The healthcare and medical sector are endorsing and promoting the use of digital services. With customized digital marketing solutions and effective Digital Marketing Services for Doctors, it is possible to bridge the gap between patients and healthcare providers to promote brand awareness, maintain long-term relationships, increase revenue, and multiply profit.
A study suggests that at least 58% of smartphone users download and use healthcare applications. And you are probably one of such people! In fact, healthcare is at your fingertips.
Digital Marketing Services for Doctors
The healthcare industry is constantly leveraging the next technological advancement — being in sync with the digital pulse of branding.
If you’re working in the healthcare industry, you already have enough going on with your patients than look at your website’s performance. Digital marketing for doctors and physicians is a confusing prescription, as is their handwriting.
The Importance of Digital Marketing Services for Doctors
Nowadays, people look for illnesses, book appointments, and read testimonials before visiting a new clinic or hospital. Hence, digital marketing for physicians, healthcare centers, and clinics helps them build a strong and convincing online presence through social networking approaches, channels, and tools.
Digital marketing provides a lot of benefits to healthcare providers and other medical professionals. It promotes their services to a broader range of consumers and helps better manage their brand identity, acquiring new customers to their business.
Additionally, it also allows doctors’ clinics to access a set of new tools and techniques to help patients and physicians in a professional and more resourceful way.
Healthcare professionals can now get high exposure and reach billions of people online through search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing, and content marketing as opposed to traditional advertising techniques.
According to a study conducted by consultancy firm Deloitte, approximately 52% of individuals search online for relevant information about treatment alternatives or to learn more about their health concerns.
Hence, it is clear that the healthcare marketing strategy inclines towards encouraging and strengthening the relationship between healthcare professionals, hospitals, and doctors’ clinics.
Benefits of Using Digital Marketing Services in the Healthcare Business
Digital marketing is a valuable metric to utilize in branding and advertising healthcare institutions and building an online presence. There are several concrete benefits of adopting digital marketing practices for the healthcare industry, and below are some of the best of them.
Here are the top 7 tangible benefits and importance of digital marketing for healthcare professionals, hospitals, and clinics:
1. Improve Your Online Presence and Service Awareness
The healthcare and medical industry is becoming over-competitive. If you want to grow your consumer base, it is important that you spread awareness of the major services you provide.
In an online survey, Google recorded that at least 44% of visitors choose to make their doctors’ appointments online or by calling after noting down the number from websites before visiting the clinics. It shows us a specific trend of the individuals who research online before selecting a hospital, clinic, or physician.
The use of digital marketing services for your healthcare service provides a broader consumer reach and develops a good branding of the services you provide.
2. Easier Access to Patients’ Healthcare Records
The majority of healthcare services and medical professionals refrain from choosing any marketing service since they consider it an inappropriate practice. Digital marketing for healthcare services actually helps in making things simpler and more accessible for patients.
For instance, having a website and an active social media page helps provide the patients simpler access to hospitals and healthcare professionals and saves them from unnecessary service research. Moreover, patients are always grateful for an extraordinary user-friendly experience.
3. Display Your Healthcare Services Online
Social media gives your practice an excellent platform for promoting your service offerings. Whether it’s displaying a service section on your social media platform or highlighting healthcare packages on the website, digital marketing makes it simpler and convenient. With just a few clicks, your potential patients can see how you may help them.
There is no constraint of exploration for patients. They do not have to wait outside your clinic to book an appointment. A social media presence or website is an extension of your hospital that never sleeps. Its 24*7 access is what helps a patient or a potential customer.
4. Provides Accuracy
Digital marketing for healthcare services is more of a requirement than an option when it comes to advertising the right information. If you’re not mindful of your online presence and reputation, it will allow the incorrect information to spread like a virus. This can adversely affect your reputation, potential customers, and the overall consumer base.
When you implement a well-informed digital marketing strategy, it ensures that no misinformation or ill word of mouth occurs on social media platforms. In this case, your social media channel is a noticeboard of information.
5. Tailored Marketing Strategy
Marketing isn’t just about making engaging promotional videos and posting attractive ad posters. The key advantage of using digital marketing for hospitals is that you can tailor it according to your requirements.
