Going digital is the obvious choice for healthcare brands wishing to reach their target audience. Our research shows that 80% of people do a search for their symptoms before getting in touch with a healthcare practitioner.
Be it for doctors, hospitals, healthcare networks, or clinics, digital marketing can bring patients closer to these enterprises that care about the health of their patients.
The healthcare industry is competitive, and patients frequently change their healthcare providers according to their needs. With all the options out there and the sheer number of healthcare brands, people no longer just choose the healthcare business that’s closest to them.
The healthcare industry, just like any other, requires lead marketing. Digital marketing is the best to go about it, as patients are known to do google searches and read articles about their health-related complications online.
Here’s how you can make your healthcare brand a stronger force online.
• Be consistent about branding
Have you ever compromised on your patients well being? So why should you compromise on your brand? Do regular brand-related activities to straighten your brand online. Try and position your brand as a market leader in the healthcare domain. Show your patients that you spare nothing in the process of caring for their health.
• Keep track of a patient’s journey
People with chronic illnesses go through a patient journey that can be mapped by studying their online behavior.
- Awareness Stage – The patient analyses their own symptoms then researches the potential health conditions they may have online. They use the digital medium to look up treatments for the same. They may even reach out to various communities around them to get help.
- Consideration Stage – At this stage patients go online to discover more about their condition or disease. At this point they may start narrowing down their choices for healthcare providers based upon facilities, fees, customer testimonials etc.
- Help Stage – The patient gets in contact with a health system for the first time, it could be via call, chat, email, mobile or direct walk-in.
- Care Stage – The patient is evaluated at a medicinal facility (clinic, hospital, etc.)
- Treatment Stage – The medical facility presents the patient with both on-site and follow-up care (dosage instructions, therapy, counseling, or recommended lifestyle changes). The patient does an active search using digital to find supplementary treatment alongside the medical treatment.
- Post-treatment care – The patient follows some changes in the daily lifestyle and takes an active part in proactive healing to reduce re-treatment or to promote healthy wellbeing.
• Target your patients online
SEO and social media marketing give you the ability to target prospects based on their health interests, searches, age, and preferences. Targeting is a powerful tool that can attract customers to your healthcare center. You can bid for keywords that have high intent in google searches, and rank your brand on the first page of search results.
• Optimize your website
In the paragraph above we talked about ways that you can get your brand to be on the top of search results. However, an organic way to do this is to build an optimized website that has the necessary keywords that rank highly on google. You can rely on website experts like us to create an optimized site that has words and backlinks that google looks for in a quality website.
• Pay-per-click advertisements
PPC advertisements as they are sometimes referred to are ads that are on the top of the search page. You only have to pay for the ads that prospects click on. You can use a mix of social media and google search ads as mentioned above, in the right combination to get the most results out of your marketing budget.
• Pick up leads on Social media
People spend a considerable amount of time every day on social media. This is a bonus for you as social media sites collect a huge amount of data from their users. You can sieve through this data to find a target audience based on their geographical location, personal interests, age, page preferences, groups, and search results. Social media is a powerful tool for collecting leads, and these can enter your sales pipeline to be processed for further contact.
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nice post ,helpful content.