.
Paid Social and Digital
Testing and experimenting are everything when it comes to running a profitable digital paid campaign. We also recommended constantly running A/B testing and if possible use videos for at least a good portion of your ads. These will nearly always generate a much higher ROI and CTR than static content, and many times your competitors won’t have videos which means you’ll be getting more shares if you are focusing on a local geographic area.
Remember that social media platforms are increasingly requiring paid promotions to reach all of your followers, which is frustrating, but also creates more opportunities to beat competitors by using better ad targeting and better-looking content.
Automated Communication
You should be using some kind of automated email scheduling software to reduce the number of times patients spend dealing with office staff before a visit, this also reduces your back office time spent scheduling and talking with customers via phone and email. More and more clients of all types and industries are preferring digital interactions and the brands that are leveraging this is becoming more competitive and gaining/retaining clients they otherwise wouldn’t.
Make it as easy and quick as possible for patients to interact with your office. Many healthcare firms are even creating their own mobile apps that are providing the core of interaction between the patient and clinic.
Local Sponsorships and Events
Get involved with your community, while this is more of a challenge during the ongoing pandemic, consider sponsoring local teams, working with local charitable organizations, festivals, etc. The in-person interactions you will have are so much stronger than any digital interactions and can help cement your clinic as a real part of the community. For smaller towns, this can be a huge advantage and generate lots of business.
If you need help marketing your clinic, practice or healthcare-related business, give us a shout! We have worked with numerous healthcare industry clients both small and large to create a range of content and marketing plans. Volan Media is a top Knoxville Tennesse marketing and video production firm.
