In today’s age, administrations from all businesses cannot afford the risk of not being up to date. And the need to regularly deliver value to buyers rapidly increases day by day. In fact, this is especially true for healthcare organizations.
We all know the severe level of competition in this industry, but we do not obviously see how a number of healthcare companies still struggle with the new market shift. For you to stay solid in the healthcare industry, you need to constantly improve on your marketing strategies.
Although healthcare marketing can be quite complex and confusing, but this article (by the healthcare success) will give you solid tips for you to stay relevant with your healthcare marketing.
9 Healthcare Marketing Strategies that Delivers More Healthcare Patients (By Stewart Gandolf)
Healthcare patients have more options than ever before. With so much information available online, these patients no longer feel the need to visit the closest hospital, a medical practice closest to their location, or even healthcare practices with multiple locations in the community. That’s why it’s so important to have a planned, budgeted healthcare marketing plan to reach new and returning patients in your area at the best moment.
Healthcare Marketing, even if you’re happy with your current patient volumes, can’t happen without a planned medical marketing strategy to keep your healthcare brand at the forefront of people’s minds.
Think of all the reasons someone might decide to switch healthcare providers: changes in the type of healthcare insurance, relocation, dissatisfaction with wait times, or just one negative experience. You are not guaranteed to keep up your patient volumes forever.
Planning Your Healthcare Marketing Strategies
Doctors tell patients all the time that an ounce of prevention beats a pound of cure. It’s better to have a marketing strategy in place now than to wait until you find out your patient marketing CRM database is nearly empty.
Healthcare marketing is a strategy for doctors, hospitals, healthcare networks, health practitioners, caregivers, healthcare providers, and healthcare marketing professionals. Rapid changes in the healthcare industry markets require agility and focus. You may have to hire outside help and plan for a larger budget than you have in the past. But in the end, it’s worth it for that peace of mind–and to see your patient volume grow faster than ever before! To help you along, we provided our top 15 items to include with any well-planned healthcare marketing strategy.
1. Use consistent healthcare branding
You might feel confident your expertise sets you apart from other healthcare providers, doctor practices or hospitals. But let’s face it–to a patient, one white coat looks just like the next.
You need to figure out what your brand is all about. What’s unique about your healthcare network, hospital or medical practice? Is it the way you treat patients? Your family-friendly office? A spa-like environment? There is at least one thing that makes your medical teams unique, and that’s what helps patients remember your healthcare organization’s name.
It may take time to figure out what works for your brand. But eventually, your healthcare marketing strategy comes together smoothly because you learn how best to represent your brand with any marketing materials.
2. Evaluate the online patient experience
A decade ago, simply having a website was enough to impress prospective patients and help them find your healthcare brand identity. But now, a website is healthcare’s new front door. It’s the first thing patients often see, and if it’s not optimized for user experience, it may also be the last time a person considers your hospital or practice.
Put yourself in a patient’s shoes. If someone were to land on any page of your site, would they know your location, or your medical practices’ multiple locations, and primary services in about 5-10 seconds? Would they be able to contact the right person quickly? Do the imagery and wording represent your healthcare clinic’s, or practice’s, average patient?
User experience is an important consideration in website design. But sometimes, designers are so focused on making the website look good, they forget to focus on the patient experience. We often find that websites need to be completely redone. However, it might help to make small changes, like positioning the “Contact Us” form higher up on the page.
3. Build a responsive healthcare website
A responsive website is one that automatically adjusts to the size of a screen, so the experience is the same whether the site is accessed on a computer, tablet, your phone, or any mobile device. It’s the norm [FYI: Google will mobile-first index all websites, including Healthcare websites, by September 2020] in website design today–but more than that, it’s something the search engines are looking for when crawling any healthcare website to determine how and where you’ll rank.
Google cares about the user experience, and it will prioritize competitors who have a site optimized for mobile. In general, responsive sites work best for the mobile digital healthcare experience. But even if you currently have a responsive site, you should check that the content and imagery continue to load properly on mobile devices.
