Digital Marketing for Healthcare: Top 6 Strategies for Online Success

According to the American Hospital Association, there are 6120 medical facilities in the United States. It is no surprise that you see so many hospitals in your vicinity competing with you. If you want your competitors to bite the dust, digital marketing for healthcare industry is the solution.

It denotes an array of digital marketing strategies that helps you with patient acquisition & retention, revenue generation and customer engagement for better conversion. Although healthcare marketing through digital channels might pinch your pocket at first, the returns are immense if you apply the right strategies.

What is Digital Marketing for Healthcare?

Digital marketing for healthcare is the process of leveraging online marketing verticals for the purpose of virtual promotion of healthcare units. It is a wide avenue that channels several strategies, like search engine optimization, PPC advertising, email marketing, content marketing, online reputation management, etc., to augment visibility. 

An upbeat healthcare marketing that makes use of all the right strategies can help a medical unit gain better traction on the organic search results. Besides this, it garners more click through rate and establishes it as a trusted name in the healthcare industry. 

5 Benefits of Digital Marketing for Healthcare Services

Healthcare marketing has become one of the primary things that Hospitals, urgent care centers and clinics need to survive. Let us walk you through some of the basic reasons why you should invest in healthcare digital marketing:

1. Elevates Patient Awareness

Every channel of digital marketing helps you increase patient reach. Whether you are using a basic marketing strategy like SEO, or an advanced marketing channel like PPC for doctors, it helps in creating brand awareness at every stage. It bolsters the online presence of your healthcare unit, making it more discoverable for patients searching for such services.

2. Fosters Relationship with New & Potential Patients 

Strategies like Social media marketing, email marketing, and online reputation management focus on creating a concrete relationship between medical practitioners and patients. These bridge the gap and bring both parties into close virtual proximity.

3. Helps Beat Competition

Superb online marketing strategies can help you get an edge over competitors who are still using basic techniques. As digital marketing publicizes your practices on several fronts, it makes it easier for healthcare organizations to use these strategies to get higher visibility, more patient acquisition, and a better reputation in the healthcare industry over healthcare brands that are not using internet marketing.

4. Reduce Patient Acquisition Cost

Digital marketing strategies are relatively more cost-effective as compared to traditional marketing. Marketing strategies like TV adverts and flyers cost more than digital marketing methods. With the latter, you would be able to get more patients at a lower price point spent on marketing.

5. Make Informed & Smart Campaigning Decisions

A thorough campaign that involves the use of analytics tools offers smart insights into the current campaign. It shows the ROAS, patient engagement rate, acquisition figure, and conversions. Through these insights, healthcare marketers can make informed choices and tweak their campaign according to necessity.

6 Powerful Strategies on Digital Marketing for Healthcare Units

You might have a hospital, an urgent care medical facility or a privately owned clinic, it would only get success if you market it well. Because a healthcare unit is no use to you if there are no patents.

Hence we are here to elucidate some of the best digital marketing strategies for healthcare marketers who are starting the journey by themselves.

1. Search Engine Optimization helps Drive Organic Traffic

SEO for healthcare means implementing standardized practices on websites to drive more organic traffic. It focuses on building up both the quality and quantity of website traffic to bolster the business revenue growth through better placements in the organic search rankings.

Search engine optimization is one of the most useful techniques, when it comes to digital marketing for healthcare. This is because 68% of all online experiences begin with search engines!

Hence, healthcare marketers should keep up with SEO for medical websites. Devising separate landing pages for each medical service type helps website visitors navigate to the resources they are looking for. SEO strategies like blog posts assist in driving organic traffic by causing traction on the search results. This potential to attract more patients should keep you hopeful and optimistic. 

Try doing thorough keyword research beforehand to get your hands on a few keywords that help you build informative content. Use keyword research tools if you need to. Shelling out some bucks on these tools can give you extra mileage in patient acquisition. These tools give you a comprehensive idea of what prospects are searching for. 

Remember, SEO is a long-term process. You will need some time in hand to optimize website content with keywords naturally. However, avoid over-optimization at all costs. It accounts for black hat SEO practices and can be potentially disconcerting for your website. 