There are a lot of tools and techniques that you can use to promote your services. For example, content marketing is very effective in holding a strong social media presence and keeping the audience aware of your service.
In case your product demands only pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, it can be done so and likewise. Digital marketing cannot be a ‘one strategy fits all’ approach. It varies from service to service, similar to the fingerprints of hands.
6. Excellent SEO Benefits
Healthcare institutions have the ability to broaden their social media presence and brand themselves by using search engine optimization(SEO). SEO techniques allow healthcare professionals to be found in large numbers in search engine results.
For instance, patients who are conducting a Google search for doctors in their local service area can easily find a doctor’s clinic when the doctor has used SEO to reach the right audience.
SEO techniques do not apply only to hospitals at large. Several patients are looking for local practices on the internet, and these searches ultimately direct towards a potential patient.
A study by Google suggests that approximately 28% of online searches for something nearby result in a profit/purchase. Moreover, local SEO or website optimization for local search results can also be a useful digital marketing initiative for practices that function in particular geographical locations.
7. Improved Rates of Conversion
Converting a patient’s healthcare record online is just at your fingertips. Did you ever think that it’s now a reality? Rather than a patient having to go physically to the clinic or wait to book an appointment, they can make an appointment from the comfort of their home.
The average for website conversion rates stands at 2%. For every 100 visitors, you can only expect to gain 2 potential customers. And in fact, that’s a very good conversion rate. A lot of websites only have a 0.1 to 0.2 conversion rate. This means that to gain one potential customer, you need to have 1000 visitors.
This is why you need to focus on your digital marketing strategy by leveraging marketing automation to start looking for patients online now.
5 Best Digital Marketing Strategies for Doctors and Physicians
1. Leverage Videos to Engage More People
According to a recent survey, over 5 million videos are watched on YouTube daily. Videos that are more engaging generate 1200% more shares than texts and pictures combined. They are one of the best digital marketing strategies for developing authenticity and value for your brand.
There is nothing more interesting than watching an informational video that has got you glued to the screen. This tactic helps your patients feel at ease and assures them that they are in safe hands. Moreover, videos are also the correct medium to feature your customer feedbacks.
The biggest advantage to leveraging videos is their ability to display and portray multiple emotions such as hope, courage, and passion that drive them further down the marketing funnel.
2. Website Optimization
Imagine you have an extraordinary website, proactive blogging platform, emailer, and videos. However, your patients cannot find you on Google. The only effective way to solve this problem is to implement different methods of search engine optimization with an in-depth on-page and off-page checklist.
SEO is essential when it comes to digital marketing for physicians and other healthcare professionals in building a content strategy dependent on keywords used by your patients for their Google searches.
The first thing you need to do before producing your content is to do keyword research leveraging tools such as the Google Keyword Research Tool and LSI Keyword Generator Tool.
It is always recommended for you to look for a keyword with a lower difficulty score and higher search volume. Even though you need the latter metric for better website ranking, good content is always the king.
3. Leverage Local SEO
According to a recent study, around 39% of patients select their physician or hospital on a Google search. These stats prove that enlisting your healthcare services or clinic on Google My Business Listings plays a significant part in improving your visibility and customer base.
Ensure that you provide relevant information with your latest services, phone numbers, working hours, complete address, and a direct link to your website.
These listings also offer feedbacks shared by former patients and visitors that add more value to your practice. Moreover, you can also share relevant blog links in your listings, providing readers and visitors with a comprehensive glance of what you have to offer.
4. Go Social for Building Strong Connections
Digital Marketing for healthcare professionals is incomplete without a strong connection on social media platforms. The key element that every doctor should remember is that every networking platform has a unique audience.
The preferences and trends of Facebook and Twitter are very different than that of LinkedIn. Hence, it is a good idea to strategize your social media campaign dependent on the platform’s demographics and nature.
There is no better tool than online networking platforms to address the complaints and worries of your customers.
For example, online communities and forums are excellent tools to better address customer complaints. Hangout interactions, hashtag campaigns, memes, infographics, live chats, and Q&A sessions are other ways to successfully engage your customer base through social media.
