With the use of groundbreaking technologies like AI for administrative efficiency and robotics in surgery, it’s evident that we’re witnessing a digital revolution in healthcare. At the same time, this transformation opens exciting new opportunities for healthcare marketing, but navigating them can be challenging. Between government and industry regulations and intense competition, healthcare marketing can be downright intimidating, particularly for smaller practices that may lack the resources of their larger counterparts.
Despite these challenges, the potential of healthcare marketing can’t be overlooked. Daily, there are over one billion health-related searches on Google. Additionally, one
in every ten Americans turns to social media for medical advice, and 69% of millennials prefer online information over consulting with their doctors. This digital inclination among potential patients is a clear indicator of where you should focus your marketing efforts. But throwing together a website and randomly posting on social media won’t deliver consistent results. In fact, poor digital healthcare marketing can backfire and send prospective patients running to your competitors.
So, how do you identify and implement the best marketing strategies in healthcare? It’s not enough to use the tactics of other successful healthcare organizations—you need to craft a unique narrative and a tailored strategy that sets you apart in a crowded marketplace.
Optimize Patient Engagement with the Best Marketing Strategies in Healthcare
As patients embrace digital tools and actively search for healthcare options, you must engage with them at every touchpoint of their online journey to drive more conversions. Investing in a modern, diversified, and timely healthcare marketing plan that reaches patients where they are is key to long-term success. Here are some of the best marketing strategies in healthcare you can use to increase patient acquisition and boost brand awareness:
Build and Maintain Consistent Branding
Just like customers don’t buy anything they don’t already know or trust, potential patients won’t choose a healthcare provider or services they’re not familiar with. That’s why building and maintaining a strong brand identity is one of the best marketing strategies in healthcare, proven to increase business revenues significantly.
A great starting point for creating this consistent brand image is maintaining a uniform color scheme and typography across all your marketing assets. Your logo should be simple, impactful, easily recognizable, and adaptable across various mediums. Avoid complex designs that might lose clarity when resized for smaller screens like those on mobile devices.
Ensuring consistency in your messaging is just as important as visual uniformity. This means that the tone, style, and core messages of your brand should align across all platforms. Whether through blog posts, social media updates, or advertising, your brand’s voice should reflect the values of your healthcare organization.
Expanding your brand strategy to encompass niche topics is another effective way to deepen connections with your audience. By addressing specific health concerns or raising awareness about lesser-known conditions, you can humanize your brand and drive inclusivity, showing that your healthcare practice pays attention to the different needs of your community.
For example, by aligning their marketing efforts with their core values of trust and excellence in patient care, the Mayo Clinic has successfully cultivated a strong, reliable brand presence. Their branding is marked by a focus on patient-centric content and interaction, encouraging health awareness and patient advocacy. This consistent, integrated approach across various platforms and initiatives effectively reinforces their brand identity, establishing the Mayo Clinic as a trusted and recognizable name in healthcare.
Benefit from the Power of Video
Using video marketing can significantly improve your ability to connect with and inform your audience. With 96% of marketers acknowledging its critical role in outreach, video content stands out as one of the best marketing strategies in healthcare for its flexibility and engagement potential.
This medium is perfect for summarizing information, offering insights, showcasing facility tours, sharing patient success stories, and presenting testimonials. In addition to this, the ease of integrating video into various platforms—from social media and YouTube to landing pages and blog posts—makes it an incredibly effective tool.
An excellent example of this strategy in action is New York-Presbyterian Hospital’s video campaign featuring patient stories, demonstrating the impactful use of video in healthcare marketing. Their approach goes beyond mere information sharing, building a narrative that viewers can relate to and feel a part of. Showcasing real patient experiences and journeys through healthcare allows the hospital to engage with a broader audience, demonstrating the power of video in creating lasting relationships and trust in the healthcare sector.
Encourage and Manage Reviews
People always look for social proof before making a decision, particularly in the healthcare industry, making review management one of the best marketing strategies in healthcare.
A lack of reviews can cause problems, as your potential patients might find it suspicious that you don’t have any ratings online. For this reason, you need to request and encourage feedback from satisfied patients. You can do this by sending them automated review requests 24 hours after receiving care.
How you respond to the feedback, both positive and negative, is equally important. If you leave a review unaddressed, it can signal that you don’t value patient experiences. Make sure to take the time to follow up on reviews by thanking patients for complimenting your services or responding with empathy and HIPAA compliance in mind to those unsatisfied with your care.
Maximize Social Media Impact
Social media plays a crucial role in healthcare choices for many, highlighting its importance in the best marketing strategies in healthcare. Social media platforms give you a way to connect with patients outside of their appointments alone. Creating and publishing regular content keeps you front and center, so when patients need you, they know where to turn.
As part of this strategy, you can create a hashtag campaign to build buzz around a particular topic or event and engage users. A key aspect of this tactic is to choose a hashtag that’s short, memorable, and easy to spell, promote it across social media, and even partner with influencers or organizations with similar values to broaden your reach.
For example, the World Heart Foundation advocates for funding and prevention of heart disease and strokes by globally broadcasting their dangers. Their global scale means that social channels play a big part in their campaigns. Instagram and Twitter were used to encourage people around the world to take ‘Healthy Heart Selfies’ and post them with the #PowerYourLife and #WorldHeartDay branded hashtags. These, in turn, were curated by the World Heart Foundation, shared on its website, and branded social channels.
Create Value-Driven Patient Engagement Offers
When it comes to the best marketing strategies in healthcare, offering value-driven patient engagement is also important. In other words, you need to provide patients with something of tangible value that resonates with their health needs and interests.
This involves creating compelling incentives that encourage prospective patients to connect with your healthcare services. One effective way to do this is by offering resources or services that potential patients find beneficial, such as providing a free health consultation or screening, an ebook on a relevant health topic, or exclusive access to new research or workshops.
When creating these engagement offers, remember that what you offer has to be equally valuable as the information the prospect will be giving you. The goal is to establish a relationship based on mutual benefit and trust, paving the way for more personalized and targeted healthcare marketing strategies.
Analyze and Track for Data-Driven Success
Now that we’ve looked at several of the best marketing strategies in healthcare, it all comes down to one thing: how do you know what’s working and where the opportunities for improvement lie?
Incorporating data analysis and tracking is essential to understanding the effectiveness of your campaigns and ensuring your marketing efforts are data-driven and results-oriented. Regularly monitoring and analyzing data helps refine your strategies, enhance patient engagement, and optimize your marketing ROI. In addition, this approach is necessary for adapting to changing trends and maintaining the effectiveness of your healthcare marketing initiatives.
Healthcare marketing is a dynamic field, offering endless opportunities for growth and patient connection. As you navigate the best marketing strategies in healthcare, partnering with platforms like SocialClimb can be transformative.
Our healthcare-specific platform provides you with the ability to measure the effectiveness of any marketing campaign through increases in patient appointments. We can help you follow patients from their first click on an ad to the operating room and beyond–in a HIPAA-compliant way! This insight into the patient journey will allow you to better select your marketing campaigns and prove their value at your organization. Learn more about patient conversion tracking.