Healthcare practitioners should always look forward to enhancing the user experience. Engaging in SEO practices such as page speed optimization, getting an SSL certificate,  and fixing broken links can render your website more attractive to potential patients. Hence, ensure you follow through. 

Checklist on SEO for Healthcare

• Look for valuable keywords 
• Create relevant website content using keywords 
• Implement top notch technical SEO for the sake of user experience 
• Use H Tags to structure the content 
• Infuse keywords in the URLs

2. Paid Search Engine Advertising 

Paid search engine advertising means running paid ads in various search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing. It can be of various forms. When it comes to Google Ads for health, there are four basic payment systems: Pay-per-click, pay-per-lead, pay-per-impression, and pay-per-sale.

For healthcare digital marketing the former three garners better results, whereas the PPS type of Google ads is best reserved for other industries.

Paid advertising can have immense benefits for webmasters of medical websites. However, for that to happen, you need to be on your A-game as far as paid advertising for medical care facilities is concerned. 

Major search engines like Google, Yahoo and Bing allow digital marketing for healthcare through paid advertising.  

For instance, Google has nine types of paid ads. However, the most suitable ones for medical websites are search ads, display ads, and local service ads. 

While the former two can have an international reach, local service ads limit your healthcare marketing to the immediate geographical area of your practice. 

Don’t take it to be a disadvantage.  In fact, LSAs are the most vital when  you want better patient footfall in your clinic as these have terrific local reach. Let’s  be honest, for most doctors, their bread and butter relies on the appointment calls by locals in and around the location of their clinics or hospitals.  

Local search ads can land you in the Local 3 Pack, which ranks right above the organic results of local! It is one of the mightiest ways to attract local patients. 

However, there are various conditions you need to meet to qualify for local search. Apart from license and insurance verification,  you also need to have a GMB account. 

If you are new at optimizing Paid ads for doctors, try the Google performance max ads. These are versatile advertisements. The Performance Max Ads uses Google AI to lay the foundation of a sound card campaign for your healthcare unit. 

Checklist for Launching a Paid Ads Campaign for Healthcare Units 

• Choose the type of advertising you want to launch 
• Search for keywords and bid on them 
• Create a compelling ad copy that resonates with the target audience
• Link the ad copy to the relevant landing page (and not the main page)
• Set a budget capping to have control over ad spend

3. Knock on the Patient’s Inbox with Email Marketing 

Email marketing is one of the most widely used channels when it comes to digital marketing for healthcare. Email marketing in the healthcare industry is a highly personalized approach. It means sending out emails to current and future patients addressing individual concerns so that they visit the healthcare facility.

An added advantage to email marketing is its personal approach (although balance is the key here). You can approach the target audience by directly reaching into their personal inbox. All that remains in the way of your healthcare marketing success is crafting an email that spikes patient engagement. It should get on the right foot with the target audience by addressing their pain points. 

The best emails for healthcare marketing should have a personal note while keeping a professional tone. Remember to keep it precise. The email should not take more than a minute of your prospect’s time. Longer emails come across as tedious, making the audience abandon it midway.

Suppose you are a dentist interested in doing dental marketing. You first have to create a patient base that is actually looking for dentists. Also, make a list of patients who are probably seeing your competitors. The content of the email should be different for the two lists. For the first, you need to allure them by stating generic advantages of visiting your dental facility. For the latter, you need to cite your USPs to gain an edge over your competitors.

However, do take care of HIPAA compliance. The Health Insurance Policy and Accountability Act restricts the email content you can send to patients. As a doctor, you are likely to be well aware of the HIPAA guidelines on patient privacy. If you think that you might miss a thing or two, there is always a solution in the form of a good digital marketing company for healthcare services.

Email Marketing Checklist for the Healthcare Sector

• Create an email list for patients looking for dental services
• Craft several email versions to send to different sectors of target patients
• Keep the email relevant and concise
• Adhere to HIPAA compliance policy

4. Effective Content Marketing Strategy Speaks to Patients

An effective content marketing can make or break the whole digital strategy. It is the content that has the power to drive traffic to your website or to repel them. Content marketing for healthcare services means creating and publishing informative materials like blogs, videos, images and infographics to pique the interest of the readers and attract them towards the medical services,

Content marketing for healthcare denotes crafting relevant content concerning the pain points of the audience and attempts to offer solutions for the same. Healthcare marketers can start with creating a simple blog section, ad copies, and eBooks.

