The healthcare industry has become ultra-competitive. Although this is a good thing, stakeholders must make great efforts to ensure their products and services reach the patients who are in grave need.
Hence, they must continuously focus on crafting robust healthcare marketing strategies to promote their services and let people know that a dedicated and highly experienced team is here to offer them the best healthcare services.
If you are in the healthcare industry and want to know how to attract new patients to your facility and retain existing ones, you are in the right place. The following blog is here to guide you on how you can implement healthcare marketing for your medical practice.
What is Healthcare Marketing
Healthcare marketing is an approach that helps healthcare providers communicate about their medical practices with existing and potential patients. It also helps reinforce brand awareness and allows people to learn about the services and products they offer.
With the right healthcare marketing strategy in place, you are able to gain the trust of healthcare consumers and establish yourself as a credible service provider.
In today’s digital age, the internet is the first place people go when searching for information regarding a health condition they are suffering from. A simple Google search provides them with everything they need to know about their illness, from the symptoms to the solutions. Hence, if you have the right healthcare marketing strategy in place, you will be able to target your audience at the right time, place, and context.
Why Healthcare Organizations Need Strategic Marketing
Building Trust and Credibility
Building trust and credibility among your patients is one of the crucial aspects of being a healthcare provider. If you can establish your healthcare practice as an institution they can trust, your patients will readily put their health and well-being in your hands.
Acknowledging this fact, healthcare marketing strategies focus on building patient trust and credibility among potential patients and enhancing your position in this competitive industry.
Addressing Patient Needs and Preferences
Through healthcare marketing, you can address patients’ concerns, showcase your expertise, and make them aware of your specialties. Doing so allows you to retain existing patients and offer them what they truly need.
Staying Ahead in a Competitive Market
By now, you know that the healthcare industry is highly competitive. Yes, word of mouth plays a crucial role in making people aware of your expertise. But in the era where every individual relies on the internet for information, making digital marketing an essential part of your overall marketing strategy is very crucial.
This entails having approaches in place, including a robust search engine optimization plan and making people aware of your healthcare organization’s services. This will help you stay ahead in this competitive market and allow patients to learn more about what you have to offer.
Key Elements of a Successful Healthcare Marketing Strategy
Clear Goals and Objectives
How will you move ahead if you don’t have a direction? This is why it is extremely important to have clear goals and objectives. Setting realistic goals allows you to align your digital marketing resources with the objective.
All healthcare marketing initiatives must have a “SMART” goal, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Setting smart goals allows you to take your marketing efforts in the right direction.
Audience Segmentation
Audience segmentation is important because you want your marketing efforts to reach the patients who truly need your products and services.
To segment your audience, you must have a clear answer to the questions below:
Who is your audience?
Where are they located?
Why do they need your products and services?
When do they need it?
When you have clear answers to these questions, you will be able to segment your audience and craft a unique value proposition for this group. Segmenting your audience based on their interests, demographics, online behavior, and likes and dislikes will allow you to target genuinely interested users in your facility and bring a significant ROI.
Digital Presence Optimization
After setting clear goals and successfully segmenting your audience, it is time to optimize your digital presence. One way to do this is through SEO strategies.
SEO strategies allow you to appear for organic search results, get more online traffic, and increase conversion rates.
In addition to search engine optimization, another healthcare marketing strategy to enhance digital presence is pay-per-click advertising (PPC). This model involves paying every time a potential patient comes across your advertisement and clicks on it to learn more about your services. PPC is a great way to track the number of patients who clicked on the ad and booked an appointment with you.
Content Marketing for Healthcare
Effective content marketing allows you to publish content pieces that help your patients. Patients are most likely to view your content because they are struggling with a health issue and trying to find a solution.
Hence, by publishing content pieces that are actually going to help your patients, you assist them in finding solutions. However, it is important to be consistent with content marketing efforts and ensure that you do not publish repetitive content. For this, you need a content calendar that will help you outline and strategize content creation and distribution for a specific period of time.
Leveraging Social Media and Reviews
In social media marketing, you promote your healthcare organization using platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok.
Healthcare practices can use these platforms to inform potential patients about their services and previous patients about any new updates or changes that their organization has made.
When using social media to promote your organization, ensure the content is informative and engaging.
