It’s a commonly-heard cliché in marketing that certain campaigns have changed the lives of millions of people. Unlike many marketing disciplines, where the only lives changed are the lives of those few who got rich by selling their products or services, in healthcare marketing, this is literally true – your campaigns may very well change, improve, or even save lives.
Before we delve into the latest healthcare marketing trends that should help you build your medical business, let’s say a word or two about healthcare marketing in general.
What is Healthcare Marketing?
Healthcare marketing involves a set of omnichannel, highly-segmented and highly-targeted marketing strategies, created and implemented with the purpose of finding and acquiring the right patients, engaging with them, and nurturing them to form long-term doctor-patient relationships.
This specific branch of marketing was born out of the need of private health clinics and professionals to attract new patients. Basically, private healthcare industry functions as a B2C (business-to-customer) service.
In addition to general practice medical services, doctors and clinics focusing on healthcare marketing often offer beauty-related services like plastic surgery, aesthetic medicine, dermatology, or dental surgery.
With the development of technology, the health industry has changed too. Healthcare marketing as well – it has almost entirely shifted from offline to online. That being said, I present you with the 6 latest healthcare marketing trends to pay attention to.
The 6 Latest Healthcare Marketing Trends to Keep Up With
1. Patient-oriented, mobile-friendly website design
If you’re running a private clinic, I bet you invested significant sums into interior design, cleaning services, the best equipment, and so on. Anything that would make your patients feel comfortable, relaxed, and confident. Let’s face it, no patient wants to be treated at a place that looks like a scene from the Walking Dead.
That being said, your online clinic (your website) should be no different. The University of Surrey study has shown that 75% of user judgment on your business’s credibility is formed on the bases of your website design. Moreover, such judgments usually happen after as little as 3.42 seconds spent on the site.
So, what do your patients really want in terms of website design? Here are some of the must-haves:
- Mobile-friendly. Google’s own data shows that 77% of smartphone users have searched for local health services on mobile in the previous 6 months.
- Online scheduling option. A survey by Salesforce and Harris Poll has shown that 71% of Millennials consider online appointment booking via mobile apps as one of the most important conveniences.
- Easy personal health records access
- Virtual health services
- Messaging capabilities
- Informative content (educational blog posts, emergency wait room times, doctor or specialist info, and so on)
2. Location-based healthcare SEO
If I told you that 73% of patients research treatments online, 83% of them visit a hospital website before scheduling an appointment, while 43% of visits to hospital websites start at search engines, there’s only one conclusion to make – when it comes to healthcare marketing, SEO matters.
More precisely, as your business is physically dependant on the location of your clinic, location-based SEO and local marketing matter the most. You need to make sure whenever a potential customer types in their medical problem + near me in Google, your website comes up among the first results. Down below is the sample Google search for ‘dermatologist near me’ for the area of Phoenix, Arizona.
In case you’re completely new to the basic SEO practices, check out this beginner’s guide to SEO. Once you’ve familiarized yourself with the basics of SEO, we’ve prepared some actionable tips on how to dominate local marketing that apply to healthcare marketing as well.
3. Social media marketing – be where your patients are
If it’s not on social media, it didn’t happen. It doesn’t exist. And it’s unlikely to be found.
Everything is on social media nowadays. And so should your medical services be. Facebook alone has 2.23 billion monthly active users, while there are at least five more social media networks with over billion users.
Still, simply being present on social media (having a Facebook profile, for instance), is not nearly enough. You need to make sure your profile contains all the necessary information about your business, regularly post high-quality content, and promptly engage and interact with your audience.
The Mayo Clinic, for example, does a great job at this on Facebook.
4. Generating highly-targeted leads to easily convert into patients
Lead generation is one of the most important concepts in digital marketing. Without leads, there are no customers. Without customers, there are no sales. And without sales, there’s no business.
That being said, let’s briefly discuss another healthcare marketing trend that has emerged only recently – using quizzes to generate leads. Encouraged by great successes of a great number of their colleagues, more and more medical professionals are deciding on this step.
All you need to generate highly-targeted healthcare leads are a health-related quiz (and a quality quiz maker that lets you easily create one) and a traffic source (your website, social media, paid advertising, etc.). Asking various health-related questions will enable you to segment your potential patients according to their specific needs and then approach them with the right solution for their medical condition.
Let’s take a look at how other medical professionals use quizzes in their own healthcare marketing efforts:
Rejuv Medical created a hormone imbalance quiz, which they promoted on Facebook. Having in mind the importance of local healthcare marketing, they advertised it with a 50-mile radius to their two clinics.
The results? They generated 947 leads, driving them to a free consultation page. From these leads, they generated 30 consultations and turned 15 of those into new patients, which led to $18,000 in new revenue.
Let’s examine another example. Dr Kellyann Petrucci created a quiz around gluten intolerance, asking various questions about their potential patients’ health. After finishing the quiz, they opted in with their name and email in order to receive the results.
Using just a single quiz. Dr Kellyann managed to generate 40,145 leads, in only 5 months, at a $0.38 cost per lead. In her own words “LeadQuizzes has been a tremendous competitive advantage in our ability to grow our email list and create a bigger impact.”
As nothing speaks as loudly as success stories, here are a few more:
- Integrative Healthcare used LeadQuizzes and on a monthly basis, grew their local email list by 1,600 people, received 40-60 new consult requests, and closed 57% of them into new clients worth $1200/year on only $1000/month in ad spend.
- Dr. Joel Kahn, a Clinical Professor of Medicine (Cardiology) at Wayne State University School of Medicine, used LeadQuizzes to build his email list by 34,189 people in 6 months at a cost per lead of only $0.43.
- Dr Tami Meraglia used LeadQuizzes to build her email list by 34,657 people in 6 months and reduced her cost per lead to $0.19.
- Meno Clinic used LeadQuizzes to build their email list by 2,918 leads in 1 month at a cost per lead of only $0.31.
- Dr Anthony Capasso used LeadQuizzes to build his email list by 3,676 people in 1 month at a cost per lead of only $0.31.
- Dr David Jockers used LeadQuizzes to grow his email list by 4,738 leads in 3 months.
If you’re looking for more info on how to create your own quiz and use it to promote your healthcare services, we have prepared this detailed quiz maker guide.
5. Personalized email marketing
Once you’ve used your quiz (or any other lead generation and segmentation method) to segment your potential patients, you need to approach them with the right solution for their specific medical needs. The way to do it? Personalized email marketing.
A great thing about quizzes is that they enable you to get to know the quiz takers. Once you’ve gathered some data on them, it’s much easier to come up with personalized, non-generic content to use in your email copy.
If you’d like to learn more about the best email marketing practices or how to segment your email list, we’ve got that covered as well. Employing the basic principles behind behavioral and psychographic segmentation could do wonders for your healthcare marketing efforts!
6. Testimonials and reviews are the new word of mouth
As testimonials and reviews usually speak for themselves, I’ll just let one do that here.
Conclusion
Healthcare providers need to be as passionate about their marketing efforts as they are about providing impeccable patient care – in order to have someone to provide that care to in the first place.
As already shown above, improving your online presence and keeping up with the healthcare marketing trends is not only likely to “cure” your lack of patients but also help you maintain and improve your relationships with your current patients.
