Are you a healthcare marketing agency or marketing executive looking to attract new patients or stay ahead of your competition in 2021?
You’re in luck.
Whether you’re looking to kick off your healthcare business or you’re ready to scale up – we’ll give you the top 12 actionable healthcare marketing tips you can apply to get ahead of your competition in 2021.
Let’s take a look.
1. Improve Your Google EAT Score
What is Google’s E-A-T?
E-A-T stands for Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness.
Google E-A-T rating is a part of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, a 175-page document that shares how Google measures the expertise (topic), authoritativeness (author), and trust (publisher) of the content.
Sounds cool, right?
Let’s dig a little deeper.
What It Means for Healthcare Marketers
In August 2018 Google rolled out one of the largest search engine algorithm updates dubbed the Google Medic Update.
It is important for healthcare marketers because it was meant to primarily affect organic rankings for health, fitness, and medical websites.
Google E-A-T plays a critical role in how healthcare websites trend and how publish their content and who is writing them.
For example, if you publish medical advice, it should be written or produced by people or organizations with appropriate medical expertise or accreditation.
Pretty simple.
Instead of just following the best healthcare marketing strategies to generate more leads and conversions, healthcare marketers must focus on creating content people can trust.
Gone are the days when you can just publish articles optimized for healthcare keywords and rank on top of SERPs.
Let’s take a look at a live case study.
Source: DoctorAnyTime.gr
Take www.doctoranytime.gr that was hit by the Medic Update. The site believed that it wasn’t trustworthy enough in the eyes of Google. Their goal moving forward was to re-establish its E-A-T to improve its ranking.
The site was able to recover from the update by following Google’s Search Quality Rater Guideline and by performing the following optimization to improve the EAT of their website:
Optimization Techniques:
- Drastically restructuring the content on their blog and main site
- Reduce the amount of promotional CTAs from four to five to just two or even one
- Created an editorial policy and openly informend how they verify health information
- Enhanced our author’s bio information
- Hired physicians to review the content and added them as reviewers (inside the schema as well)
- Linked author profiles with author pages (only with bio information) and also their website (if available)
- Added forms asking doctors and patients feedback
Final Thoughts
Do keep in mind, even with all the EAT improvements you make, it is never guaranteed that your website organic traffic or your keyword rankings will recover.
If there’s more deserving content, Google will continue to favor them instead.
| PRO TIP: It is very expensive and hard to find good writers who are medically accredited. That’s when websites like www.kolabtree.com and www.clearvoice.com may come in handy and help you ensure your content is up to par with Google EAT standards. |
2. Healthcare Audience Segmentation: Refine Your Target Audience
What is Audience Segmentation?
In case you didn’t know, not everyone in your audience is on the same level of your sales funnel.
Source: Fit Small Business
Some of them are still in the Awareness or Discovery pipelines while some will be deeper down the funnel.
This reason is why audience segmentation is vital to your healthcare marketing strategy.
It refers to organizing your contacts into different subgroups based on their respective stages in the pipeline.
From here, you can send each of them tailored messages that speak at their level, thus helping them slide down deeper to your sales funnel.
What It Means for Healthcare Marketers
Based on its definition, audience segmentation doesn’t sound fun for healthcare marketers.
This goes to show that you can’t send everyone the same message and expect them to convert.
As a result, you have to carefully craft your messages personalized to each subgroup.
I know, you’ll have to spend more time developing these messages before sending them out.
However, think of the positives:
By sending them personalized content, you can increase your engagement with each subgroup.
Through engagement, they become more aware of what your product and service does.
And once they’re knowledgeable about their benefits, it’s much easier to convert them into customers and repeat clients!
Doesn’t sound as bad now, does it?
But before you can properly segment your audience, you need to set up your system where you can manage subgroups in your audience.
For this, you can use a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool like HubSpot CRM or similar.
Hubspot is a marketing automation software that offers a free CRM software. With it, you can use it alongside your email client to organize conversations with clients and leads.
Source: YouTube
When segmenting your audience using a CRM tool, group them into specific pipelines of your sales funnel.
The idea is to help guide them down your funnel by creating a healthcare marketing plan using different techniques for each.
You will learn more about these tactics to use for these pipelines in the other tips below.
