Healthcare marketing is a process of proper communication, high awareness, and smooth relationship building designed to attract patients, lead them through their hospital journey, and keep them engaged with the healthcare facility.
Your healthcare marketing technique is to attract people to choose your facility. Guide those patients to choose you, again and again. Next, your patients will do advertising for your hospital, as they recommend your healthcare facility to their contacts.
But, how do you improve and retain your patient base so that your healthcare facility can grow?
Patient-centered marketing is essential for the development of your healthcare facility. Competition is very high in the medical industry, across the board. Your patients are your valuable customers. And, just like in any other industry, your potential customers have countless choices.
Effective healthcare marketing services lead to increased patient engagement, which will lead to a developing healthcare facility.
What happen when your healthcare advertising techniques aren’t effective?
If your healthcare marketing is lacking, your hospital won’t see an influx of new patients. With the right circumstances, even your most loyal patients may incline towards the marketing tactics of other healthcare facilities in your area.
Of course, you believe that all your patients should receive quality health care from your medical team at all times. Patient experience doesn’t begin or end with personalized attention. Your patients should receive quality care from every aspect of your medical centre –from your social media platforms to your healthcare facility website, to of course–your healthcare marketing strategy.
These things when combined together create an overall customer or patient experience. When you promote your facility effectively while your medical team treats patients carefully, your hospital will develop a relationship of deep trust with your patients. The aim of healthcare SEO services is to get your healthcare facility online presence in the best position to rank for vital terms on Google and other search engines.
Content Marketing
Content represents your brand name or business name online, organically. Content marketing is the practice of using relevant content to draw huge traffic to your website. Content can be uploaded to your healthcare facility’s website, social media platform or even your YouTube channel. Content marketing materials can be as simple as photos, engaging videos, FAQ pages, informative blog posts, new healthcare pages, etc.
But, it is quite important to remember that you are also developing a relationship of trust with your valuable patients. You don’t foster a relationship by slamming advertising materials and brochures down their throats. You can only do this by creating engaging content that is helpful, educational, and attractive for them.
If you are running a healthcare business, you have a broad skill-set and wealth of knowledge for your hospital’s potential patients. This is amazing for impressing a board but not necessarily what your potential patients will be searching for. Your medical knowledge will more than likely be above your potential customers’ heads. Basically, your potential patients won’t ask similar questions you would ask.
Now the question here is …What will your potential patients ask? Those simple and generally irritating questions you answer twenty times a day…Those questions that you can already see coming before the person opens their mouth, just by the way they look at you. Yes, the questions that, towards the end of the day, start making your blood boil. Those are the particular questions you will want to write informative content around.
Effective content marketing takes time. Don’t expect your single engaging blog post to double your website traffic overnight, even if it is a helpful blog post. Your content work will only convert as many patients as your website allows.
You wouldn’t need information about serious infections if you thought you are required to visit an orthopedic surgeon for a fracture, right? In a similar way, you will need to break your content down into parts.
It is essential to plan out content particularly for your hospital’s individual departments, based on particular search queries relevant to each medical department.
Advertise Your Healthcare facility locally with Google My Business
Healthcare facility with a complete Google My Business profile will have better and expected results, locally, as compared to a healthcare facility that doesn’t. Google My Business is a superb platform that allows business owners to control their own Google listings.
For beginners, you should fill out as much information as you can about your healthcare facility on Google My Business.
Then, you will need to make monthly relevant posts on Google My Business to show Google that your profile is updated and that you take care about maintaining your relationships with potential patients.
Each general physician employed at your healthcare facility needs their own Google business listing. Because, as you are well aware, patients don’t come for the healthcare center. They come for experienced and trained physicians.
When your potential patient Googles any particular physician, they will see a Google listing. Individual Google business listings will give the user all of the relevant and precise information they need to make an appointment. This is a win situation for your highly trained physician and a win for your healthcare facility.
Social Media Marketing for Healthcare Facilities
Every business, including healthcare centres should have a solid social media presence that supports all points of your advertising strategy. The majority of your existing patients and potential patients spend a lot of time on sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
You don’t need to find your potential patients. There you just need to meet them. Social media platforms are the places where you can engage with them and build your brand name.
