Healthcare Marketing Strategies: 10 Simple Digital Marketing Strategies That Brought 500% More Patients

Healthcare is a competitive industry. New doctors, clinics and medical institutes are emerging. Whether you are an established authority or a new startup in the field of medicine, healthcare marketing strategies play a vital role in bringing in more clients and inquiries your way.

Unlike a few years ago, your prospects can be reached out via an array of channels. When it comes to seeking professional service that’s backed by one of the most strict guidelines, licensing and monitoring, patients and dependents may not care much about the history or the branding.

Considering the dedication and effort doctors and other medical professionals have to put in, it’s not a big surprise that many patients go to the first doctor that Google recommends them in their area.

So, many new practitioners are flourishing and absolutely smashing it in the marketing game, outwitting their competitors by using some of the most simple yet effective healthcare marketing strategies.

If you are in search for a cost-effective marketing strategy that will translate into a few extra high-paying patients every month without breaking your monthly marketing spend boundaries, you are at the right place, WoodBows.

In this guide, we are going to discuss 10 extremely effective healthcare marketing strategies that many well-known and established medical institutions to small scale clinics.

Let’s dive in.

Healthcare Marketing Strategies:

01: Share your wisdom and become an authority

A more technical term would be — inbound marketing. You teach people and share your knowledge with curious prospects, establish yourself as an authoritative figure and attract prospects without spending much.

The best part about inbound marketing is that you get to interact and target exactly the people who are looking for or are interested in your professional services. The only thing you have to do here is offer value. That’s one of the many big reasons why we have so many questions and answer websites related to medicine and healthcare industry.

People have too many unanswered questions. Maybe their sessions didn’t turn out the way they wanted, or maybe their doctors weren’t able to get the point across. Either be the case, if you can get their attention answering a few simple questions, converting the same set of people into paying customers will not be that difficult.

How do you establish yourself as a reliable body in your niche?

Share original, ground-breaking content online through social media and your business website. It would also help if you could push a few blog posts on your personal blog portal sharing your experience working with customers and treating them. Having video testimonials, review and social proof on the homepage and below the main blog posts would definitely help you in the long run.

Become an active participant in your local meetups, conferences, and parties. Introduce yourself and speak at a few venues to gradually build your network.

Answer business emails. Many doctors and busy professionals avoid interacting with their patients and prospects. We cannot entirely blame them as they work in one of the most congested work environments. You barely get holidays and when you do, you don’t want to spend that time answering emails. But, if you could find 20 minutes every day for email marketing, you will be able to land a few extra appointments which will eventually convert into high paying long-term clients.

Guest blog on established blogs in your niche. Niche authority websites love professional advice from a practicing doctor. It makes them look good and you get an opportunity to connect with a lot of people.

02: Video Marketing: YouTube, Facebook, Instagram….

You cannot deny the fact that video content is much more reliable today. A few years ago, you’d have to wait for a video to load on video, then there were those occasional buffering disrupting the viewing experience. That’s changed today.

The way we consume video content today is different. With streaming services clocking in mind-blowing profits and YouTube featuring more and more celebrities, and family friendly content, it is safe to say that advertising and marketing your services and businesses on this vertical will open a lot of doors.

How do you leverage video marketing?

Video marketing depends on the quality of the video. If your video lacks quality, the content will not impress many people. Users today are very particular when it comes to liking and disliking the content. You have to understand that there are hundreds of videos on the same topic are yours. If your video doesn’t offer them better quality, they will not watch it.

Get a professional recording setup. It is going to cost you a bit but considering the long-term benefits, investing a few bucks on a decent microphone and soundproofing to record a couple of videos a month isn’t the worst idea.

What if you don’t have time to produce content?

Well, in that case, you can head straight to freelance websites or perhaps hire an agency in your locality to produce the content on your behalf. Your main goal is to produce content and promote it on supported platforms.

Which platforms to target?

In short, you should target all the major social networks with support for video content. Some of our personal favorites are:

1. Youtube

2. Facebook

3. Instagram

4. Pinterest

5. Reddit

Be aware that you have to approach each with a different mindset. YouTube users have a different mentality than Facebook users. Similarly, even a common user between these two platforms will behave differently on these platforms.

A Facebook user will be open to a lot of content. Be it contextual ads, video ads, blog posts, new updates and more. But a typical YouTube user will only care about the video content or content that they have been searching for.

The same goes for the other two social networking websites as well.

You must spend some time researching about this topic even further before going all in. The most common mistakes professionals make when marketing their services is to blindly believe in marketing fluff without having any prior marketing experience.

Read a few articles, watch a few videos and try medical marketing for a couple of weeks in your free time to see if you are a good fit for this job.