Final Thoughts
By determining the most appropriate approach to convert the audience in your pipelines, you can engage your audience more effectively.
You can create campaigns that not only turn your leads into customers but also educate and inform the public about your business.
| PRO TIP: It’s much easier to get existing customers to get back as returning ones because of their previous experience with your brand. Using a CRM tool, identify who they are in your audience and create a healthcare marketing plan that caters to these segments to maximize your sales. |
3. Research and Optimize for Local Keywords
What are Local Keywords?
Keywords refer to the queries users type in on search engines to find relevant information about the topic.
Local keywords, therefore, are keywords with location-specific terms that produce results to pages related to the entered location.
For example, if I’m from Arizona and am looking for chiropractors, I type “Arizona chiropractors” or any variation of this keyword.
The results should show me pages of chiropractors practicing in the Arizona area.
I can also type “chiropractors near me” on Google since it’s smart enough to identify where I’m conducting my search.
What It Means for Healthcare Marketers
This keyword type allows people to identify the best terms that healthcare marketers should optimize their businesses for.
This way, they can appear on top of Google, especially on the local 3-pack, and get more visitors that way.
Here’s the catch, though:
Finding the right local keyword for one’s business isn’t as simple as it seems.
Optimizing for “Chiropractor Arizona” for on-page SEO doesn’t equate to your site ranking on top of organic search for it.
You’ll be vying for the same spot against hundreds of other chiropractors in the area, some of which have a more established site and a better healthcare marketing strategy.
At the same time, you need to consider other variables of local keywords to maximize your traffic.
Again, it’s complicated.
But to help you simplify local keyword research a bit, you need a tool like Ahrefs to see factors like keyword difficulty, search volume, and others.
The information here will help you choose the best search phrases to use, as well as keyword ideas and suggestions you can use for these pages.
Once you have the keywords, you must integrate each of them to the right pages correctly. Using Surfer SEO not only helps you create content optimized for the keywords.
It also lets you craft semantically relevant content relative to the keyword so you can rank higher on Google.
Using Surfer SEO’s Content Editor, you can also export the guidelines to create instant content briefs you can assign to writers.
This is what YOYABA Gmbh, a German digital marketing agency, did for one of their clients in the health niche. Using Surfer to create content briefs relative to the keywords it is trying to optimize for, the agency was also able to grow their impressions by 152% for a certain industry.
Final Thoughts
By combining the keyword research features of Ahrefs and the content optimization abilities of Surfer SEO, you can produce content that would serve as the foundations of your healthcare marketing.
| PRO TIP: When creating content for your healthcare site, target long-tail keywords (at least five words in a search phrase). They are easier to rank for and have a clear search intent, making them ideal terms to optimize for. |
4. Turn Visitors Into Patients With Lead Magnets
What are Lead Magnets?
Lead magnets are products and services given away to your audience for free in exchange for their contact details.
An example of a lead magnet in the healthcare niche is a free pain assessment from APC Physio.
Source: APC Physio
The clinic takes the patient’s details to conduct a 15-minute call assessing the pain you’re experiencing and gathering additional information about it.
What It Means for Healthcare Marketers
Lead magnets are a great way for clinics and medical practitioners to get in touch with their audience.
In other words:
They help bridge the gap between fairweather healthcare website visitors and knowledgeable customers.
Some of your visitors may be the perfect patient for your healthcare business – they just don’t know it yet.
Therefore, by lending their expertise for free (even for a moment), clinics are able to build a more personalized approach with leads.
As a result, converting them into actual patients becomes much easier.
If you can’t offer a free consultation, you can create other lead magnet types such as (but are not limited to):
- eBooks
- Guides
- Whitepapers
- Reports
You can set this up with a pop-up form to appear on your site. Once people fill out the form with their contact information, they wil receive the free content straight to their inbox.
Final Thoughts
Lead magnets could prove to be the missing link in your healthcare marketing plan.
By informing website visitors how your services can help them, you guide them down your sales funnel to ultimately become your patients.
| PRO TIP: If you have blog posts on your site, you can improve one of them and turn it into a lead magnet using Beacon or similar. This beats having to create content from scratch or offering free consultations. |
5. Engage with Your Audience on Social Media
Why Social Media?
