Author: Jeff Tormey

Video is a highly important aspect of online business and has been for the better part of a decade. In 2018, viewers were spending almost 7 hours per week watching online video, and that number goes up as the viewers get younger.

To capture the attention of all generations, and to be able to convey your message in a more effective way, your healthcare business needs to start using video as soon as possible.

Excuses For Not Using Healthcare Videos

1. It’s too expensive. Although online video can be expensive, it does not need to be. More and more, people are consuming content made with no editing filmed on smartphones. This can be done by any business!
2. It’s hard to track. This is absolutely false, as Youtube, Google Analytics, Facebook, and Instagram all allow you to track metrics. It’s up to you to correlate them to business objectives.

Why Should Healthcare Businesses Use Video?

1. Videos make excellent testimonials, which help build trust in your brand and authority in your niche. People trust what they can see, and they are more drawn to people who are talking to them directly on video. Best of all, if you can use these videos to show results, it makes for a powerful marketing tool with strong social proof.
2. Healthcare videos can be used to educate and inform patients about their health conditions. Patients want to learn about their conditions in order to understand what they’re dealing with and ease the anxieties they may have about living with or treating their conditions. This also shows that you know what you’re talking about, building trust among your viewers.
3. Social media is video-friendly. Facebook and Instagram prioritize videos in their algorithms, allowing you to reach greater numbers of people with a video post.

Tips for Effective Healthcare Videos

1. Focus on what your patients care about. When posting a video about a certain condition, you’ll want to use the video to ease their anxieties while also giving them the most important information they need.
2. Optimize for mobile devices. The majority of video views are done on mobile devices, and vertical video is becoming more and more common. 
3. Keep in mind the platform when you’re uploading videos. Snapchat and Instagram Stories are meant specifically for vertical video, whereas Youtube and your website are more for traditional horizontal videos.

Healthcare marketing has changed a lot over the past decade. Now we’re entering a new decade, and it’s an exciting time for healthcare businesses doing Internet marketing!

By taking advantage of the following healthcare marketing trends for 2020, your business can grow with the times without being left in the dust. Check them out!

Changes in SEO for Healthcare Marketing

Search engine optimization, or SEO, changes more rapidly every year. As Google’s big brain aims to assist users by giving them the most relevant results, typical SEO techniques have been largely overtaken by a focus on the user experience.

A few things to note for 2020:

Content is King

People have been saying “content is king” for years now. However, it’s never been more true than it is now. When considering the user search experience, Google wants users to find exactly what they’re looking for when they’re searching on their platform. They promote content that is high quality and decisive, giving the user exactly what they want.

When creating content for healthcare marketing, keep keywords in mind. These keywords will expose what people actually want to know when they search for that term. As always, aim for the long tail, and give people the content they want. Authoritative, correct, and informational. But never forget your business’s main objective!

Healthcare search marketing content should revolve around answering the questions patients and clients actually want to know. They want to learn about their relevant health conditions, or how your products and services will help them. Answer these questions informatively and with authority.

Infographics: Rank for Image Search

Infographics have spread in the late 2010s, and their use isn’t going away. People want content that is condensed, easy to understand, and quick to digest. Infographics fit this bill exactly.

Best of all, infographics often end up prioritized in Image Search because of how many people click on them.

Use them to make excellent content even easier to digest. For example, if you want to talk about the benefits of a medical device or service, you can include many different statistics and charts to show how it helps people treat their conditions or solve their problems.

Video: Not Just Youtube

People watch more video content every year. Video content has become the focus on many social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn. Videos have become prioritized on those social networks, and people share more and more video every day!

By producing high quality video content, you can more effectively spread your message in a condensed form that keeps the user’s attention. But video quality is not just about how good the camera or studio is: in fact, vertical video shot with smartphones have become commonplace even for businesses and personality brands!

For your healthcare business, people respond to personal authorities on video. Having someone who acts as an ‘influencer’ for your business, while having the authority to speak on advanced healthcare topics, could be your saving grace for a good video campaign.

Most of all, remember how your content strategy fits into your business’s objective. Use your content, including videos and infographics, to help bring people into your funnel and segment your potential prospects.

Wondering why your healthcare business doesn’t rank all that well on Google? It’s because your website isn’t optimized for it!

SEO, or search engine optimization, has been a buzzword in the industry for years. But it’s important, and we’re going to show you how to do healthcare SEO yourself; simple, effective, and actionable tips.

Know Your Keywords

You own a healthcare business, so surely you already know what people are searching for, right? Unfortunately, many people get this step so wrong, and after doing all sorts of healthcare SEO, they still don’t get any more traffic!