In addition to social media, posting reviews and patient testimonies on your own website and social media profiles can also help potential patients gauge the credibility of your services.
Effective Marketing Strategies for the Healthcare Industry
1. Geofencing Marketing
Targeting patients based on specific locations is one of the most crucial aspects of healthcare marketing. This is why geofencing healthcare marketing is very effective.
Geofencing is a location-based marketing strategy that allows healthcare marketers to display their ads in a targeted area. In this approach, you draw an imaginary boundary around a physical location, and every time a potential patient enters this imaginary boundary, personalized advertisements about your facility are sent to their smartphones.
Geofencing uses technologies such as cellular Wi-Fi, Bluetooth beacons, and GPS to send messages to the target audience’s smartphones.
Geofencing has numerous benefits, including:
- Precise targeting: Geofencing allows precise targeting and ensures that your message reaches the audience group that is in close proximity to your services.
- Personalized messaging: This form of marketing strategy allows you to send personalized messages to your target audience. You can send your target audience custom offers and discounts based on their location and online behavior.
- Bring offline traffic: Although geofencing is a digital healthcare advertising tactic, you bring offline traffic to your facility as well.
So, if you are a facility located in New York, targeting patients based in rural Kansas is not a great idea. Geofencing acknowledges this and allows you to target location-based audiences.
2. Programmatic Display and OTT Advertising
Programmatic display and OTT advertising are relatively new but are slowly taking the healthcare businesses by storm. Due to their precise targeting capabilities and enhanced efficiency, they are the most effective healthcare marketing strategies.
To understand programmatic display and OTT advertising, we must learn about both terms separately. Programmatic display is the automated process of buying and selling ad inventories. In this process, technology determines the suitability of an ad slot based on location, demography, and online behavior.
OTT advertising refers to the display of ads on streaming platforms and devices. Now, programmatic display and OTT advertising together refer to the real-time buying and selling of ad inventories to display healthcare marketing content on OTT platforms.
3. Paid Search Campaigns (Google Ads)
Take, for example, you are a pediatric clinic with a physical location in New York. A resident of New York is searching for a pediatric facility nearby. When the search results appear, the first website is yours. Sounds great, right? This is exactly what a paid search campaign does.
A paid search campaign, also known as a pay-per-click ad campaign, is an effective healthcare marketing strategy in which your ad appears in the top results of Google search queries. And if you think this is expensive, you will be glad to know that you pay Google only when a user clicks on your ad displayed in the Google Display Network. Hence, this is one of the best healthcare marketing strategies if you want to maximize the return on your investments.
4. Social Media Marketing
Social media is one of the top platforms for helping patients learn about healthcare providers and the services they offer. Healthcare facilities can promote their services through this medical marketing strategy on different social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitter.
Social media marketing involves maintaining and optimizing your social media accounts, creating content for your social media posts, and engaging with the audience through comments, likes, and reactions.
Social media healthcare marketing helps you humanize your healthcare facility and build a strong relationship with your followers, making it simple for them to reach out with queries and doubts.
5. Email Marketing
Email marketing is an approach that healthcare organizations use to promote their products and services. This is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies and has an excellent return on investment.
As a healthcare provider, you can use email marketing to educate your target patients about specific topics, inform them about webinars you organize, or provide educational content through weekly and monthly newsletters.
The possibilities with email marketing are endless. However, when crafting an email, ensure that the subject line is catchy and has an appropriate call to action.
6. Public Relations (PR)
Public relations is a form of strategic communication between you and your patient base that focuses on maintaining your public image or responding to public discourse.
PR helps you maintain an image in front of your patients. This is particularly important in the healthcare industry because your image can literally make or break your brand.
The healthcare industry functions on trust and credibility. So, if you can portray your facility’s image in a positive light and highlight its achievements, expertise, ideas, and reputation, you will establish yourself as a leading service provider.
PR advises you on the marketing strategy you must follow and offers guidance to ensure that you can retain current patients and attract new ones.
Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them
Navigating HIPAA Regulations
HIPAA stands for Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Every institute in the healthcare industry is regulated by HIPAA compliance, which aims to protect patient health information.
HIPAA compliance is regulated by the Department of Health and Human Services and enforced by the Office for Civil Rights.
