The healthcare industries are progressive in many ways, but somehow somewhere we lag behind the timeline of marketing strategies. The marketing strategies of hospitals tend to lag behind the other consumer-centric industries. Because, marketing strategy is not the priority in healthcare — patient care is (and rightfully so). A recent survey shows that nearly 70% of the patients search online before booking an appointment to a hospital. Thus, it clearly shows that both consumers and patients are taking advantage of online research and ongoing care. Hence, it becomes really important that organizations take advantage of digital marketing to boost patient’s engagement and to show care toward them. Here are some benefits of doing digital marketing for hospitals:
-
Know your patients:
Hospitals are dealing with consumers who are remarkably smart, demanding transparency and two-way communication from their healthcare providers. So, you need to provide transparency and being online present is the first way to do that.
-
SEO:
Consumers’ extensively use search engines to find facilities or inquire about their health. So, healthcare marketers must keep search engine optimization (SEO) in mind when considering the overall digital strategy.
-
Increase ranking on the search engine:
Healthcare marketers can help search engines recognize and rank their organic content – such as blog posts, or patient testimonials. They can do so by tagging a page with relevant keywords, writing informative page descriptions, and creating strategic HTML titles, among other techniques. This all can help you in ranking the hospital’s website high on the search engine.
-
The website should be mobile-friendly:
People are glued to their mobile these days so your website needs to be mobile-friendly. Recent studies have shown that more than 50% of web searches are mobile searches.
-
The website should be optimized:
Your website must be user-friendly. Nobody likes a website that is very slow and consumes a lot of time to load things. Hence, it is better to optimize web pages for mobile search and browsing. Prioritize a dynamic design for your website and maintain fast load times.
-
Produce Video content:
Video marketing is taking over as the next major opportunity to engage consumers especially in healthcare. Video is an ideal medium for providing information about complex health issues or diseases in a simple, easy-to-understand visual format. Through video, patients’ storytelling can be brought to life and cause new visitors to trust the hospital even before making an appointment.
-
Social media presence:
Social media can be used to engage with patients, support physicians, and improve population health outcomes. A healthy social media presence also helps attract patients.
-
Organize health campaigns:
To make new customers trust your hospital, organize health campaigns so that they can visit it. Patients can learn about your hospital by the health campaigns and seminars that you organize.
-
Email marketing:
It is a low-cost, effective, and immediate form of communication with plenty of opportunities for narrow-focus personalization. Health is a personal subject. Therefore, it makes sense that healthcare marketing should be highly personalized.
-
Prioritize analytics:
One of the great things about digital marketing is the ability to constantly track performance. So, that you can make real-time adjustments if a campaign isn’t going as planned.
Digital marketing has helped the healthcare industry evolve. So, make sure yo do it right to extract the advantages of digital marketing.