So far, we talked about generating site traffic by optimizing it for local keywords.
But you’d probably be surprised when I say this:
There are other channels to help you expand your reach and drive more customers to your healthcare business, if not raise awareness.
Who would’ve thought?
Seriously, if you’re looking for other digital channels where you can reach out to patients, it doesn’t get any better than social media.
With over 3.8 billion users across different social media platforms, you are sure to close at least a patient or two from this channel.
What It Means for Healthcare Marketers
Just from the volume of social media users worldwide alone, healthcare marketers like yourself will have a field day finding leads and patients on different platforms.
But, as always, you must still do your due diligence when promoting medical products and services on this channel.
Therefore, here’s what you should do:
Dedicate your resources into social channels where your audience is mostly found.
For instance, LinkedIn works best if your target is B2B, while Twitter is perfect for B2C.
For Arkansas Children’s Hospital, it’s Instagram.
They use the platform to share success stories of their patients and employees involved in various activities involving the organization.
Source: Instagram
The best thing about the hospital’s social media activity is the absence of anything related to sales.
All it’s doing is showing how the people working in the hospital are helping the community with their efforts. It’s a great way to build trust with potential patients in the area.
Also, there are no surprises to the level of engagement Arkansas Children’s Hospital received since 55% of social media people trust hospital posts.
There are other emerging social sites like TikTok and Snapchat, but you need to create content specific to those platforms before you can engage.
Source: TikTok
While medical professionals tend to be more business-like in nature and demeanor, it doesn’t mean they can’t have fun, especially when the need calls for it.
This TikTok of a doctor shows him in a “Character Select” meme that describes what his specialty is.
The video fits the whimsical nature of the social media without compromising the doctor’s medical accomplishments.
Final Thoughts
The key to successful healthcare marketing on social media is constant engagement.
By creating content that resonates with your patients, regardless of their tone, you can bring more awareness to your practice and generate more clients that way.
| PRO TIP: Since your goal is to engage with your social media followers, you don’t need to sell or promote them anything. What you want to do is show what takes place behind the scenes in your clinic or hospital as seen in the examples above to also build trust with patients. |
6. Spy on Competitors
What is Competitive Analysis?
Competitor analysis refers to the process of researching about the strategies your competitors implement in their campaigns.
In a way, you’re spying on your competitors, although you’re not breaking any laws in doing so.
Instead, you are reverse-engineering competitors by starting with their current results to trace back to possible tactics.
This is the closest you can get into the minds of people running similar businesses as you, which is very important for building your marketing strategy.
What It Means for Healthcare Marketers
Healthcare marketing doesn’t take place in a bubble.
What I mean is this:
You can’t develop a marketing plan in complete isolation against similar businesses.
This may seem like a good thing because you put the spotlight exclusively on your healthcare business.
However, you shut yourself out from what others are doing.
Maybe your competitors are launching high-converting campaigns that you’re not aware of using strategies you haven’t heard of before.
This reason would explain why you can’t achieve the goals you set for yourself with your campaigns.
Thus, competitive analysis lets you take a page of tactics your competitors used in their campaigns that worked.
A tool you can use for this purpose is Competitors.app. It shows you keywords your competitors are ranking for and backlinks it has that you don’t.
For SEM, it also spies on your competitor ads.
From here, you can check which variants most people are clicking on.
For social media, the tool lets you track your social media performance and see how you compare against competitors.
You should see here opportunities for posts you can publish and share across your social channels.
With help from competitor research tools, you can take the best performing content, ads, and social posts of your competitors.
Final Thoughts
You can’t build a winning healthcare marketing campaign without spying on your competitors. In a way, they provide you a holistic view of the industry and its best practices.
By finding out which tactics work for your competitors, you can emulate their success, if not exceed it!
| PRO TIP: To maximize your effort, find the best-performing content of your competitors using your tool of choice and create even better versions of them for your business. This way, you can leapfrog their performance on search engines and social engagement. |
7. Launch Patient or Customer Programs
What are these Programs about?
Patient programs refer to initiatives rewarding subscribed patients with exclusive VIP treatment and services.
To get into the program and receive these benefits, the patient needs to pay a monthly fee to the medical doctor.
On the other hand, customer programs reward patients with points and credit they can consume over a period by performing specific actions.