03: Leverage Search Engine Optimization(SEO)

Most businesses are investing a huge amount of their marketing expenditure on SEO by hiring a reliable SEO link building packages provider. If you are not aware of this term, here’s a quick explanation:

Optimizing your website for better search engine ranking and organic search traffic stream is called search engine optimization. By modifying your content-heavy pages and tweaking a few settings, you could make it easier for search engines to gauge your content. Since SEO is a huge topic, it’s impossible for us to include everything in one article.

Moreover, you really don’t need to master every aspect of SEO. You have to understand how LOCAL SEO works.

Local SEO refers to a strategic geographically depended SEO strategies. You don’t necessarily target every customer in the country. You only target interested users from a particular location.

For example, If John Doe from California initiates a Google search with the term, “Best Cardiac Surgeon in my AREA”, Google will show location-based search results with the help of your GPS and IP address.

In the images below you can see how Google shows only relevant businesses from the location of the user.

Local SEO is a bit tricky as compared to the general one. You have to be very specific and medical niches, in general, are very competitive and money-hungry.

This means you will have to put in a lot more effort to rank your website on the local search listings. On top of this, Local SEO takes a long time.  It can take longer depending on the level of competition and niche saturation. So, working on the brand image of your business online through organic customer reviews and social media proof will pay off in the initial stage.

04: Attract Prospects With Content Marketing

Actually, content marketing falls under the inbound marketing process. It’s still a very big niche in the marketing industry. So, this deserves its very own section.

The idea behind content marketing is pretty easy to grasp.

You craft quality, ground-breaking content in your industry, and promote this content. Google and other search engines will slowly catch up and rank your web pages accordingly.

Sure, it is a slow process but it is one of the most effective ways to gain customer without spending money on paid ads.

That said, content marketing isn’t affordable. The cost of content creation varies from niche to niche. A most common piece of content is blog posts and a single blog post could cost somewhere from $50 to $400. It all comes down to the quality and the quantity of the content.

For $400, you will get a well-researched, SEO friendly article suitable for Google’s top ranking spots and social media shares. A few articles a month would help you attract a lot of organic search traffic in the long run.

If you publish roughly 4 articles in a month, that’s 48 articles in a year. If you manage to drive 200 visitors per article per month, you will be able to drive more than 10,000 unique visitors in a month.

These visitors are highly targeted and interested in your content. These people are more likely to contact you or come and visit you at your clinic or hospital.

Furthermore, the best part of content marketing is that you don’t have to continuously invest in crafting content unless you are planning on curating a content-centric blog.

Once you reach your goal of blog content, you will only need to promote them for a while. Once your website is ranked, it will stay there for a decent amount of time. All you have to do to keep this ranking stable is patch potholes and update the content with new information. Adding a few more sentences every now and then will also help you rank for multiple keywords in a single post.

05: Spend Time Building Your Brand Online

Google favors brands over websites. That’s the reason why websites like Forbes, Fox, and BusinessInsider still rank for some of the most competitive keywords despite producing content without much information about the said target keyword.

But, the real question is – How do you build your brand image online?

For starters, you need to:

1. Launch a website and hire a professional medical copywriter to write a copy of your business website.

2. Focus on the design side of your business website. Anything remotely poor will turn away a lot of potential clients.

3. Start a company blog for inbound marketing as mentioned in an earlier step.

4. Advertise on social media and Google AdWords.

5. Get featured on authority website interviews.

6. Get as many social testimonials, reviews and positive video testimonials from your clients and patients.

7. Start networking with others in your industry via Linkedin.

Having a positive brand image online could transform your entire business. You could potentially go from servicing a few 100 clients a month to servicing more than 10,000 clients in a month. Most people won’t be able to take on such a challenge as it sounds really intimidating but you don’t have to worry about any sudden growth. Your growth will be gradual and scaling your business with such a pace is quite achievable.

06: Paid Ads, PPC ads and Video Ads

Tired of waiting for the search engine love to kick in and social media marketing is also not paying well? There’s one very promising option left for you to try, digital advertisement.

Paid ads enable you to connect with millions of people instantly. With platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Google offering competitive rates for emerging businesses, it’s worth giving digital advertising a try.

As we all know by now that Google tracks its users’ online activities. They use their browser-stored cookies and cached data to track the type of websites, questions and video content a typical Google user consumes on a daily basis. With their machine learning algorithms and AI-powered deep learning technology, they can closely predict a user’s behavior.

This helps them in showing targeted ads.

But, what does this mean for you?

Unlike any other option listed in this article, the paid article is very specific. You can target any age-group, restrict ads from showing up on certain location, devices and age-groups or entirely block a whole country in your campaign.

You also get access to a lot of historical data which will help you in setting up the best ROI ensuring campaign.

