Content
Digital Healthcare Marketing: Enhancing Patient Care
March 26, 2024
15 mins
Although the healthcare industry is dynamically evolving, many small-to-medium players still lack efficient digital marketing strategies. While this is partly due to strict HIPAA regulations and marketing restrictions imposed by the FDA, currently only 24% of appointments are being made online.
Therefore, sound integration of 360-degree digital marketing is essential to increase patient engagement and profitability for your healthcare business.
Our new blog post reveals how digital marketing in healthcare contributes to enhanced patient engagement.
Today, Promodo healthcare marketing experts are highlighting the best-fit digital marketing strategies that will help you achieve above-median industry benchmarks.
So far, we are witnessing a gradual transition from traditional ways of communication with patients to digital healthcare marketing.
While 88% of patients schedule healthcare appointments by phone, patients on-call convert 30% higher than on the web. Phone calls are yet 10-15 times more profitable than web leads.
Despite the widespread preference for scheduling appointments over the phone, Promodo marketers will share a bunch of digital marketing strategies that will help you attract and retain more loyal customers.
With a better understanding of patient needs, expectations, behaviors, and individual preferences, you will effectively capitalize on your digital marketing avenues:
🔴 Lower customer acquisition cost
🔴 Reduced marketing budget waste
🔴 Higher conversions.
Healthcare digital marketing is about a plethora of yet unbenefited tech opportunities and innovations capable of improving patient care and easing communication processes.
More and more patients are relying on extensive online research before choosing a healthcare provider or a medical facility. With open access to physician reviews, ratings, and online forums, they are getting in touch with other patients who’ve experienced similar conditions.
Vast digital marketing opportunities have empowered healthcare players with online platforms where they can communicate and promote their services to patients. From 2022 and on, more and more healthcare providers have been increasing their digital marketing budgets to stay in touch with their current and potential patients,
Essentially, digital marketing healthcare enriches healthcare providers with an in-depth understanding of individual patient needs, immediate concerns, and behavioral patterns.
The vast choice of ready-available online analytical tools allows them to track a patient’s path from an online user interested in healthcare services to one’s loyal patient. More to that,
effective digital marketing in healthcare industry results in close-knit patient-and-physician engagement, further retention, and networking.
This is how progressive healthcare providers win more patients at a lower cost and ensure their longer lifetime value.
A vast army of patients prefers online healthcare services given the ease and speed of communication. Getting in touch with specialized healthcare providers in a few clicks is what motivates most prospects to schedule appointments.
The convenience of innovative digital marketing for healthcare industry solutions like voice-activated search, chatbots, and mobile apps has revolutionized the industry by easing the workload for medical facilities and hospitals.
With a patient-centered approach underway, the whole industry is about utter personalization. First off, you should understand essential healthcare needs to be shared by your prospects.
Painting an ideal patient portrait will help you target your audience both organically and through paid digital marketing channels. Given the high sensitivity of the subject matter, in most cases, patients are seeking personalized treatment from the medical facilities they can fully rely on.
By exploring your ideal patient through years of hands-on medical practice, you’ll know how to best resonate with your immediate patient needs especially in case of emergencies.
A deeper exploration of patient behaviors online will help you spot the most effective traffic channels and better manage your marketing budget:
🔴 87% of patients who discover healthcare providers online proceed to schedule appointments.
🔴 72% of patients rely on online reviews when seeking a new doctor.
🔴 60% of patients refer to online reviews when selecting a medical treatment facility.
🔴 52% of patients place trust in online healthcare reviews equivalent to that of recommendations from friends or family.
🔴 44% of patients who research healthcare facilities on their mobile devices are scheduling appointments.
Search engines are driving 30% more visitors to hospital websites than other sources.
The deployment of the best search engine optimization (SEO) practices will boost your online performance:
🔴 Increased web traffic
🔴 Quality, value-driven content
🔴 Brand authority
🔴 Patient credibility
🔴 More local searches
🔴 Higher competitive positions
🔴 Advanced return on your investment.
Search engine analytics tools help healthcare marketers optimize organic content. In this vein, our SEO techniques entail:
Hot Tip: Aligning the healthcare content on your website with popular user queries is the best-fit advice to drive more organic traffic. The same concerns patient queries coming from voice-activated searches.
Not less important is the prioritization of mobile searches which constitute above 50% of all web traffic in healthcare. So, make sure your website is:
Paid Search Ads make the difference as they convert at 2.6% in the healthcare industry. This is higher compared to display ads and social media ads. This explains why top healthcare players spend about $50,000 a month on paid search advertising.
Precisely, Google Search Ads will help you reach highly targeted patients who are actively searching for healthcare and wellness offerings online. Paid ads on Google will help you:
🔴 Enhance your online visibility
🔴 Reach potential patients when they need you most
🔴 Drive more traffic to your website.