The more they do these acts, the more credits they get.
What It Means for Healthcare Marketers
In today’s world, it’s all about building loyalty.
And, ironically enough, loyalty is cheap.
How?
A 2% bump in customer retention results in a 10% reduction in costs.
Moreover, a new customer costs five times more than an old one.
That means you have to spend on marketing and promoting your services to reach new patients. Whereas all you need to do with old patients is to hit them up via phone or email.
This goes to show the value that previous customers have in relation to growing your healthcare practice!
And by using the aforementioned programs as part of your healthcare marketing strategy, you get them to commit to your services even more.
For physicians, consider setting up a customer loyalty program to long-time patrons.
Source: Optimal Dental
By having one, you provide patients with better services that regular patients don’t get.
In doing so, you give patients part of the program preferential treatment of services. And as long as you hold up your end of the bargain, expect these patients to remain part of your program for a long time.
Read this Medium post to learn how to build the right loyalty program for your healthcare business.
For other healthcare vendors, howeverer, it’s better to pursue a referral program to grow their business.
22 Days Nutrition, a meal planner service planner, has an Ambassador Program in which members can earn a 10% commission on every successful person they refer.
Source: 22 Days Nutrition
Based on the examples above, referral programs work best for products in the healthcare niche while loyalty programs are best for services.
Nonetheless, whichever program you use, turn this healthcare marketing opportunity into more engaged clients with your practice.
The more you reward and treat them well, the longer they’ll stick things out with your business.
Final Thoughts
Your choice between a patient or customer program depends on your healthcare business. Some models work better with patient programs while others do best with customer programs.
| PRO TIP: You can partner with local businesses within your area to offer your patients discounts to those establishments. They’ll do the same with their loyal customers to yours. This is a good way to help each other grow their customer bases. |
8. Invest in Trust to the Next Level
How to Gain the Trust of Patients?
With the advent of Google EAT and YMYL, you need to make your site as authoritative as it can be.
We already touched upon hiring medically accredited writers in your staff earlier.
Surely, there has to be something more, right?
Right! (And don’t call me Shirley.)
One of those ways is to include credentials of the article’s fact-checker.
Source: Healthline
Another thing to consider is applying for accreditation from Health on the Net.
As an authority in the healthcare scene, a HONcode certificate is akin to a thumbs up from the site.
Source: Health on the Net
By passing all its regulations by containing the right information and solutions to health-related issues, your site gets the respect it deserves from your audience.
What It Means for Healthcare Marketers
It’s one thing to have an online presence with your healthcare brand.
It’s easy to just rehash health-related content from different sources.
But publishing advice from an accredited and accomplished writer in the health field allows you to earn the respect of patients.
I know what you’re thinking:
Is it fair for healthare businesses to pull out all the stops whereas other industries can rank their sites without the need for accreditation?
Here’s the truth:
You want to provide the best solutions to people looking to improve their health.
Because if not and if their health fails under your watch, imagine the backlash your business witll receive!
To answer the question, there’s a reason why Google EAT and YMYL is receiving the attention it deserves.
If you care about helping your patients, then you shouldn’t even be asking this question, to be honest.
Therefore, by featuring the necessary trust signals on your site, you get your audience and Google on your side.
Final Thoughts
If gaining a foothold in the market with your healthcare business means bending backwards to appease your patients, so be it.
Taking your site seriously by creating content and services meant to improve people’s lives shows that you also take their lives seriously.
And the more trust signals you set up on your site, the sooner Google and people will hold it in high regard.
| PRO TIP: Similar to medical writers, you need to hire fact-checkers with a medical background on Kolabtree. This ensures that the information provided by writers in the content is accurate and correct. |
9. Manage Your Online Reputation
What is Online Reputation?
Online reputation refers to the sentiment that people online have about your brand or business.
The sentiment is generated from the accumulation of reviews and mentions of your business on different online channels.
For instance, if unhappy patients left a negative review about your services, it creates a predominantly negative reputation to your brand.
Online reputation is vital from a sales perspective – more than ⅓ of patients believe in the sentiment a doctor has.
Moreover, almost 60% of patients avoided physicians with negative reviews and chose those with postiive ones.
Makes sense, if you ask me!
