Healthcare organizations and hospitals are facing stiff competition. Patients have started to shop around and even become thrifty to save money and will still receive top-notch care. Years ago, patients would often visit the closest hospital or medical practice, but now it’s not about distance but value and the level of care. To compete, healthcare organizations and hospitals have to step up their online marketing to reach more would-be patients and their families. They need to pull in new patients while also appealing to those who will return for medical services shortly. Hiring a skilled digital marketing agency is often the first step towards success.
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Importance of Healthcare Digital Marketing
Healthcare has undergone a metamorphosis in recent years. It has become a big business that requires a brand identity, so the hospital or practice stays at the forefront of people’s minds. People now switch healthcare providers frequently because of relocation, dissatisfaction (especially with wait times, high costs, and healthcare insurance changes. There is no guarantee that a hospital or clinic can maintain its patient volume without successful marketing strategies.
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Healthcare Marketing Tips
It is better to focus on a marketing strategy immediately instead of waiting until your patient load starts to fall. Successful healthcare marketing is an investment for everyone involved. You can hire outside marketing help or tailor your in-house team. There is no time like the present to grow your patient volume with healthcare marketing ideas.
1. Focus on Branding
Many private practices and hospitals will argue that they are not a ‘brand’ business like Nike or Apple. However, they could not be more wrong. Healthcare is very much a ‘brand’ business (at least the successful ones are). You do not want to just be your typical medical practice or hospital. There has to be something that makes you stand out from the rest and that is solid brand identity. Have a meeting with your staff to discuss what your hospital or clinic is all about. What message are you trying to convey to patients and their families? Do you offer a spa-like medical center? Do you focus on a particular type of care or niche? Once you have an idea of your identity, then you can start to develop your brand.
Here are a few tips on creating a brand for your medical practice or hospital.
- Unique Value Proposition (UVP): Give your patient’s a reason to choose your services over your competition by identifying your UVP. What gives you an edge and sets you apart? Analyze your positive attributes within your practice or hospital so you can focus on them and promote each one to your patients.
- Define Target Market: Are you appealing to families? Women’s health? Children? The elderly? You’ll want to create a branding strategy that targets your demographic and their unique healthcare needs.
- Visual Branding: Yes, a logo and tagline matter! They should convey a feeling when your patient sees them. Your patients should automatically recognize your logo when they come into the hospital or office. Use your logo on your website, brochures, business cards, advertisements, and more.
- Solidify Your Online Presence: You’ll need to create a consistent tone of voice to portray your medical practice or hospital. To develop a tone, leverage social media platforms and truly interact with your patients. Share helpful advice, interesting articles, and tips. You want to show that your practice or hospital is an industry leader. You’ll weave text and visuals online and on our website.
- Monitor Your Patient’s Experience: Repeatedly ask your patients to fill out a form showing how they feel about the level of care and service they received. You need to listen to how your patients feel.
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2. Mobile-Friendly Responsive Websites
Yes, website design is extremely important, but so is website response. People have a notoriously short attention span. They do not want to wait around for a website to load, or they will navigate away and find another site that brings faster satisfaction. Not only does the website need to load quickly, but it also needs to be available not only on a computer but also smartphone compatible. Most studies have shown that the typical user will spend only five seconds waiting for a website to load, and if it does not load properly in that time frame, then they will navigate away from the site. Your website speeds will give you an advantage if they are faster than your competitor’s within your localized healthcare neighborhood or when categorized within your medical services niche.
Nowadays, everyone uses their smartphone to access local listings, so the website has to adjust its size and specs to also tailor to the smartphone user. In 2020, Google even started to index healthcare websites by mobile-first. Nowadays, the search engines put mobile-friendly websites first on the search results, so if you want your hospital or healthcare practice’s website to score the first page on a Google search, it must be mobile-friendly.
3. Online Presence and Website Design
Patients are getting hard to impress. Nowadays, you need to build on an online presence for your hospital or practice. The patient needs to visit an impressive website loaded with all of the information, such as FAQs that they are seeking. In addition, a strong social media presence on Facebook and Instagram also helps solidify the patient experience and your brand’s identity.
Nowadays, the majority of people start their search for a doctor or hospital online. They look at local listings which take them to the various websites. When the would-be patient lands on the website, they spend about 5 to 10 seconds evaluating whether to click away from the site or continue exploring, so they have to be impressed to remain. One of the most important marketing tips is website design. The website not only needs to look good and also provide a good patient experience. It should offer easy navigation, important information, and a way to quickly contact the clinic or hospital. With GoMarketing’s Healthcare website design services, you can overhaul your site’s look, feel, user experience, and user interface to encourage more conversions.
4. Social Media Role
Social media has changed the way businesses and It has also become a primary means for hospital and healthcare providers. A well-reputed, nationwide Healthcare Digital Marketing Agency, GoMarketing offers a wide range of social media marketing strategies to healthcare and medical providers like you. Our Healthcare Social media Marketing services include:
- 1. Keep Your Followers Updated
- 2. Highlight Organization’s Achievements
- 3. Leverage User-Generated Content
- 4. Maintain Your Brand Voice
- 5. Pick the Right Network
Social media marketing allows healthcare and medical practitioners to target their desired demographics, such as age group, areas, and much more. Just choose the correct forum where your audience is present, and you are all set to march.
5. Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is an impressive and powerful tool to add to your marketing strategy. As mentioned in the mobile-friendly section of this article, you want your website to rank first on a Google search. Yes, making sure your website loads quickly and is mobile-friendly will help push your site to the top of the list during a Google search, but there is another key factor that you should not ignore. Healthcare SEO uses keywords on your website to grab Google’s attention and rank your website. You want to make sure your hospital or medical practice ranks well in any healthcare search, especially localized search results.
SEO is about a lot more than simply adding keywords to your website. It is also about using those keywords to create true readability. Google knows if a website reads well or is a mixed-up jumble of words that do not flow correctly.
Your website should not only include information on your practice/hospital, staff bios, location, and services but also offer important information to the breeder, such as blogs that focus on healthcare tips, an FAQ page, and other practical medical tips that a reader might find useful. Your website should truly build authority in the medical industry through the use of SEO, web design, speed, user/mobile-friendliness, and information.
Using long-term content that is relevant and helpful will also increase the number of time visitors spend on your website, which lowers the website’s bounce rate. Bounce rate is how quickly a visitor lands on your webpage and navigates away. Websites with a high bounce rate will rank poorly on Google because the search engine will view the site as not being helpful enough.
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Go Marketing is a Healthcare digital marketing agency that specializes in online marketing tips for healthcare organizations and hospitals. Contact us or call us at 805-413-7893 today to learn more.
