With increasing competition and changing public behavior patterns, it is not enough to be an excellent hospital or clinic to stand out. Ensuring an adequate number of appointments and a good audience requires strategy, a healthcare marketing agency, and excellent management.
Knowing this, we have separated some strategies that any successful manager should apply in their healthcare marketing agency. Understand how to use social media, a good website with SEO, and a blog to increase conversions for your campaigns. Just continue reading.
How healthcare management and medical marketing have evolved in recent times
Marketing for hospitals, and strategic digital marketing for healthcare in general, were very different. A few years ago, most of the publicity material of these institutions was made in printed material. Then, pamphlets, folders, and billboards were the main form of communication with the client and future patients.
A medical marketing strategy was created in the offices and then on the street. From there, it wasn’t easy to measure the results and know exactly what worked and didn’t. Anyway, the market was less complicated.
Past generations were not used to researching before hiring a healthcare marketing agency. It was much more common to always go to the same hospital, clinic, or doctor, following the family tradition or the recommendation of acquaintances. Today, most people do research before visiting a specialist or when they experience any different symptoms.
Increased competition also motivated this shift. Patients have a greater number of options and frequent contact with healthcare businesses. They can view reviews and recommendations online and even ask for suggestions in groups and pages. The choice is no longer based solely on a simple indication.
Changes in healthcare management
Of course, the digital revolution has not only affected patients’ lives. Health management also underwent many changes with processes that were no longer analog and became part of systems. For example, even a simple chart nowadays is no longer handwritten by the doctor but typed into the computer and included in the patient’s record.
Schedules are also changing. Many have sought to communicate through Whatsapp, social networks, or apps. The customer wants more practicality, and hospitals must change to adapt to this.
As a result, the manager makes more accurate and assertive decisions. After all, digital processes allow for more detailed information collection and increase the proximity between patient and hospital.
All of this can benefit the hospital or clinic, increasing the number of appointments and patients. Keep reading to understand how to apply marketing to your management and get the best results. If you get more information about digital marketing please visit: https://www.healthcaremarketingagency.net/
How to use hospital marketing and medical marketing to increase appointments
Implementing marketing in hospitals and healthcare marketing agency is a process that can be done gradually. Many start by adapting the company’s internal team to handle online advertising. Posts begin once social networks are created, and that’s where many are wrong.
Sounds easy. Just post on social media and wait for the results to show up. However, marketing strategies for medical offices have their nuances.
First, it is necessary to know the hospital’s services very well. That is, survey all specialties, exams, and procedures performed. You should also know what needs they meet and when your potential customer often comes to you.
Then we get into another essential part of the marketing strategy: knowing your audience. Understanding who you want to sell to is just as important as knowing everything about your product! So, before adopting the digital marketing techniques and tools of a medical marketing agency, we will describe and analyze them.
Marketing objectives for hospitals and healthcare management
In addition to performing good audience analysis, it is important to define marketing strategy objectives. For this, marketing and health management departments must be aligned, making the disclosure bring relevant results for the entire organization.
Among the objectives of a marketing campaign you can include:
- Dissemination of plans and packages for patients and specific groups;
- Engage the wider community to bring greater visibility to the hospital;
- Increase the number of appointments.
A note: if necessary, you can work with all objectives simultaneously. Still, it is essential to establish an order of priorities to know how to handle marketing planning.
Essential digital marketing tools in the health management strategy
Digital channels seem to be the definitive solution for those who have always wanted to invest in marketing efficiently. In addition to offering more targeting options, they are better for measuring and tracking campaigns.
In other words, it’s nothing like launching a Billboard and hoping the right people will see it. It’s more like positioning a sniper to hit who needs to know the content. With the right tools, achieving a greater return on investment is possible.
Of course, some who work with clinics and offices have felt confused by the digital transition. There are so many possible dissemination channels and many ways to use them. So how do you target a medical marketing agency to get the best results?
The answer is simple: select the most strategic tools for your digital marketing. To help, we’ve brought a list of the methods that help most in digital strategies for hospitals and healthcare marketing agency.
Hospital website and clinic website
We consider the website of a hospital or clinic as the first step in carrying out its medical marketing strategy. It is the perfect opportunity for managers to show all their business can offer to customers, from technology to specialties and even health plans that serve.
A tip for creating the perfect website is to be careful about the information. Include data on the professionals who serve at the institution, the services and specialties that the hospital or clinic offers the state-of-the-art equipment it has, and everything else a patient might want to know before scheduling an appointment.