What It Means for Healthcare Marketers
Receiving less-than-stellar reviews from unhappy customers on Yelp, Google My Business, and other online directories is par for the course among meical professionals.
However, it’s what they do next that determines what patients think of them after.
Here’s the problem:
Brands would downplay these reviews and let the positive ones shine on their profile.
According to a PatientPop survey, half of respondents rely on information on online business directories when making an informed decision.
What’s even more telling is 95% of Americans find online reviews “reliable,” according to a Binary Fountain survey.
As you can see, a negative review sometimes is much more telling about a business.
In that case, instead of ignoring negative reviews, it’s best to take them in stride and open a line of communication with customers.
Here’s what you should do as healthcare marketers:
Learn from their constructive criticisms and find a way to include the improvements in your business.
By simply addressing the negative review, you can almost double the rate of patient satisfaction according to the same PatientPop survey.
Another way to manage your online reputation is to identify posts on social media with negative sentiment.
Instead of waiting for their issues to trickle down to you, get ahead of the conversation and nip this out of the bud. Use Awario to help you track and monitor your brand name and keywords.
It will show you social posts where people used your name. Get to the bottom of this by reply to the post and finding a way to resolve this.
Doing these shows to other people that you care about your customers despite their feedback.
Final Thoughts
There’s truth to the saying, “perception is reality.”
Even if some of the negative reviews are inaccurate to what really happened, people tend to give them the benefit of the doubt until you respond to them.
Failure to respond shows that you either don’t care about what people think or what happened is true.
Either way, you allow a negative perception to develop about your brand, which could lead to fewer patients moving forward.
To avoid this, respond quickly to diffuse the situation, if not make things better for you.
| PRO TIP: Sometimes, the best defense is a good offense. Instead of waiting for negative reviews to respond to, ask patients to submit a review on your Yelp or GMB account after their positive session with you. This way, you build goodwill towards your audience and prospective patients. |
10. Embrace Technology
What is Healthcare Technology?
Also referred to as “healthtech,” this term talks about IT tools for the benefit of the healthcare system.
This includes unearthing new data regarding medicinal treatment, improving administrative productivity in hospitals, and others.
Also, innovations in healthtec are cost-effective, more efficient, and provide more customization options for healthcare businesses.
This means they can offer better and faster services on top of giving a more personal approach to their patients.
What It Means for Healthcare Marketers
Healthcare has been experiencing a surge in emerging technologies, much to the delight of healthcare marketers.
For example, innovations like Amazon Alexa to manage the conditions of patients make everything more convenient to both physicians and patients.
In relation to this, your healthcare marketing should revolve around leveraging these IT tools to power one’s practice and eschew the traditional approach.
That means no need for in-person visits and consultations to reach out to patients!
This is a gamechanger, for sure!
One of the more interesting technological developments nowadays is telemedicine and telehealth.
During these times when social distancing is the norm, healthcare organizations must go out of their way to serve patients even when away.
Partners HealthCare offers a wide variety of telehealth services to cater to patients who are unable to visit the clinic. This allows them to get the right treatment for their condition without the personal visit.
Source: Partners HealthCare
From a marketing standpoint, this is an opportunity physicians should capitalize on to get in touch with more patients in this online world.
But the key to this operation is setting up your equipment to ensure a seamless experience between you and patients.
We’ve already discussed tools you can use to improve your healthcare marketing efforts. However, the end goal of using technology is to collect patient information for healthcare marketing purposes.
Using their details, organizations can come up with better campaigns that target these patients based on their demographic.
For example, Tempus gathers data of cancer patients to help physicians provide personalized treatment plans to offer patients that match specific cases from the data.
For other medical practitioners to gather patient information efficiently, tools like CareCloud allow you to set up a mobile app.
Source: CareCloud
Aside from collecting data, you can review their clinical documents at the palm of your hands. It also lets you schedule your appointments and approve medication refills to make your job much easier.
Once you have their information in an easy-to-access device, you can personalize your interactions with each of them and market your services better.
Final Thoughts
As you can, healthcare technology has a positive and indelible impact on one’s medical business.