To do this simply and effectively, come up with a list of services you offer. Then write down the benefits of these services. These are your keyword starters… but they won’t be what you optimize for.

Then, open up Google’s Keyword Planner and enter these phrases into the tool. You’ll be presented with a list of keywords, ordered by the amount of traffic available per month.

Look for long-tail keywords (keywords looking for something specific, usually more than 2 words in length) with significant volume, at least 200 monthly searches. Keep a list of these.

Get Your Meta Tags Straight

Those keywords you’ve come up with should be in your meta tags. You can see them between the head tags in the HTML of your site.

There are many types of metadata, but the two primary ones are the title tag and the meta description. The title tag should contain the topic of the page and should have your focus keyword for that page. The meta description should describe what’s on the page, in a sentence, containing the top few keywords you want for that page.

Focus On Your Local Area

Healthcare SEO is centered around local SEO. Local SEO focuses on people who are looking for a business in their local area, and is a goldmine for highly targeted traffic!

You need to create a Google My Business listing, if you are a local business with an address you want people to visit or a phone number you want people to call. Associate that My Business listing with your website and that business will pop up on Maps and in the main search results when people search for you (and sometimes when people search for your focus keywords!)

Post Excellent, Original Content

Google prioritizes good content over poorly-written or spun content, based on several complicated and secret factors. All in all, though, your content needs to provide great value to the reader, while also being original.

Remember that keyword planner tool we were talking about in the first step? Now we want to create content around these keywords. Choose a few of them and write articles about these topics, focusing on optimizing for a long tail. This is how you not only rank, but get quality traffic from Google!

Leverage Other Types of Media

It’s not just websites people search for. They’re also searching for images, videos, news, places, and more!

By making sure your images and videos have the appropriate keywords and metadata on them, you can help your website show up in search. People may click the video and image and go to your site from there, opening up an avenue for high-quality traffic!

Facebook is one of the biggest online advertising channels around, with billions spent on ads every year. Businesses now treat Facebook as a primary part of their marketing mix, and healthcare advertising is no different.

Healthcare companies do a fair bit of advertising on Facebook. From private practices to medtech, healthcare advertising on Facebook has become an even greater part of the overall strategy. But how do you do it properly? Here’s how.

Tip #1: Start With Your Primary Objective

Why do you want to advertise on Facebook? Well, to grow revenue, of course! But Facebook has some very powerful tools to help businesses get exactly the kind of business they want.

Do you want product sales or patient visits? Do you want scheduled appointments or phone leads? Depending on what your business needs, you will advertise slightly differently.

In Facebook Ads Manager, you have the option to select your objective. This is important because Facebook will optimize ad delivery to get you more of your desired result for less.

Choosing the right objective will mean the difference between a dead campaign and a winning one.

Some objectives will require that you have a functioning Facebook Pixel on your site, too, so make sure that’s set up properly by going to Events Manager and testing your pixel!

Tip #2: Get Your Audience Right

The most important rule of marketing is to know your target market! Facebook is a wonderful platform because it allows you to laser-target your desired customer: down to age, gender, location, interests, and even behaviors! You can even target people who are on your mailing list or have taken an action on your website using Custom Audiences!

To get the proper audience, start with a customer avatar. Your customer avatar is a description of your perfect prospect, the person who would get the most value out of your services. This is especially important in healthcare advertising!

Use the Audience Insights tool to turn your customer avatar into a targeted audience for your ad sets!

Tip #3: Test Lots of Creative

Creative, or the visual & copy elements of your ad, is the first thing that your audience sees. It’s your first impression. Make it count.

But how do you make good creative? You need to test lots of it. Figure out 3-5 possible appeals that your audience will respond to. Then choose 3-5 different images or video elements that are both eye-catching and relatable to your offer. Now you have between 9 and 25 different ads to test.

Testing them all will take different amounts of time depending on your budget. But this money spent is well worth it!

Video marketing is one of the hottest trends in marketing right now.

Most healthcare marketers are using healthcare video to connect with existing and potential clients, engage with them, and convert them into regular clients. It is useful because medical video production has become more affordable and medical videos online resonate with potential patients.

Three Reasons Healthcare Video Production Succeeds in Marketing

1. Most people are visual learners. Ninety percent of the information that our brain processes is visual.
2. Videos humanize organizations. Video can convey emotions that are not possible with text content. They make a connection with people. Personal connections will likely lead to action, and action will lead to conversions.
3. Video content differentiates one healthcare organization from another. It is difficult for a healthcare company or practice to stand out on the Internet with written content alone. The combination of real-time visuals and informative content draws people and search engines to your website and presents the unique services your healthcare concern offers.