5. Use Blogs to Promote Content
Once you’ve developed a user-friendly website, the next thing you need to do is build a strong informational blog section that resonates with your medical practice.
According to studies, around 3.5 million medical searches take place daily on Google. To begin with, you need to understand those elements that are constantly being looked for on the internet.
From long-form content that tells about symptoms and treatment options and commonly-asked questions to home remedies and simple tricks, you can use your blog section to educate your customers. Moreover, there is no better place than blogs to showcase the success stories of your patients.
Feedbacks from customers and patients can greatly improve your website traffic and readership. To stay ahead of the competition, it is crucial to plan an actionable content strategy by determining the important dates and months in medicine.
On the other hand, Email Marketing is another important strategy when it comes to digital marketing for physicians. Resourceful emailers help medical professionals connect with their customer base at a more personalized level. Your patients will find it extremely valuable as the blog is right there in their inbox even before they begin their search.
Top Digital Marketing Services for Doctors
Given below are some of the best digital marketing services for doctors, alongside their case studies. All of these agencies have proven experience with healthcare marketing.
1. 9th Wonder
9th Wonder is a U.S.-based media, strategic marketing, and ideas agency. The company looks for and grabs opportunities that build an immediate and long-lasting impact on your brand. Several brands in the medical sector do not finish their digital transformation, and hence need an agency like this for it.
For instance, 9th Wonder’s partnership with Western Dental says it all. To meet the growing demands of their patients, Western Digital needed a new look for their website.
The agency immediately started a deep discovery process such as competitive research, SEO audit, and usability testing on both mobile and desktop for English and Spanish people. Moreover, 9th Wonder designed and gave the website a new look.
The new website was built on a user-friendly enterprise-level CMS that blends in with existing systems and enabled the marketing team to start making easy modifications to the website even before its official launch.
2. Rocket Insights
Rocket Insights specializes in the overall design and development lifecycle. Marketing, Hospital & Healthcare, Food & Beverages, and Media & Entertainment are some of the major industries they serve.
Foundation Medicine (FMI) — a leader in genomic medicine — collaborated with Rocket Insights to bring the company’s vision to life. They built a top-notch database and software and deployed it into FMI’s existing knowledge base. Hence, scientists could accelerate their research and analysis process as the data can be easily added and structured.
This move helped FMI in the processing of more than 300,000 genomic profiles. Moreover, it has also helped the company map more than 150 cancer subtypes, thereby making it one of the world’s largest cancer databases.
3. Digital Advertisers
Marketing for the medical sector is difficult compared to other industries. Specialization in healthcare marketing is just like the expertise of healthcare providers. This means that both experience and education help develop the strength of everyone involved. In this case, Digital-Advertisers is one of the best digital marketing agencies to partner with.
Digital Advertisers works with doctors to go that extra mile in finding relevant and convertible leads. This is essential for any given practice — being aware of the types of insurance and the types of cases accepted.
With proper understanding of the given industry, this agency can extract historical data from their previous campaigns to study how far patients travel for treatments, what types of treatments are more often used, and what channels work the best for marketing to them.
Moreover, they can run a Patient Match back Analysis to know more about the leads that convert to patients.
The Bottom Line
The healthcare industry is constantly evolving with the latest technological advancements. Patients are looking at companies’ blogs and the internet to look for illness symptoms, physicians, and more. To begin, the medical sector needs to build their patients’ trust online.
Conventional ad techniques are transforming, and even your website design is a crucial factor for approaching people in 2021. Digital marketing agencies are becoming a vital part of the healthcare business.
As mentioned above, there are many benefits of implementing digital marketing practices that will eventually transform the way that your practice can connect with patients.
Digital marketing is one of the best ways to engage with your patients when they are most likely to be looking for services similar to yours in the digital space. It’s imperative to have a solid digital marketing strategy before you move forward with developing and distributing content or launching digital advertisement campaigns.
Reconsider your overall business objectives that align with these goals. Later, determine which digital marketing practices and initiatives you will apply and develop a solid plan for execution and measurement.