5 Digital Marketing Strategies You Should Try in Healthcare Industry
By Mary Walton
The healthcare industry is constantly pursuing the next big technological advancement. Whether it’s a groundbreaking facility, an improved treatment, or the expansion of physician specialties, these organizations are doing their best to provide a greater level of care for patients.
Unlike other industries, healthcare serves a large audience. Today’s customers are becoming more dependent on websites and apps.
In fact, a large group of patients relies on websites to make healthcare decisions. Thus, it’s crucial to stay on top of the digital marketing game and keep your organization at the forefront of innovation—even online. Below are five digital marketing strategies that will help you reach patients and generate more leads in today’s patient-focused market.
#1: An Easy-to-Navigate Website
The website you have serves as the welcome mat to your healthcare company. Usually, it’s the first impression your organization will make. It plays a vital role in a patient’s decision to go with your facility or look somewhere else. Therefore, make sure the experience is as user-friendly as it can be.
Odds are if someone’s on your site, they’re looking for answers for a loved one or themselves and want to find exactly the suggestions they are looking for quickly. So, make your site patient-focused (i.e., display your many offerings right on the homepage) so the visitors don’t have to search through the entire website.
#2: Resourceful Emails
It is true that patients go searching for various information online, but email is a great way to stay one step ahead. If the information is already in their inbox, they won’t have to look for it elsewhere. By sending out newsletters at least once a month, you will continue to educate your patients by providing them with valuable content like how to detox, best yoga practices, keto-diet tips, etc. These are things they can apply to their health and greatly benefit from.
Capturing your patients’ interests is the key to providing your email database with a variety of useful information. You can use email segmentation and personalization based on user interests and preferences, so they are only receiving information relevant to their needs.
Send out a current blog post, a video, or industry news that will provide readers with information on different topics. Also, make sure to plan all this ahead of time so that they’re timely according to whatever’s happening at your healthcare industry.
#3: Strong SEO Attributes
While you may have an attractive website with tons of blog posts and videos, they are of no use if they cannot be found via search engines. With the help of SEO optimization, you can boost the number of organic traffic by centering your articles on specific keywords that your patients would use in their search queries.
If you are a hospital with multiple service lines, you may want to perform some in-depth keyword research with a tool like HubSpot Keyword or SEMrush to identify the best-ranking keywords. You just need to find keywords that are currently generating traffic to your site, as well as your competitors’.
Once you find the keywords, build your content based on those specific keywords. In order to optimize a webpage around a particular line of service, you must include the keyword it in the page title, URL, meta description, H1, alt image tags, and throughout the entire content.
Keywords are necessary, but make sure they sound natural within the rest of the content. Avoid keyword-stuffing, or else Google might penalize you if the keyphrase appears way too many times.
#4: Videos that Educate and Inspire
People nowadays are leaning more toward visual content. Statistics show that about 1/3 of internet activity is spent watching videos. Consider getting your physicians on camera talking about their area of expertise. This way, it will help capture an audience that’s out there searching for knowledge your doctors have.
Videos can make a patient feel as if they have already met the doctor and boost their comfort level by observing their mannerisms, expressions, and even hearing their voices. Video is a potent tool; the music, lighting, and story structure work together simultaneously to draw out emotion when presenting something in ways a blog post isn’t able to. These elements tend to evoke feelings of hope, passions, fear, courage, and many others that written words alone cannot capture.
#5: Engaging Social Media Strategy
Is your healthcare organization on social media? If not, you are missing a big opportunity to connect with your target audiences. Social media can be a robust promotional tool if used correctly.
The majority of social media users are likely to trust posts and activity by verified physicians over any other group. Therefore, plan out your posts wisely. Make sure they’re written ahead of time. Also, offer a large variety of content and information on your page. A good social media presence will expand your reach to patients.
Wrapping Up
A solid healthcare digital marketing strategy is most actionable when managed in a streamlined way, where every element is in sync with another, instead of siloed.
It’s important that you meet with your team regularly and share your marketing strategy to discuss updates or changes. Also, connect those elements via a content management platform so that you can track the performance of your efforts and determine areas for improvement.
Mary Walton is a professional editor, content strategist and a part of NCSM team. Apart from writing, Mary is passionate about hiking and gaming. Feel free to contact her via Facebook.
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