Print collateral such as brochures and flyers can be effective in specific settings, but digital healthcare marketing is steadily growing, making up 90.9 percent of percent of healthcare marketing tactics in 2017 according to a 2018 Medical Marketing and Media report. As such, it’s crucial to employ marketing strategies that gives patients (both existing and potential) the functionalities they want while making it as easy as possible to move them down the marketing funnel to usage.
Your website should be robust and transactional. It’s important to build brand awareness, but that should be just one factor. By providing clear and engaging calls to action along with features personalized to patients based on location, for example, you’re able to give patients everything they need in one convenient place.
Once your site is developed, keeping your patients engaged is crucial. A customer relationship marketing (CRM) strategy can help you do just that by allowing you to reach and nurture patients at every interaction. Whether it’s through social media or email, keeping your patients engaged and aware of your dedication to their needs can lead to more profitable patient retention.
Even the most well designed websites may not prompt users to take action. To truly understand what is most effective, you must test what resonates with and motivates your audience. This can and should be done often through conversion rate optimization (CRO). The process can be broken down into five steps:
There are tools you can — and should — use to support your optimization process: web analytics tools measure performance and helps identify optimization opportunities; behavioral tracking tools show you how users engage with your content, helping to inform and test optimization recommendations; and testing tools execute A/B and multivariate tests to find the most effective content and design executions..
Paid search, also known as pay-per-click (PPC) ads, is an effective tool to quickly get your message to those searching for services that you may offer. Using PPC ads to test creative themes can be a cost effective way to get into the mind of your audience; the more they respond to a certain ad, the better insights you have for the creative direction of your future campaigns.
When researching keywords and developing paid search ads, keep in mind that what may be important for you — someone who works in healthcare — may not translate the same to patients and consumers. For example, you may be running a campaign with a keyword about “cancer computed tomography (CT) scans,” but a patient might search “CAT scan for cancer.”
Search engine optimization uses existing information and content from your website to yield better organic search results. All the content on your site, from headlines and captions to links, can be “scored” across different variables, and this scoring is taken into account in a search engine’s algorithm (e.g., Google, Bing, etc.). The higher your content is scored within each variable, the better your search engine rank. As you add functionalities or content to your site, you should continue performing SEO to keep your scoring high.
You can find tools to analyze and assess your site’s SEO score for content, website authority, and technical variables, such as page speed. When applied together, you have a higher chance of attracting new patients and moving them through the marketing funnel.
At Movéo, our healthcare clients benefit from data-driven strategies like these to help grow their business.
See how we can help you overcome your digital marketing pain points with a free 60-minute consultation.
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