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The tactics to market a healthcare service online are significantly different than those to market a restaurant, repair shop, hair salon, or almost any other service or experience. They are also different from marketing for consumer goods and products.
Due to the more sensitive nature of healthcare services, along with the larger and more conservative organizations that tend to provide them, marketing in this sector has been a bit slower to adopt the latest trends. This is particularly true in the areas of ad personalization and app development. But that doesn’t mean that healthcare marketing is completely stuck in a rut.
Here are some of the best ways healthcare practices are staying top of mind and showing their value to prospective patients.
Local and Mobile Marketing
There are many ways your local patient base will find you online. Your website is a primary one, and it’s important to have professional SEO services to make sure you are ranking for all of the services and specialties you offer. Beyond that, spend time ensuring you have complete and accurate listings on the many other directory and physician listing sites on the web. Use Google Analytics and analytics from your social media and advertising platforms to ensure you are reaching the right audience in your local community.
For larger healthcare networks and organizations, mobile marketing often comes down to a successful mobile app. App marketing not only involves convincing users to download your app, but using automation and other strategies to keep them active and engaged. After all, 1 out 4 apps is never used again after its initial download.
Immediate Service with Chat and Text
It’s commonplace for patients to receive appointment reminders and other alerts via text marketing. It’s also becoming increasingly common for patients to reach their providers through secure messaging or chat apps and portals. Savvy healthcare groups take it one step further and encourage patients and prospects to opt into push-based communications about offers, special events, health news and more. Many existing EMRs and patient reminder apps also allow for other types of patient communication, and using these to the fullest helps to keep your healthcare business top of mind.
Remarketing
People who visit your website or engage with you on social media have already expressed some interest in the services you offer. Remarketing helps you stay in touch with those people and encourage them to take the next step. The drawback of remarketing in the healthcare space is that due to state and federal privacy protections, targeting advertising to people with known health conditions can be problematic. Both Google and Meta have restricted the use of health characteristics in targeted advertising, and the trend seems to be toward greater privacy protections ahead. In short, while remarketing can make sense in certain instances, tread lightly.
Augmented Reality
In the aesthetic healthcare space particularly, showing people what their results could look like can help to convince them to take the next step. Most surgeons use this technology, such as Vectra, inside the office as part of a consultation. There are a few web-based services that, after a user uploads a photo, can provide approximate results of surgery. These are still quite rudimentary and have struggled to become mainstream. But the success of various photo manipulation apps and features on social media points to the latent demand for envisioning healthcare outcomes.
Patient Review Management
Reviews matter for practically every business, but they are particularly influential in healthcare, where consumers are trusting providers with their lives. Most healthcare practices find that it’s not enough to simply respond to reviews as they come in. First off, in this passive strategy practices tend to find themselves playing defense and spending most of their time trying to manage negative reviews. Secondly, a more active reputation management approach to encouraging reviews helps to provide a more balanced picture of the service your organization offers. Lastly, always keep in mind patient privacy rights and ensure that all staff interacting with reviewers understand their obligations under HIPAA and other privacy laws.
Sponsoring Offline Events
We haven’t all uploaded our brains to the metaverse just yet, and health is still closely tied to activities in the good ol’ fashioned real world. Sponsoring health activities such as a 5K race, wellness workshop or blood drive may be a no-brainer for your healthcare brand. But even activities better associated with community health – such as creek cleanups, spay/neuter clinics, or concerts in the park – are worth a closer look for sponsorship.