However, these are not limited to these alone. Research says that 90% of information that registers in the brain comes via visual and auditory channels. Doctors can engage in creating content on social media, podcasts and webinars.

The sole aim of healthcare providers during content marketing should be to connect with the target audience in this aspect. Healthcare consumers tend to search for professionals who understand what concerns them. Once you hit the sweet spot, consider yourself golden.

Successful healthcare content marketing would get new patients, more online appointments, and queries regarding your services, as well as popularize your name in the medical industry.

Content Marketing Strategy Checklist

• Craft content for ocular, visual and auditory senses
• The content should resonate with the audience
• Leverage both organic and paid content marketing channels

5. Harness the Power of Social Media Channels

Social media optimization and marketing for the healthcare industry denotes all the efforts that healthcare marketers make to promote their hospitals, medical facilities or private clinics on social media. With social media, you can take a two-fold strategy.

The first is SMO, which is great for better organic traffic to your website; the other is SMM or social media marketing. This vertical promotes your healthcare facility through social media advertising.

As a doctor if you want to leverage the power of social media, you have to begin with the basics. Start with opening an account on every major social platform. Now upload images of your chamber or clinic. Kickstarting and engaging with potential patients in the comment box is another great way to go. It fosters better doctor-patient relationships.

However, if you want a better pique in online discoverability, we highly recommend taking advantage of social media advertising like Meta ads and YouTube Ads.

Ads on social media networks work much like Google ads. However, they are most cost effective. It makes social media advertising a superb channel for healthcare facilities that want to engage in paid advertising yet do not have an exorbitant budget to run search ads.

6. Online Reputation Management 

Online reputation for healthcare business refers to all the acts that are directed towards establishing the brand in a positive light. ORM can have various channels like public relations & networking, prospective patient engagement and mitigation of negative reviews through addressing patient concerns.

The reputation of a healthcare facility is a crucial digital marketing strategy that can render new heights to your healthcare brand. Generally, while getting treatment, people consider the expense as a secondary factor.

So, hiring the best doctors in the country might not suffice. You also have to promote their names through multifarious channels to attract new patients into the medical facility, which translates to better revenue growth. Starting with a brand name audit is perhaps the right way. You can follow up with patient outreach. Marketing user-generated content on several digital platforms is another terrific way to go.

Hence, it is important to establish yourself as a brand and online reputation management is crucial. ORM in the healthcare industry is primarily the act of getting the medical practice in front of the target audience. It is a double-edged sword that helps you understand the negative experience that your patients might have encountered and mitigate the matter at the same time.

Checklist for Healthcare Online Reputation Management

• Do a brand reputation audit
• Claim positive brand mentions
• Leverage user-generated content
• maintain a professional tone throughout the marketing process
• Claim positive mentions of your healthcare brand

FAQs

Conclusion 

Digital marketing for healthcare is not a very tough zone to wade through if you know the tricks. With some knowledge of healthcare and digital marketing, you can create a formidable strategy that is tough to beat. Digital marketing strategies like SEO and online reputation management should always be there in the mix of your digital marketing campaigns. However, strategies like PPC and email marketing strategy should be applied after some consideration.

However, as digital marketing is a dynamic strategy, it requires constant efforts and monitoring. Try using a digital marketing tool, such as SEMrush, for the purpose. If you want to focus on your core healthcare business, then it is perhaps better to leave the task of a professional digital marketing company for healthcare.

Additional Resources:

• Advanced Lead Generation Strategies for Doctors and Healthcare Providers
• 12 Medical Clinic Marketing Strategies to Attract More Patients
• 6 Urgent Care Digital Marketing Strategies & Tips for Beginners
• PPC for Doctors: The Ultimate Guide to Generating Online Leads
• SEO for Doctors Made Easy: Effective SEO Tips to Get First Page Rankings