HEALTHCARE AND MEDICAL MARKETING TIPS IN LOCKDOWN
What You Need To Know
Healthcare marketing in London keeps on evolving at an alarming rate each year. Customers are demanding better patient experience and more online medical tools to ease their care, and marketers today understand they have to create relevant and personalized content to connect with more patients. Here are some medical marketing advice and tips from our top marketing experts to enable you to engage more consumers and grow your medical practice:
- Give More Attention to Providing Better Patient Experience:
Prevention and personalisation are the new major themes touted by experts as the future of marketing in healthcare. With the multitude of care options available to patients today, hospitals and health systems have to up the quality of their care and develop unique customer service and preventative care to engage more target consumers.
To stand out in the healthcare market this year, marketers and healthcare providers will have to leverage information from their website and social media platforms, to provide a patient experience that is unique and superior to what is being offered by the competition.
- Build a Strong Referral Program
For small businesses without a well-developed digital marketing experience, offering quality medical care services to existing patients and building a strong referral program is the best return on investment activity.
- Offer Care That Will Be Irresistible to Patients
Content still is king in today’s marketing world, and healthcare practices must invest time and money in creating content that is valuable and relevant to its target consumers. Valuable content should be more than an optimised blog post, but instead an offer of care that won’t be easily turned down by your target patients.
- Develop a Formal Patient Experience Strategy
Developing a unique Patient Experiences (PX) is proven as one of the fastest ways to interact with more patients, and boost the growth of your practice. Most patients are not great at discussing the efficacy of a medical exam or clinical care, but they are experts at telling just how much they enjoyed the human experience they received and will leave positive comments on influential social networks if they loved the experience.
According to our marketing experts, a five or four-star rating on rating sites can make the difference between your practice growing or sinking. Research your target patients thoroughly, and develop a comprehensive Patient Experience strategy that will cover all possible touchpoints that patients will experience during their care.
- Don’t Shun Advertising on Local Media
Healthcare providers looking to grow their practices must leverage advertising on local media as well as online media when developing their marketing plans. Marketers can run ads and advertorials or engage potential patients through targeting and retargeting keyword searches relevant to healthcare.
- Optimise Your Website with Fresh and Consistent Content
Search engine optimisation is essential in today’s digital electronic age, and many healthcare practices are investing in it for their websites. Competition for favourable website ranking and visibility is becoming increasingly fierce as more doctors move their practices to the digital marketing space to connect with more consumers online.
Healthcare marketers that seek to connect with new patients will have to invest time and money into SEO and consistently creating content that is fresh and relevant to its target patients.
- Don’t Get Stuck on Design – Give More Attention to Creating Unique Patient-Focused Content
Many marketers invest more time on website design, SEO, and social media, instead of putting more focus on creating a content that serves the medical needs of their target audience. You should give more attention to your patients, and ask yourself if the content you’re creating will improve the health of your audience, or answer the questions they’re asking online.
- Build a Personal Brand
Marketers can stand apart from their competition by building a personal brand online. By creating and sharing content that is relevant and consistent, particularly on industry-specific topics, healthcare providers and marketers can position themselves as industry experts and build their reputation online.
- Take Advantage of Google My Business Listing
A free Google My Business listing is an ideal marketing platform for every medical practice. Once your listing page is created and claimed, ensure all information entered on the page is accurate and consistent across all your web directories and citations. Tools like MOZ Local and Yext can save you the time and effort of having to update your information manually. Also if you’re a doctor, ensure you’re signed to review sites like RateMDs, Healthgrades, Vitals, and BetterDoctor. Positive reviews on such niche rating sites will help you stand out and build your reputation with patients.
- Create Interactive Content
Marketing is shifting from being just educational, to becoming interactive. Readers today are making choices that influence the kind of content they get to view; quizzes and tests are becoming some of the most shared pieces of content on websites and social media. Experts have discovered that readers become more engaged to content when they have a direct impact on that content; this also improves the readers’ brand recall.
Healthcare marketers will have to create custom contents according to user responses. In an age where most information is generic, contents should be personalised for the consumers. This will take more work and money at the outset, but it will increase brand reputation and enable the brand to be at the fore of the consumer’s thoughts. You can contact a healthcare media agency to help you with this.
- Ensure You Genuinely Follow-up with Your Patients
No patient finds it fun talking about his/her disease or illness, even with a doctor. There’s a lot of information on medical care available on the internet, and some patients will prefer to take advantage of this from the comfort of their homes or at their office desks.
What savvy medical practices can do to market themselves successfully is to provide quality care to their patients, and get positive word-of-mouth referrals. A digital follow-up program should also be developed for individual patients and categorised by the disease and treatment received. Emails should be scheduled to get monitoring feedback from patients and offer relevant health tips and reminders for their next appointments.
- Offer Preventative Healthcare
Healthcare providers should give more attention to preventative health. Patients should be educated on preventing diseases and illnesses and encouraged to schedule routine prevention checks and quarterly medical visits at the beginning of the year. Offering quality health education to patients and convincing to book regular check-ups will positively affect the choices they make, and can encourage other friends and members of the family to do the same.
Contact our Healthcare marketing agency if you need additional advice and tips to grow your medical practice, or if you need to hire the services of a reliable, professional medical marketing agency.
