At this age of digitalisation, healthcare patients are having more options than before. With lots of information available online, people seeking healthcare no longer feel like visiting the nearest hospital or medical centres nearest to their location. With a drastic decline in footfalls, it has become important to have a planned medical marketing plan to reach new and returning patients.
Even if you are satisfied with your existing patient appointments, healthcare marketing is not possible without a properly planned medical marketing strategy. To determine the right medical marketing plan, you need to determine all the reasons why someone can decide to switch their healthcare providers. Also, maintaining your patient volumes forever is a subjective risk, which no one can guarantee.
Plan your medical marketing strategies
It all goes by the saying that “prevention is always better than cure”. It’s smart to have your medical marketing plan in place than ending up finding your patient CRM database empty. Healthcare/medical marketing is a strategy suitable for doctors, healthcare, hospital networks, healthcare providers, health practitioners and even medical marketing executives. The rapid changes in the medical and healthcare industry require strategy, agility and focus.
At times of need, you can even hire medical marketing companies to help you plan for a higher budget than in the past. But at the end of the day, medical marketing is worth helping the patient volumes grow faster than before!
To help you understand and get along, we have included our top 8 strategies to integrate with a medical/healthcare marketing plan.
- Using a consistent healthcare branding
You can certainly feel confident about the expertise that can set you apart from the other medical service providers, be it doctors or hospitals. But if you look from the perspective of a person seeking medical help, everyone looks similar. To actually differentiate your services from the others you need to specifically focus on the USP of your brand.
What is unique about your healthcare service? There should be at least one factor by which people can establish a connection with your services over the others. Although this might take time to determine which works best for your brand. But gradually, your medical marketing strategy would run smoothly because you learned how properly represent your brand.
- Evaluating the online patient experience
A few years ago, only having a website could impress prospective patients and help them determine your brand identity. But now, websites are the front door of healthcare services. Your dedicated website is the first thing that patients or visitors would notice. And if it is not properly optimized or user friendly that might be the last time where patients would consider your medical centre or healthcare practices worthy.
User-friendliness is an important factor while designing your website. Due to overindulgence in making a website look good, the patient experience is overlooked. This is one big mistake that should be avoided at all costs.
- Building responsive healthcare websites and app builds
A responsive website or app builds are ones that automatically adjusts to the screen size. So the browsing experience remains the same even if the site is accessed from a computer, tablet, smartphone or any other mobile device.
Search engines like Google care about user experience. And it would prioritize anyone who has an optimised site for mobile users. If you have a responsive website or app build, you should check if your website or application content continues to load seamlessly on any mobile device.
- Optimising the patient search engine results
Search engine optimization(SEO) is a powerful tool for helping your healthcare practices or healthcare network to reach the top in search engines. However, it is a lot more complex than what most medical or digital marketing professionals realise.
A huge part of SEO requires/demands the use of the right keywords and phrases for Google to understand your healthcare organization‘s website. So it is important to be sure that you choose the right, proper and relevant healthcare-related keywords and search terms.
- Utilising PPC and display ads for medical marketing
Pay-per-click advertisements are paid advertisements that are specifically made to laser-target and appear at first in a set of search results. With pay-per-click advertising (PPC or paid search), you can properly manage your marketing budget to decide how much you are willing to spend in keeping your website visible. Your return on investment(ROI) is clear and defined by both PPC ads or display ads that appear at the sidebar or on the top of other listed websites.
- Using social media
Many hospitals, medical centres and healthcare practices depend on organic social media for a large section of their medical marketing plan and strategies. Organic social media means posting photos, informational updates, upcoming events and so on, directly to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram or YouTube.
Undoubtedly this can be a working and valid strategy to help build your brand and inform the patients about what’s new. However, the paid form of advertising on social media is the best way to connect to the “right” people who might be looking for your health care, even if they are not yet connected.
- Tracking the marketing strategy
It is extremely important that you continuously monitor how your medical marketing plan is paying off in terms of returns. Based on which your medical marketing budget should be adjusted. Your metrics can help determine what you should focus the next year.
Additionally, you can use a CRM (customer relationship management system) to keep track of how patients react to your campaigns. This can be achieved through emails, call centres, or even targeted landing pages. Apart from these, you can also use Google Analytics to find out what terms you rank or lose. Furthermore, using a HIPAA-compliant call-tracking system can help you gain insight into how your paid advertising campaign is paying off.
- Auditing the response to the medical marketing strategies
We understand that you might have the best medical marketing plan/strategy for your healthcare centre. But if your front desk handling staff cannot properly handle the patient calls, you can end up losing money as well as opportunities. Auditing your healthcare front desk can help reveal any fault within the strategy and execution.
Finally, we conclude!
We firmly believe that no healthcare or medical marketing plan is complete unless you take time to understand, represent your brand and train your staff properly! Strategy comes together when you learn how to properly represent your healthcare brand with the marketing materials.
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Healthcare services are essential to people.
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