4. Optimize for prospective patients search engine results
Search engine optimization is a powerful tool for getting your medical practice or hospital network to the top of the search engines. However, it’s a lot more complex than most marketing professionals realize. You cannot simply use the term “healthcare practice” 100 times throughout your website and hope to rank #1 on Google among doctors providing healthcare services in your area.
A large part of SEO involves using the right optimal phrases and keywords so that Google can understand your healthcare organization websites and be sure you rank for the proper, relevant and pertinent healthcare-related search terms (e.g., medical conditions, healthcare professional treatment of any type). But it also means using those terms naturally throughout your content, as Google cares about readability first and foremost. And this is only the beginning of healthcare marketing best practices for SEO, which also include:
• Having links pointing back to each page on your healthcare website.
• Gaining backlinks from reputable health sites.
• Managing your site index or sitemap.
• Claiming your healthcare website on Google My Business.
• Submitting your website to Google.
5. Leverage social media (the right way)
Too many hospitals and healthcare practices rely on organic social media for a large part of their digital healthcare marketing strategies. Organic social media means posting photos, updates, events, and more directly to Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, and it’s a valid strategy to build your brand and let patients know what’s new. [Thinking of new, or topical Social Media and YouTube, here’s a Healthcare Marketing during COVID webinar.]
However, it shouldn’t be your only social strategy. Paid advertising on social media is a better way to reach the right people who may be looking for your services—even if you’re not already connected. Let’s face it: few people share posts from local healthcare organizations online unless they are already engaged with that group, or better yet, employed by it.
Paid social media is about more than pressing the “Boost Post” button that appears when you post from your business page. Like PPC or display advertising, it involves strategizing and budgeting to target the audience you want.
6. Ask for reviews from patients
Typically, patients only leave reviews when they are motivated to do so, or if they had an above average (or extremely poor) experience. Unless you ask for reviews of your healthcare services, you miss an opportunity to feature positive feedback from patients who were satisfied with their office visit. This might be difficult for your front office staff to do–and they should not be required to evaluate each patient’s level of satisfaction as they walk out the door.
That’s why we recommend automated reviews as part of hospitals and medical practices’ Healthcare Marketing strategy. Here’s a brief overview of automated reviews: patients use a computer or tablet at the office to rate the quality of service they received on a scale of 1-10. High scores automate a follow-up email asking the patient to leave a review on their site. Those positive reviews show up directly on your website and can potentially counteract any negative reviews left elsewhere online.
Poor scores allow the practice or hospital a chance to ask the patient to elaborate and, hopefully, reach out and resolve the issues
7. Follow up with patient feedback in your marketing efforts
You can’t help it when patients have a poor opinion of your practice and leave reviews on outside sites such as Yelp. What you can do, however, is follow up with any patient feedback and show that you are working on the problem. Sites like Yelp allow you to respond to patient feedback directly. With the right follow-up, patients may be motivated to update their review to let others know the problem was resolved in a timely fashion.
Reputation management should be part of any Healthcare Marketing strategy, but this doesn’t mean you should get defensive about negative reviews. It means upgrading processes and equipment and ensuring the best possible patient experience moving forward based on prior patient feedback.
8. Look into traditional media options
Many hospitals, healthcare groups, and practices are afraid to invest in external media opportunities: traditional advertising sources like radio, television, billboards, and newspapers. These are a major investment, and you must be careful about where you spend your money to see the best, tangible results.
Having trustworthy healthcare media buyers to make these decisions for you is the best way to make sure your advertisements get seen by the right people at the right time. A billboard in the middle of nowhere does little to bring in patients, but a television advertisement that runs on a channel with demographics that represent your average patient can do wonders for your ROI.
9. Build doctor referrals into your marketing plans
How does your practice reach potential referring doctors? If you’re not using a physician liaison, you’re not getting what you need. Too many healthcare practices and medical specialty groups trust the front desk to reach out to doctors who may choose to refer their practice–but the front desk simply does not have the time to commit to this!
Doctor referrals are some of your best organic strategies for bringing in new patients. Your physician liaison should be visiting hospitals, licensed caregivers and medical practices every day, scheduling lunches with potential referral bases, and keeping in touch with potential sources.