Author: Jeff Tormey

Marketing for healthcare continuously changes. It’s challenging to identify healthcare marketing trends and determine which strategies to use to reach prospective patients. Healthcare establishments will get the best results by planning and fine-tuning their marketing strategy with the help of a few trending marketing tips.

What is Healthcare Marketing?

A process of strategically reaching out to healthcare audiences via messages and experiences to attract patients, develop strong relationships, and keep users engaged with your business.

Planning Your Healthcare Marketing Strategies

Every healthcare establishment should have a plan in place to keep up with trends in the industry to remain competitive. Crafting the right messaging in tune with those trends will allow your business to engage with your target audience at the right time.

Fine-tune your healthcare marketing strategy

Here are ten tips for fine-tuning your healthcare marketing strategy in 2020.

• Consistent branding

The brand messaging of your healthcare business should remain intact when implementing a marketing campaign across a variety of channels.

• Evaluate the online patient experience

Patients want to find the information they are looking for on your website quickly, view it clearly, and find it useful. You want patients to be able to interact with your medical site to be involved in their healthcare.

• Build a responsive website

A responsive website will display beautifully on any device regardless of the screen size. 40% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content or layout is difficult to navigate, graphics are unattractive, or the site doesn’t load properly.

• Create great content

The content draws visitors and search engines to your site. Regularly producing the best healthcare marketing content for your website that is valuable, consistent, and patient-focused will establish your healthcare business as a trusted authority in your field.

• Test site speeds

40% of users will abandon a website that takes more than 3 to 5 seconds to load. Periodically test the site speed to be sure you are capturing all users.

• Build a mobile responsive website

48% of people view websites and posts on their mobile phone or tablet. You want to be sure your site can be seen on any size screen to engage all viewers on your website.

• Optimize for the search engines

80% of consumers do their product and service research online. However, less than 10% of search engine users move on to the second page of search results. If your healthcare website doesn’t rank on the first page of results, consumers will not find you.

• Utilize PPC and display ads for Healthcare marketing

Pay-per-click advertising and display ads can help a healthcare clinic or practice increase brand awareness and move your website up in rank on search engines in a relatively short time.

• Use video marketing

Most healthcare marketers are using healthcare videos to connect with existing and potential clients, engage with them, and convert them into regular clients. Videos are being used to introduce the healthcare business and staff, inform patients about services, processes, and health conditions.

• Implement social media strategy

Marketing on social media platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter is an opportunity for your healthcare establishment to reach a broad audience with your products, services, and message and stay connected to existing clients

Using these tips to plan and fine-tune your healthcare business’s marketing strategy should reward you with an increase in prospective patients, website traffic, and loyalty among existing healthcare clients.

What is a healthcare CRM?

A healthcare customer relationship management (CRM) system is an invaluable tool to maintain up-to-date information about patients, offer quality support, gather valuable insights, and provide efficient customer management processes.

The Benefits of Having a CRM in the Healthcare Industry

1. Reports, Metrics, and Dashboards

A CRM stores data on patients in a communications module so that it is readily available to employees throughout the healthcare system to schedule and track patient appointments and interactions.

Many doctor’s practices, clinics, and hospitals have set up an online medical portal to make new patient check-in and record updates for existing patients less time consuming for staff.

The patient management module of the CRM enables staff to add or update patient records, , and access medical histories of patients to provide better care. 

The reporting module of the CRM can be designed to segment the patient population to analyze and then understand them better. Additionally it can calculate specific metrics such as patient retention rate, length of stay etc. Reports can be generated by metric or customized information to track and measure progress over time.

2. Mailing and Marketing Campaigns

Knowing who patients are, what they need, and what they are looking for allows healthcare establishments to improve their services and quality of care, and build strong relationships with their patients. A healthcare CRM can track patient satisfaction and the patient’s likelihood of referring others to the healthcare establishment. Such data provides valuable feedback to healthcare executives to make data-driven decisions.

The CRM allows you to filter your contacts to get a targeted list of patients or prospective patients who would most likely be interested in upcoming special offers or new services or products.

3. Integration with Existing Software

Your new healthcare CRM must provide EMR integration and work seamlessly with your practice’s current applications.

4. Availability on Multiple platforms

CRM software is one of the most popular types of software for business and healthcare practices. Approximately 50 % of users access CRM software from a smartphone, a cloud-based platform, or a tablet.

5. Customer Management Processes

There are a considerable number of daily tasks that must be completed for internal processes to function correctly. Filing out forms, reporting, compliance with regulations, appointments, patient notes by doctors and nurses, medications prescribed and on hand, etc. All of these tasks, which involve a specific sequence of actions, can be automated with a CRM.

The task management module of the CRM allows staff to add a task, assign it to an individual staff member, and track the progress, deadline, priority, and completion of the job.

A Healthcare CRM is a versatile system that acts as a medical records portal, patient tracking system, statistical analysis system, marketing platform, and routine task automation center. Tailored to your specific healthcare needs, a CRM can free up you and your staff to focus on the patients treatments, and more strategic projects, which results in enhanced customer experience, reducing waiting times, and satisfaction.

Well-designed Medical websites can make a big difference in elevating your medical business brand, generating more revenue, and improving the patient or prospective patient experience. Your medical website design can benefit from the following design tips.

1. Design Should Target Your Intended Audience

Health and wellness websites should target consumers seeking information and services about the specific services provided by the healthcare or wellness provider. A general practice medical doctor offers different services to different types of patients than a cardiovascular doctor. The design of the website should cater to the target audience you seek to attract.

2. Keep it Simple, clear and well-structured

Design your website so visitors can see what your business is all about and what services you offer when they enter your website.  Too many pages, menus, and too much content or graphics can cause the visitor to get lost and confused on your website. Keep medical website designs simple, well organized, professional, and eye-catching.

3. Highlight Key Information

The information that you most want your patients and prospective patients to know about your medical practice or clinic should be the first thing that catches the eye of the viewer. The entire website should be designed to highlight that essential information.

4. Create a Mobile Responsive Design

A mobile responsive website can determine if someone is viewing the site from a smartphone, and will show the mobile version of the website. If a user finds your website on their smartphone, they can push a button to automatically dial the medical practice, making it very easy for the user to contact you.

5. Incorporate Appealing Visual Content

Visual content captures the visitor’s attention first. Visual content is not limited to graphics. Website designs can utilize photos, slideshows, and videos to enhance your medical brand or provide information. Be sure that the visual content you incorporate in your design does not impair page load time. Stay away from designs that rely on Flash, as many devices do not support that technology.

6. Make it Search Engine Friendly

Search engines recognize coding elements within a website that identify what the purpose of your website is. Your design should incorporate HTML coding tags and headers to identify your medical business and help your website rank in the top pages of search engine results.

7. Consider User Experience

When a consumer visits your website, they want to quickly determine what your business does, find answers to specific questions, and become more knowledgeable about their healthcare. Health websites need to provide engaging, high-quality, relevant content in a variety of modes that will allow users to engage with the business and be more involved in their healthcare.

8. Follow HIPAA Compliance

Whenever patient’s communicate with a medical business via their website, HIPPA regulations for privacy and security must be followed. Designers are held to a higher standard for medical websites.

Medical websites that are well structured, mobile responsive, HIPAA compliant, and patient-focused will meet the needs of patients as well as the medical office or practice. The site will become a go-to tool for staff and patients alike. 

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!