How Can Video Marketing Be Used to Educate and Attract Patients?

Testimonials

There is no better spokesperson for your practice than a satisfied patient.  Video testimonials are mostly interviews with patients that highlight their personal experience with a medical condition treated by your healthcare practice. A well-made video puts a personal, empathetic face on a patient’s healthcare success story and empowers satisfied patients to share their stories in their own words. Testimonials create a much more powerful message for both marketing and conversion purposes. 

Website Welcome Videos

Welcome videos introduce people to a hospital, clinic, office, or healthcare system and inform them about the services that are provided. It is much more cost-effective than a salaried employee repetitively providing an overview of your business.

Physician Profile Videos

Trust is the bedrock of any medical practice. People want to know that they can trust their physician with their healthcare. Creating video physician profiles on your practice’s website introduces people to your physicians in a non-threatening way. It makes it easier to for a patient to get comfortable with your practice and schedule an appointment.

Procedure and Condition Information Videos

Educational videos are an excellent way of providing an overview of a specific process or health condition to a patient. These videos are usually simple, informative, and easy to follow. They are an essential method of establishing your healthcare practice as a trusted source of healthcare information.

Marketing Your Healthcare Videos

Well made videos have been known to go viral on social media sites. They are a powerful marketing tool to introduce your healthcare practice to a large number of potential patients.

Online video content is becoming a critical means for people to obtain healthcare information, evaluate a medical provider, and make informed decisions about their health needs.

Video Marketing is an essential tool for healthcare because it differentiates providers, builds meaningful relationships with end- user audiences, and results in conversions. Engage and connect with your viewers, and they will not only increase your reach by sharing your video with others, but also spend more quality time on your website.

Healthcare marketing consists of a lot of moving components, but none as important as medical seo or “search engine optimization.” Search engines are the gatekeepers to online traffic, and the name of the game in healthcare seo services is to get the search engine to rank your website on the first page of results in response to a user’s query.

Healthcare SEO is a long-term strategy to improve the rankings of your healthcare practice website involving three techniques.

Rules and Methods for Healthcare SEO

1. On-Site SEO Techniques

The method in which your healthcare website is set up for code, images, and the written content has a marked effect on how easily search engines can find your practice.

Visible sitemap: Just like you need a map to find your way to a location not known to you, search engines need a sitemap of URLs or a menu to find your practice.

The Functionality of your website:  Most consumers don’t have the patience to sit and wait for a web page to load or spend time on a site that can’t be viewed very well on their mobile phone. Google takes into account the Page Loading Speed and Mobile Responsiveness in it’s ranking of your website.

Tags: Search engines crawl the Internet and are drawn to coding elements within a website that identify what the purpose of your website is. Tags are HTML coding that specifies the title of your web pages, brief descriptions of the content, keywords that identify your business, and alt tags that highlight the relevancy of images on your site.

Headers and Footers: H1 and H2 headers  (titles and subtitles) within the content of your web page and Footers at the bottom of your page further identify the purpose of your website.  

Links: Clickable hyperlinks embedded within the content of your web page also draw search engines to your site.

Content: Content is the vehicle that draws visitors and search engines to your site. Make sure you are posting regular content to your website that is up to date, relevant, and customer-centric.

2. Off-Site SEO Techniques

One of the most effective off-site medical seo techniques is the use of backlinks. Backlinks are links from authoritative, credible websites or directories within your field that point to your site. A referral to your healthcare website from your best friend Bob’s auto garage is not as valuable as a referral from the Mayo Clinic.

How do you get Backlinks?

• Put out a press release announcing the introduction of your practice or a new service.

• Get listed in a medical or local area online directories. Many insurance companies provide online directories of physicians nationwide that accept their insurance.

• Write an informative Blog Article or a Social Media post regularly.

• Actively manage online negative and positive reviews of your practice.

3. Local SEO Off-Site Techniques

Google and other search engines scour your website for keywords and phrases that indicate where your business is located to rank your website in the search returns for local areas.  Most consumers looking for an allergist want an allergist that is near their location. They may search using phrases such as: 

• “Allergists near me.”
• “Allergists in Atlanta, GA.”
• “Allergists near Marietta Town Center”

Makes sure that your healthcare practice ‘s name, address, and phone number frequently appear throughout your website and are accurate in directory listings.

Effective Healthcare advertising involves a healthcare seo strategy that optimizes your website through numerous strategies to advance your site up in the search engine results to top-of-page.