Not only can you implement the most appropriate IT software to help your patients, but you can also manage their data more effectively and run better campaigns in the long run.
| PRO TIP: White label a healthcare mobile app using Continuous Care or similar. This works both ways – patients can book appointments, receive e-prescriptions, and ask questions; while physicians can access patient data, consult via videos, and receive payments online from the appl. |
11. Use Omnichannel Marketing
What are Local Keywords?
“Omnichannel” refers to a content strategy that makes use of different channels as touchpoints to establish better relationships with your audience.
In the context of marketing, it involves the use of social media, SEO, ads, text, and other channels to produce a seamless and immersive experience with your brand.
When done correctly, the omnichannel approach can help drive more conversions to your business.
But you need to know how to make it work with regard to healthcare marketing.
What It Means for Healthcare Marketers
Here’s how:
This strategy allows them to streamline communication between physicians and patients.
And here’s an example:
Dental clinics vow their allegiance to direct mail as their top healthcare marketing tactic even to this time.
However, by putting all their eggs in a single basket, they miss out on the opportunity of generating more patients online.
Borealis Dental Studios was aware of this, which is why they went the omnichannel marketing route to squeeze out more sales.
Instead of just sending postcards to patients, their campaign now consists of online ads that last up to 60 days for better retention and call tracking.
In doing so, the clinic was able to increase their monthly new patients by 143% and saw a 998% ROI in a year, among other results.
Source: Midwest Direct
Final Thoughts
There’s a lot to learn about omnichannel marketing alone in relation to healthcare marketing.
For one, omnichannel healthcare marketing paves way to consistent branding across all platforms.
By creating a channel-agnostic system where you can reach out to and monitor leads using different platforms, you align your brand message on all these touch points.
As a result, it helps improve your brand’s reputation in the industry thanks largely in part of prioritizing a more immersive communication system.
To learn more about omnichannel marketing, read this article at MD Connect.
| PRO TIP: To develop coordinated omnichannel campaigns for your healthcare marketing, you must segment your audience according to the pipeline. By identifying which level they are in your sales funnel, you can create personalized cross-channel campaigns for each to improve your conversion rates. |
12. Analyze Performance (and Repeat What Works)
What is Web Analytics?
Web analytics is the practice of gathering information about your online properties to determine how your audience interacts with each of them.
The goal is to use the collected data to improve the performance of your website and social media, among others, and gain insights about your target audience.
I’m going to be the first to say that crunching the data can be a boring and tedious process.
But here’s the doozy:
How you interpret and take action on your web analytics with dictate the growth of your healthcare business moving forward.
What It Means for Healthcare Marketers
Upon implementation of your healthcare marketing campaign, you can track its current progress or review it once the campaign has concluded to see the results.
Depending on the campaign you launched, you should be able to monitor the results with the specific tool used for the plan.
For instance, you can see how many in your email list became customers during your drip email strategy from your email tool like ActiveCampaign or GetResponse.
Then take the good things and replicate them on your next campaign or remove the ones that didn’t work.
However, the answers to your problems aren’t always in the campaigns you launched. Not all analytics tools can measure patient experience and sentiment as well as clinical efficiency.
Here’s a case study to show you what I mean:
An orthopedic and spine practice was having problems recouping their ROI from the CMS bundle it was paying for.
However, by tracking its critical performance metrics that go beyond its healthcare marketing campaigns, the practice was able to increase its referrals and double its reimbursements through open negotiations with payors.
Therefore, you need to think outside the box when finding ways to improve the performance of your business.
Final Thoughts
Web analytics is critical in helping you increase your website’s bottom line.
However, each healthcare marketing campaign you launch requires you to gather different sets of data. That means more numbers to crunch and interpret.
But whether you’re a fan of numbers or not, coming up with ways to improve the performance of your business across all boards is in your best interest.
Hence, you have to analyze your healthcare business properly if you want it to succeed.
| PRO TIP: Find tactics that worked in your campaigns based on the analytics and double-down on them. For instance, if chatbots generate the best response from patients as far as getting in touch with your business is concerned, you need to find other ways where you can implement chatbots in your practice. |
Conclusion
In a sea of businesses trying to provide the best products and services to their audiences, healthcare marketing is everything.
How you position your brand and the unique angles you’ll be taking to find prospects and turning them into patients is key to your success.
By applying the healthcare marketing tips above, you should be able to grow your business and help even more people.
