A healthcare marketing agency is essential for all healthcare facilities and professionals who want to keep up with the digital transformation that has affected the medical field. In a world where more and more people use the internet to make choices about their health, the web’s presence is becoming increasingly important.
An old saying goes, “Change three habits a year, and you will get phenomenal results,” and in a healthcare marketing agency, each year brings with it numerous changes, new priorities, and new trends. This year has brought big updates for medical marketing strategies: hospitals, clinics, and health professionals will have to keep up with the needs of patients and the competition’s progress. Therefore, every year it is essential to retrain with all the tools and strategies designed for the health sector.
This article offers tips for developing a healthcare marketing agency to improve your digital system.
Create an effective website
Users visit websites to find the information they are looking for quickly. Therefore, the website often constitutes the support base for every web marketing agency: it must be clear, simple, and intuitive. In addition, it must arouse interest and inspire trust in the user and guide him in the choice he has to make. In the case of a healthcare website design for the health sector, the user experience is much more important, for example, than the graphic layout.
The blog of the site can be used in many different ways. For example, it can be used to report testimonies relating to health problems or therapy paths that other people have already experienced in the past. In this way, those who find themselves – or will find themselves in the future – in the same situation will have more knowledge and awareness of the problem, also finding a sort of support between the lines.
Keep the website updated with the latest trends
Online health communication channels should always keep up with updates from Google and the various search engines. In addition, the homepage must reflect the solidity of the company and the professionalism of your person. Using a clear message to attract your patients can be a good practice, as well as caring for every aesthetic detail of the website.
In this way, you can get more visibility, but Google has also updated its algorithms now consider considerably:
- competence of a website;
- site authority;
- reliability of the information.
This update has affected many websites, even in the healthcare world. Notably, the 2018 update received the ‘Medic’ update name due to its influence on healthcare website design. Therefore, if you want clients to locate your clinic online, you must optimize your website. Don’t underestimate the importance of the content on your website.
Email Marketing
Newsletters and DEMs allow you to offer people content without searching for it. Therefore, sending newsletters to users’ inboxes at least once a month can incentivize them to stay updated and informed about advice applicable to their case.
Customizing the messages and target segmentation is important for an effective email marketing agency. This way, targeted emails will be sent to an audience interested in the subject matter.
Personalized newsletters to build patient loyalty
Personalizing newsletters, called mail merge, is a common practice in email marketing. The customer, more than multiple ones, appreciates individual messages, so having a personalization system for your emails can give a greater sense of trust and closeness to the patient.
Personalized emails will be the most intelligent advertising method because patients will always be able to let patients know the news of the work and their research, maintaining active contact with each of them.
Make Educational Videos
Video making responds to the growing interest from users in interesting and inspiring visual content. According to Wordstream, users dedicate at least one-third of their internet activity to watching videos: it is, therefore, important to create visual content, arousing interest and giving greater legitimacy to the source of information.
A good example is Cleveland Clinic which makes videos in which doctors discuss health issues related to their area of expertise and suggest treatment paths. The video also gives the patient a greater sense of reality and concreteness than reading articles.
Video in a healthcare marketing agency
The statistics confirm the incredible importance of videos in a health marketing agency. In the age of the image, having videos on your landing page can boost your brand views by up to 80%. In addition, videos are easy to share on social media and have a strong emotional impact on the customer, which is why most experts agree that video marketing is the future.
The preference for video content has also extended to big brands, to the point that 54% of consumers say they want to see more videos from their trusted brands.
A further reason for introducing video into your healthcare marketing agency is that users pay more attention to video content than written text. It seems that, if in the written text, the patient usually skips a few lines, in the video, the concentration on what is shown is exponentially greater.
Pay attention to SEO
Optimizing a site in an SEO key is essential to be found by your audience. SEO tries to improve the visibility of a website or a web page to climb the heights of the SERP, that is, of the pages indexed by Google when searching.
Optimizing the website for search engines (SEO) allows the pool of users who contact the published content to expand and increase their business. The healthcare SEO services activity must use specific keywords to stand out among competitors, identifiable through tools such as SEMrush or HubSpot.
It would help if you used these tools to find the keywords that are right for you, considering the difficulty score (the lower, the better) and the search volume, which must be high. The main keyword will then be inserted in the contents, in the title, in the meta description, in the URL, and placed several times (moderately) within the article to optimize the page around the keyword.
Do you want your site to be among the top Google results? Then, start thinking about investing in improving your SEO. Health marketing professionals can optimize your content and web page to the fullest.
Also, use social media
With the advent of web 2.0, how users learn their information and use the internet has changed. In addition to reading blogs, much of people’s activity is focused on social media.