Healthcare organizations that want to market their services must remember that they may face severe legal and financial penalties if their strategies don’t align with these regulations. These compliances focus on safeguarding the patient’s sensitive information by issuing several restrictions on sharing these pieces of information without patient knowledge or consent.
You must protect your patient’s health information to comply with these requirements. Privacy, integrity, and security must be upheld in all cases.
Balancing Patient Privacy and Personalization
Healthcare organizations must strive to strike a balance between patient privacy and personalization. Healthcare consumers want an experience that is made only for them. However, they also want their privacy to be protected. This has caused a dilemma among medical practices regarding how to fulfill both conditions.
Healthcare marketing strategies must use patient data judiciously without crossing the boundary. Healthcare consumers appreciate personalization but also want their privacy to be protected. Successful healthcare providers know how to tread the lines.
The first step towards effective marketing strategies is maintaining transparency. When you clearly communicate how the data is collected and how it will be used, you create a relationship based on trust and clarity. Moreover, it provides healthcare consumers the power to control their data.
Measuring ROI in Healthcare Marketing
Measuring ROI in healthcare marketing is essential to understand its effectiveness. However, one of the major problems is the long sales cycle. In healthcare, decisions often involve lengthy processes, especially for high-cost treatments or services, where patients take months to make a decision. This delayed response makes it harder to tie marketing efforts directly to immediate outcomes.
In addition, the healthcare industry must pay special attention to protecting patient privacy and data. In such a situation, it becomes difficult to access patient data and track how marketing efforts are influencing patient behavior and whether they ultimately convert into appointments or treatments.
Moreover, healthcare marketing often focuses on intangible outcomes such as patient satisfaction, trust, or improved quality of life. Measuring all these aspects is difficult as they can’t be determined in financial terms. This makes analyzing the success of a marketing campaign complicated.
Therefore, healthcare marketers must pick their KPIs carefully to ensure that they can measure the campaign’s effectiveness.
How Propellant Media Can Help
Propellant Media is your answer if you are looking for a reliable healthcare marketing provider. Healthcare marketing’s success is based on building trust and credibility for your organization and providing the best healthcare services to patients.
Propellant Media is an omnichannel marketing agency that will help your medical organization grow. If you are curious to know how medical practices can benefit from our services, here are a few points you must know:
- Steady growth: We believe in steady and sustained growth. Our experts will help you launch a website with search engine optimization. Moreover, we will also help you craft online content that is informative and engages your target audience.
- Boost visibility: Boost your business visibility with Google My Business Profile and social media. We help you tailor social media marketing strategies to build a loyal following. In addition, setting up a GMB profile for your business allows you to have better control over its visibility and helps you stand out in the search results.
- Promotes paid search: Paid search is one of the fastest ways to drive traffic to your website. Our search ads and display advertising allow you to get more clicks that convert into appointments.
- Assists in reputation management: You can maintain and improve your online reputation with our public relations management experts. We allow you to make the most out of your positive online reviews and patient feedback to build authority and credibility.
Healthcare professionals who aim to enhance the growth of their healthcare facility can greatly benefit from Propellant Media’s marketing strategies.
We know exactly what a healthcare consumer needs from a facility and design a robust plan accordingly. Our team is dedicated to improving patient experience, allowing you to establish yourself as a credible brand that stands tall in this highly competitive market.
Conclusion
The healthcare industry is constantly changing. This means that the possibilities for implementing new marketing strategies and ideas are endless. However, choosing the right partners for implementing your marketing strategy is also an important factor.
A team that has experience and knowledge about the needs and demands of the field will allow you to accurately target your audience, grow your patient base, educate them, and scale your practice. In addition, the right team of medical marketing professionals will also allow you to build credibility and authority for your organization.
Healthcare marketing is very complex because it is controlled by a lot of regulations and compliances that safeguard the privacy and consent of patients. So, only a team that is experienced in this industry can provide you with the right support and guidance.
At Propellant Media, we understand the importance of having the right marketing professional by your side. We know that before implementing any marketing strategy, you must comply with numerous regulations.
Hence, you don’t have to worry about a thing when you have us. With us, you can relax. We will take care of everything for you. Hire us today to enjoy all the benefits of healthcare marketing.