Your strategic paid advertising milestone here is to attain a sound lead conversion rate (LCR). This is about how many potential patients who clicked on your Google search ads have scheduled an appointment at your healthcare facility. With that, you’ll know:
🔴 The number of users who have converted directly from the ad through the click-to-call
🔴 The number of users who have converted from the landing page linked to your ad
🔴 The number of users who have visited your website after viewing the ad.
At Promodo, we help clients increase the efficiency of their ad campaigns with Performance Max and pay-per-click (PPC) automation services. We are deploying machine learning algorithms to optimize your ad budget and enhance targeting.
Today’s patients eagerly resonate with video marketing. The empowerment of healthcare landing pages with video clips holds a conversion growth capacity of more than 80%.
It is crucial to note that the healthcare business is all about a patient-centered approach that assumes an innately individualized aptitude.
Hot Tip: Narrative-rich, informative video clips showcasing your hands-on experience and patient testimonials will ultimately serve you as a game changer. Engaging videos hold the power of sharing real-to-life patient stories with dynamic storytelling and eye-catching visuals. This is how you develop a sense of trust among the new visitors to your healthcare site before scheduling an appointment.
The leverage of medicine-focused videos is your golden opportunity to uncover complex health issues or diseases in simple terms. format. Some of the top industry players use videos to:
Short-form videos and longer formats are worth your investment in 2024 and beyond. This is your chance to stand out from the crowd by avoiding the oversaturation of written medical content.
Hot Tip: By far, there are plenty of competitive top-ranking blog posts about various symptoms like asthma or Alzheimer’s. To stay competitive, leverage dynamic videos to share your first-hand expertise and boost wider communication with your future patients.
Another way to engage with more patients is by leveraging social media networking.
A lion’s share of your prospects concerned about high-quality treatment and wellness are spending much of their daytime online. Social media channels like Facebook and Instagram are perfect spots where people communicate immediate healthcare needs and share personal experiences.
57% of patient decisions on better quality of treatment depend on media connections pursued by a healthcare provider. The wider your social engagement with patients, the more they will trust you.
Your strategic marketing task here is to boost patient reach and engagement.
There’s a vast choice of healthcare social media marketing strategies:
Hot Tip: In line with the organic social media strategy, be sure to invest part of your marketing budget into paid social media advertising to target and reach the patients extremely interested in your healthcare offerings. Paid social campaigns will also help you re-engage existing and potential patients who’ve already visited your website or are looking for healthcare services like yours.
Healthcare organizations must align their digital tracking and data collection practices with HIPAA regulations and the data privacy guidelines mandated by Google Analytics. To prevent violations, strict limitations are imposed on how healthcare marketers should track data in line with personally identifiable information.
To stay competitive in in healthcare industry, continuously track your website performance. Today’s wide digital marketing healthcare industry analytics tools like Google Analytics (GA4) make a world of difference.
Continuous performance tracking will help you make real-time adjustments for your digital marketing campaigns. With that, actual numbers will lead you to informed decisions and campaign optimizations from planning to implementation.
For the most effect, be sure to regularly check on the core metrics:
In particular, the GA4 Custom Dimensions feature is full of valuable and actionable insights that will help you distinguish existing patients from new visitors. Among other user attributes, you’ll strategically deploy content across various channels to target the patients who are most likely to engage with your healthcare services and schedule appointments.
Promodo digital marketing analysts will help you unlock the potential of effective web analytics to gain invaluable insights into your website's performance. We will help you
We use a comprehensive analytical approach while integrating data from numerous sources to:
Cross Analytics will help you gather data from all patient touchpoints. By knowing which digital marketing channels are the most profitable, you’ll:
Another sound piece of digital marketing advice is to leverage Forecasting to gain foresight into your operational capacity and expenditure details.
Mobile App Analytics will help you track traffic flow from web to app and craft customized reports on patient behaviors to ensure a seamless user experience.
Setting up sales funnel tracking will help you identify and address bottlenecks in user behavior scenarios stemming from unclear descriptions or poorly designed pages. By tracking the sales funnel, you’ll observe the behavioral patterns of your users as they navigate through your healthcare website. With that, you’ll gain invaluable insights into:
Finally, A/B Testing will help you test and experiment with new features on your website that will best resonate with immediate healthcare needs and concerns shared by your patients. This is a crucial step to optimize patient experience and expose your healthcare services to wider audiences.
Foremost, we approach healthcare marketing from the lens of our loyal clients. Beyond the industry essentials, our mission is to help you with implementing a full-funnel 360 marketing that is about helping you develop an omnichannel strategy and pursue a customized attitude to every patient.
Our vision is to embrace the right promotion strategies from the perspective of your business circumstances and external market conditions.
To optimize your performance, we offer the expertise of our best digital marketers. Leverage the years of our in-house marketing experience in implementing digital innovation and creative strategies.
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Content Marketing Manager at Promodo
Taras has 16 years of hands-on copywriting experience overseas with 3000+ unique copies.
Accredited with Certificate of Proficiency in English (C2 level) by Cambridge University. Studied at Writing Launch Academy (United States) and owns an Academic Writing Certificate from Oregon University. Author of 12 dictionaries with Apriori Publishers.
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