Social media is a powerful tool for understanding the needs and interests of the public. The use of social media is now widespread in all age groups.
Therefore, it will be essential to be present on these platforms and understand what interests the customer, giving the right information on multiple channels. Today, using Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in the medical field is already a daily reality. Therefore, we cannot exempt ourselves from being present on these to implement a healthcare marketing agency successfully.
According to the Infographics Archive, 60% of users trust more than one social media post (related to doctors’ activity) rather than reading from other sources. It is, therefore, necessary that the posts are of quality to better inform their audience; the agency also, in this case, could be to schedule the publication of posts that provide the right quantity and an important variety.
For example, Cedars-Sinai Medical Center uses social media by publishing the most varied content, even less technical and more stimulating and friendly, giving relevance to the events.
Another advice is to link the website address to the social pages to send users back to the site, increasing visits and allowing a deeper knowledge of the organization.
To conclude, a solid healthcare marketing agency is efficient when you combine different to reach more users and increase the flow around your activities. There are many fronts on which to focus your commitment: for this reason, the advice could be to connect the elements through a platform for content management, such as HubSpot, to monitor your progress and results.
Think of a data-driven healthcare marketing plan
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are fundamental for understanding a company’s growth. One must start from the data to invest in a targeted way in health marketing and increase patients.
All marketing channels must be developed and updated to refine a winning agency, but this practice requires time and, above all, the desire to get involved. Google Analytics can help track visitors to your site and have important statistics about visitor searches. One piece of advice is to set a marketing goal for the new year based on the data from the previous year and thus calculate the time and budget needed to carry it out.
Big Data is increasing. Let’s learn how to exploit it!
The era of the electronic medical record has now come. The advantages of this new system are not few for medical marketing. Patient data is now easier to analyze to define targeted marketing models and strategies. There are already many studies of professionals who have begun to interrogate their patients’ data using the now consolidated system of the digital file.
Even Amazon did not hesitate to seize the ball, giving life to Amazon EMR, a Big Data platform that allows you to quickly process large amounts of data. For example, analyzing the information available on patients will make it possible to understand a lot about the average target, allowing you to make marketing choices appropriate to the brand.
The health marketing strategies of the competition
The continuous evolution of healthcare marketing has led to unprecedented competition in the medical sector. Therefore, competitive auditing or monitoring competitors’ social profiles become fundamental in a well-planned marketing agency. Monitoring the competition will also make it possible not to overlook any news in the medical marketing field. It is, in fact, a sector that continues to evolve and which continually reserves new surprises.
Relying on expert hands could be a quick solution to grow your business, but throwing a private eye on the profiles of other professionals can also give useful suggestions.
Invest the right budget in the agency
A reasonable budget to invest in your marketing agency means considering multiple factors. Certainly, the more time and money you spend on a healthcare marketing project, the greater the result.
To build a solid and lasting web image, it will be necessary to consider a long-term investment, which can give satisfaction and patience for some time. Worldwide spending in this sector nearly doubled from 1997 to 2016, rising to at least $ 30 billion annually.
Showcase medical professionalism
The image is the first business card in any marketing agency. You can advertise your findings and work through as many channels as possible. Youtube, Facebook, and Linkedin must constantly be updated with their work. Personal care and showing oneself to the public should not be underestimated: body language also plays an important role in customer perception.
Bonus tip: Keep up to date with the best messaging apps
It’s hard to ignore WhatsApp’s popularity in your healthcare marketing agency. The seven-year-old texting and voice calling mobile app now have 500 million monthly active users. In addition, it appears that this messaging system supports around 100 million voice calls daily, making it a real phenomenon in the world of fast messaging apps.
Many professionals, including healthcare professionals, rely on WhatsApp to communicate with their patients. Therefore, it will be essential to make your contact easily available so that more and more patients can contact us instantly.
Interact with patient reviews
The power of your brand lies in what we say about its professionalism, that is, its reputation. Perfecting patient care is certainly a good start, but dealing with negative or positive online reviews is also important. When a patient feels the need to post online feedback, he has certainly been hit positively or negatively.
Dealing with negative comments calmly will also help improve customer relationships. With this system, it is possible to get precise information on what and how to improve customer service.
Healthcare marketing adapts to millennials
Millennials are continually looking for performance at maximum convenience. So let’s forget waiting rooms full of patients and start thinking about forward-looking organization methods.
Making an appointment booking available on your site will guarantee an online service that is now indispensable in health communication. Not only that, now 80% of users surf the net from smartphones. So don’t forget mobile advertising; ensure you are online with contact information, hours, and as many online services as possible.
To read more articles visit here