The intention is to make your leads extremely confident and comfortable with getting in touch. Also, have a website that is fast to load, responsive, and easy to navigate. The fewer clicks users need to make to reach the location they want, the better.
Finally, always invest in mobile-optimized sites. The use of the internet through smartphones and other mobile devices continues to grow. A portal that does not adapt to them is a real shot in the foot that a trusted institution cannot commit.
SEO with a focus on services and location
Modern shopping behavior often starts with a search engine. Certainly, the indications remain valid, but we know that the most common thing is that potential patients look for the specialty they want on the internet and then read a little on the company’s institutional website.
Therefore, SEO must be present in health management. Search engine optimization is a way to make your website more relevant to search engines like Google. Thus, the result will be highlighted when the user searches for a keyword related to the hospital.
We recommend investing in SEO that focuses on local and specialty keywords. For example, it is much more common for someone to look for “the eye doctor than “where to find an eye doctor.”
Before starting any work, survey the local words related to your business. They will be the foundation of your healthcare SEO services and will help considerably increase the number of website hits and bookings.
Video content for digital platforms
How many videos do you produce monthly to use on social media and websites? If the answer was “I don’t make videos,” it’s time for a change. This type of content is one of the main trends in digital media, including digital medical marketing. Users see them as a way to facilitate the consumption of denser and more complex content, frequently posted on hospital pages and profiles.
They should be informational, helping keep the user’s attention. But those same people watch a 1 or 2 min IGTV with no problem. That is, the trend is to increase user retention with videos.
Plus, they’re great for converting on websites and landing pages. Research shows that including videos in marketing campaigns increases conversion by up to 34%. The result is even greater on websites and landing pages, increasing up to 80%.
Creating posts with a purpose
We talked about purpose at the beginning of this article, but the reality is that all content should have a focus. For example, simply opening social media and posting something you find interesting does not bring results. Likewise, creating a random content calendar is also inefficient.
Anyone who wants quality digital marketing needs to have goals and follow them in every post. Define exactly who this content is aimed at, how it should feel, and what action your lead should take after consuming it.
There are informative posts that have the function of increasing the authority of the professional or business. It is also possible to use the content about symptoms that should be used for the lead to become aware of their problem and start considering scheduling an appointment. Finally, we have the conversion content, which calls the user to the action of getting in touch.
Email capture forms
Maybe your website is perfect, but it needs one small detail to convert even more: using forms. It’s something simple. Just provide a few fields, like name and phone, for the lead to fill in and get something. Perhaps a service quote, an e-book of tips, or a call from your agents.
This is extremely valuable for marketing because when someone takes the time to enter their data in a form, they are already very interested. So from then on, it’s up to your email marketing and customer service strategy to convert that lead into an effective patient.
By including forms on your pages, you can even better leverage traffic to your blog. For example, when someone walks into an article on “Who can have bariatric surgery,” they want to know more about it. A form calling for “learn more about our experts” at the end could be the trigger that person needed to make an appointment.
Use of a blog
Websites often completely waste their potential because they don’t have a blog. This is especially true in marketing to hospitals and medical marketing for their healthcare management. Thousands of people search for health-related topics every day. Some of the fastest-growing informational portals are collections of medical posts. Why not use this to your advantage?
The blog is a place to include rich and relevant content for your audience. These are the articles that will appear when someone searches for “headache causes” on Google. They are also the ones who will show all the competence of their team of specialists.
Websites with blogs generate greater relevance and work on their authority. The excellent idea is to include author articles signed by the experts themselves. Thus, in addition to clearing doubts from the public, it is possible to publicize its professionals and specialties.
Optimization of digital service
After applying digital strategies, appointments will surely grow. But that doesn’t mean even more return to his hospital. On the contrary, you may face a high dropout and dissatisfaction rate if service is lacking.
Remember that the internet has created a variety of new points of contact with the public. Your new customer wants to be served with quality in all of them, whether when making an appointment or asking a question. Therefore, ensure a trained service team so you don’t waste your marketing effort.
How to start applying marketing actions for health in the hospital or clinic
Did you realize the high possibility of return when investing in marketing for your hospital using a blog, website, and social networks? To get started, find out what your business still needs to be considered a reference in digital marketing. Maybe it’s a high-quality website or an optimized blog.
Then seek help if needed. For example, many processes are accelerated and simplified with a digital marketing consultancy or companies. In addition, these professionals can bring more insights to your medical marketing agency by strategically using content to increase appointments.