Take benefit of free outlets where you can connect with past and future patients by giving general healthcare advice, excellent customer support, and creating brand awareness. These engaging platforms may also help you find your partnerships.
As a healthcare facility marketer, you are well aware that privacy is and always will be a legal concern. But, the majority of social media platforms provide the benefits and data security required to use as a powerful healthcare facility marketing tool.
Online Video Marketing
Video marketing should be an important aspect of your overall healthcare advertising strategy. Healthcare is a customized, patient-driven industry. Videos allow healthcare facilities to showcase their highly experienced staff and facilities in a unique way, as well as share patient success stories. Healthcare facilities show the image of the care experience in action.
Video marketing can also mitigate the intimidation few patients may feel when they face the prospect of visiting a healthcare facility.
PPC
If your healthcare facility is not doing search engine marketing, also known as healthcare PPC marketing, on the major search engine – Google, what kind of efforts you are doing?
Running relevant ads on Google ensures that the moment a potential patient searches for something relevant to your healthcare business, you can provide the proper listing to the appropriate page on your hospital’s website.
For your hospital’s search engine marketing campaign, it is essential to have a complete set of conversion and ROI tracking setup for your campaign, including but not limited to phone calls from google ads, online form submission, schedule an appointment and the cost per patient acquisition.
Similar to how each medical department should have its own relevant content, they should also have their own specific search ad campaigns. These particular campaigns will point to particular web pages on your healthcare facility’s website. And, if your potential patient is searching on his mobile device, he/she will have all of the required tools they need to drive right to your specific location. This is only if your website is mobile-friendly.
Designing a Mobile-Friendly Healthcare Website
You already know that your healthcare business website should be well-designed and maintained. If you know that it’s not, you should hire a professional for Healthcare Web Development services.
Your hospital’s website must be mobile-friendly. If you don’t have a mobile-friendly and responsive website of your facility, then you need to begin there.
Responsive websites are quite common for retail and other direct-to-consumer industries, but many healthcare facilities have yet to develop mobile-responsive websites.
Your potential patients search for relevant information via a mobile device over half the time. Even if they didn’t, Google judges your website by its ability to be helpful on mobile devices.
Google has an index that ranks search engine results based on the quality of its mobile interface. This is applicable for searches that happen on desktops. If you have a fast, mobile-friendly website, you will rank higher in Google’s search engine results.
A well-designed, mobile-friendly, or responsive website, is one that is quite easy to view on screens and devices of all sizes. Your healthcare facility’s website needs a proper design that will align text and images according to the screen size the user is searching on.
Just think about the last time you have done a Google search on your mobile device. If you clicked on a website where the text was very small and hard to read, or the web images didn’t align properly, you probably clicked off almost immediately. This is the case with your potential patients. They don’t want to spend time zooming in and out to read proper information about your facility.
Attracting new patients is one of your healthcare marketing goals. However, getting new patients for your facility may cost you more as compared to what they will pay to you.
powerful SEO tactics, you can minimize the overall marketing budget because digital marketing strategies are less expensive than other forms of marketing. This means that you can bring in new patients much faster and for less budget.
Being at the top of search engine result pages puts your business name in front of your potential patients. Google is the major search engine, so it is a solid platform when your healthcare business appears at the top of the search engines. People trust Google, and as a result, they trust your hospital when it appears at the top of search results.
Healthcare SEO rewards your hospital at a higher rate than other forms of marketing strategies. This is so as SEO is an inbound advertising technique and allows you to advertise to qualified leads who are looking for quality products and services similar to yours.
In order to convey your marketing message to your target market, all you have to do is be online when they are looking for reliable and professional hospitals like yours. In fact, you do not need to convince your target audience to try your services. The only important message you need to convey is that you are the perfect healthcare facility for them to connect for their treatment.
Final Thoughts
By properly implementing SEO strategies, medical practitioners can significantly enhance lead quality, build healthy relationships with their patients, improve online reputation through solid online presence and better understand their target market. Ensure quality patient care with healthcare facility marketing. Our healthcare SEO professionals help healthcare facility attract new patients. Call today! to know more about our healthcare SEO.