For beginners, we recommend PPC (Pay Per  Click). It’s straightforward and the best part about this ad set is that you only pay if someone clicks on your ads giving you an option to limit your overall marketing expenditure while scoring a few customers with ease.

07: Medical Forums and Online Communities

Medicine is a vast niche. On top of that, it is also always in demand. But, unfortunately, many prospects are shy or confused to make the call. So, they search for online forums and medical groups online to find out if someone can recommend them a good clinic or a doctor.

Don’t make the silly mistake of classifying these prospects as low paying group. We have successfully converted a few potential customers into high-paying clients without selling them our services.

That’s the power of online community.

All you need to get the ball rolling is answer a few questions a day. That’s it.

Your answer needs to be very specific and to the point. The reader should feel the urge to contact you after reading the article. Even if they don’t, these answers of yours will stay there for a very long time. People who face the same trouble or medical problem will find their way to your article. Eventually, someone will get in touch with you.

And, that’s just one answer. Imagine the wonders hundreds of article would do for your business? Hundreds and thousands of organic search traffic to your answers on these communities will skyrocket your sales and annual turnover.

08: Affiliate Marketing

Most medical professionals aren’t even aware of this term. But, you’d be amazed to learn that many, many businesses make millions of dollars online using affiliate marketing.

How does it work?

Well, all you need to do is have a link on your website for a partnership. Interested marketers can signup using this link and whenever they send a client your way, you send them a deserving commission.

You could also use paid ads to promote your affiliate marketing campaign. You’d be surprised to see how many marketers are in search of high-paying affiliate programs.

But, affiliate marketing comes with its fair share of risks. Please, if you are interested in having an affiliate marketing program, make sure to optimize the process as much as you can. Any possible loopholes could lead to a lot of revenue loss and mistrust amongst marketers.

09: Optimize Your Website

I understand if you already have a decent number of articles on your blog section. But, there’s still something that’s holding your website’s ranking back. You’re on the verge of giving up on digital marketing as you’ve already tried everything. From building a website to marketing it to your top prospects.

So, what’s the big idea here? Why isn’t your campaign flourishing like others in your industry?

Well, the design of your website, the page loading performance and call-to-action button placement are some of the most important factors to consider tweaking if everything else is squeaky clean.

Here’s a list of tasks that our engineering follow when testing for design and performance issues on our client websites:

1. Use GTMetrix.com to retrieve performance related data. This data will not only show you which design elements are resulting in the slow page load time, but this test will also automatically recommend a few optimization tips depending on the type of elements and web hosting you’re using.

2. Migrate to a premium web hosting company for faster server response time and lower downtime.

3. Hire a professional team of web developer/engineers to keep your site updated with the latest and the greatest of the technologies.

4. Renovate your website to load seamlessly on mobile devices.

5. Add necessary meta-tags on the head section of your website to help Google rank your website.

6. If not already done, make sure to get an SSL Certificate for your business website. Google has made it pretty clear that the non-SSL website will be demoted to avoid web spam and scams.

10: Analyze Your Competition and Restructure Your Strategy

Competitor analysis is a very lucrative strategy to make use of when competing in a very tight niche with big players.

Analyzing your competitor’s strategy could reveal a number of marketing secrets:

– The monthly ad spend.

– Their targeted keywords.

– Paid advertising platforms.

– Ad copies.

– Target audience groups.

– Age groups.

– Monthly unique visitors and page view sent by search engines.

– Type of blog posts bringing in the free traffic.

– Their link profile.

– Guest blog posts and more.

If they are spending $50/day, you could spend $60/click/day and hijack their position.

Competitor analysis is not a very tough job. Since your competitor’s website is public, it is accessible. You can use many competitor spying tools to get the data you are looking for.

Here’s a list of a few spy tools trusted by big corporations, celebrities and internet millionaires:

1. Rank Signals

2. Majestic Competitor Analytics

3.Ahrefs

4.SEMRush

5.Similar Web

Use these tools and outsmart your competitors. You will not need to spend a fortune on testing out different campaigns, targeting different age groups and geographical locations. If your competitor(s) are targeting a certain group of people, try targeting the same group. Chances are that they acquiring a lot of leads through the same demographic.

Over To You

Marketing, if done right, can transform your healthcare business for the better. Unlike other mediums, you don’t have to spend a fortune on paid channels, you can target the right people and every exclude some uninterested group to test out a few strategies.

With the healthcare marketing strategies mentioned earlier in this article, you could set long-term and short-term marketing goals to establish your medical brand and services in your community, state or the country.

If you lack the required marketing knowledge or dedicated time, hire a marketing professional to handle this task. Get in touch with us if you believe that the above-listed strategies will help you in building and establishing your business online.