The multi-trillion-dollar healthcare industry has been growing in terms of value and importance steadily over the past several years. It is coupled with consistent developments in medicine. However, there is still work that people need to do in the area of marketing strategies. As not everyone realizes the full potential of healthcare systems yet.
During this COVID-19 pandemic, patients have been managing their health issues over virtual consulting sessions with doctors. They are reading up online about possible remedies. The right healthcare marketing strategies can inform people about the medicines and treatments available to them, as well as give you an excellent opportunity to promote your brand.
Why Do You Need a Marketing Strategy in Healthcare?
The simplest answer to this question is that the patients’ demands have changed in recent times. As a healthcare industry, not only should you provide the right treatment (which should remain your #1 priority). You should also offer great customer service to all your patients.
People in today’s digital age have the capacity to Google for a solution to their problems. So as a healthcare company, you need to go further to market your services and products. How do you make sure people find and use your offerings and not that of your competitors? This article talks about some marketing strategies you can implement. The impact those tactics have on the patients and your brand.
Best Marketing Tactics in Healthcare Today
Marketing in healthcare demands the combined effort of doctors, hospitals, healthcare networks, health practitioners, caregivers, healthcare providers, and healthcare marketing executives. The ultimate is for your patient volume to grow, but this is not something you can accomplish alone. The following strategies involve these other agents in different ways.
1. Build a Comprehensive Website
Your website should be a one-stop-shop for all the medical needs of a patient who lands there. People want to get as much information as possible themselves without interacting with a doctor, so your website should make that possible.
Have well-designed landing pages for each of your offerings, smooth navigation controls, and importantly, a responsive site. Most people prefer to use the web on their mobiles, so your website should adjust to the smaller screen size and not take more than a few seconds to load. Google (and most search engines) will prioritize your site based on how long the user spends on it, so your website must have enough information that the patient stays on it.
2. Social Media Integration
While your website is where all the information is, you need to find other ways to make your patients visit the site. Post content regularly on Facebook, Instagram, Linked In, and other platforms. These need not only be about new drugs or products your company has come up with but also any informational piece for your viewers, like “Top 10 Foods to Build Immunity”.
Paid advertisements on social media or collaborating with celebrities and industry influencers are also useful techniques to boost your social media presence. However, the best part about social media is that you can connect with your patients easily. You can respond to their comments on posts, reply to private messages, and encourage people to share your content through their accounts as well. All these methods will make patients feel closer to your brand because of your prompt responsiveness. Online activities reflect your care interest in their well-being.
3. Be Approachable
Since people cannot go to hospitals that often nowadays, patients want someone approachable online. In all your landing pages, you must include the contact information (multiple modes like email, phone, and have a live chat feature if possible) so that people can contact you for essential purposes.
If you have a tie-up with some doctors, you can set-up meetings with them for your patients through your website. You can collaborate with some video conference service provider and also have answers to questions like “How to make a video call on Echo Show?” under the FAQ section.
4. Optimizing Content for SEO
The patients who have no connections with you in any form are very likely going to find your product only through a search engine. If you have quality content, it is essential to optimize it for SEO because patients are going to blindly trust any site that Google lists as a top search result. With the right content, you deserve to be ahead of your competitors, and patients deserve to get the best source of information available.
Video content tends to get preference over audio, pictures, and text because the majority of viewers are more convinced by videos when it comes to marketing. In healthcare, videos can pack a lot of visual information about the use of a drug or medicine, as well as doctors’ testimonials to convince the patients to buy.
When it comes to keywords, it is best to have a standard keyword for your brand to use every time, as well as specific but relevant keywords that have a high search volume. Third-party software tools scrape through websites across the internet to suggest the most popular keywords in the area you want.
5. Track Your Progress
At the end of the day, you should know whether your marketing strategy is yielding results or not. There are several ways to test how well your campaign has progressed and how wide your outreach has become.
One way is to use software trackers that monitor everything from page views to demographics of the viewers to how popular your post is online. Analysis of these numbers gives you a good idea of how to channel your efforts for further marketing tasks.
You can also rely on your customers themselves as proof of progress. Encourage referrals online by offering discounts to those who spread the word; by tracking the details of the referer and the new patients, you get an idea of how far the word has progressed. Word of mouth, although challenging to monitor, is a powerful method of expanding your business.
Healthcare is for Everyone
Every industry has competition, but in healthcare, the bigger picture is to keep all your patients happy and safe. Using these strategies for marketing, your patients get the required medical treatment, and your brand gets extensive recognition.