Introduction

The healthcare industry has revolutionised at a rapid pace. Previously, the industry was a volume-based sector centred around healthcare professionals. But now, the healthcare industry has transformed into a quality-based sector centred around patients.

With more new entrants in the healthcare market, several medical practices in a given area deliver the same or relatively similar healthcare services. Healthcare practices need to develop a solution to differentiate their services from competitors.

It’s when Healthcare Marketing comes across as an integral component of sustainable growth. Without effective marketing efforts, there will be no influx of new patients, and even your hospital can lose its loyal patients. Including innovative marketing approaches in your healthcare marketing campaign can help you show how your practice is different and superior to your competitors.

This article will cover some powerful Healthcare Marketing strategies for acquiring new patients.

Importance of Healthcare Marketing for Acquiring New Patients

Healthcare Marketing and using tried-and-tested healthcare marketing strategies can have several benefits for your healthcare practice, ultimately leading to an increased patient base.

• Nurtures Strong Relationships with Patients

Marketing strategies like customer relationship management or lead management are crucial to every business, especially healthcare businesses. Establishing and nurturing strong relationships with patients is key to increased patient base and revenue. And effective healthcare marketing strategies can help you achieve the same.

Ideally, every healthcare professional wants patients to feel comfortable enough to return when requiring medical care or assistance. Your transparent marketing efforts can help you build trustworthy relationships with your patients and retain them for a long.

• Builds Brand Awareness

One main goal of your hospital in developing a healthcare marketing campaign and strategy must be building brand awareness. Promoting your healthcare brand will help potential patients recognise your hospital and its offerings.

Moreover, solid marketing and brand awareness will help mitigate the risk of your medical practice getting lost in the competition. You can distinguish your hospital’s identity and unique offerings in the market with marketing and drive more patients to your practice.

• Improves Your Reputation

A critical differentiator is a positive reputation for your hospital in this interconnected world. These days, patients often thoroughly research every healthcare practice for their reputation since they believe that a reputed hospital can provide better medical care. You can use healthcare marketing ideas to your advantage and improve target patients’ perception of your facility.

• Educates Patients

The medical field has technical jargon with many complicated and confusing concepts that are often difficult for patients to understand. Healthcare marketing strategies like posting informational content, blogs, or articles on your website can help practices educate their existing and potential patients.

You can explain complicated medical concepts or changes in the healthcare industry with effective marketing. An educated patient is more likely to purchase services from your hospital.

Proven Healthcare Marketing Strategies to Increase the Patient Base

The following listed are some top Healthcare Marketing strategies that you can leverage to bring in more patients to your hospital:

• Developing a Strong Brand Identity

A brand identity serves as the embodiment of almost everything that your healthcare business is and does. Developing a strong brand identity is among the most helpful Healthcare Marketing strategies that guarantee success. Your healthcare brand identity can inspire target patients and make them loyal to your brand.

Remember that brand is more than a logo; thus, you need to focus on some key components to develop a strong brand identity.

• Creating a Unique Value Proposition for Your Hospital

Instead of promoting healthcare products and services, healthcare providers must create a unique value proposition for their practice. Understanding your unique practice value is imperative to build a tremendously effective brand strategy.

What characteristics make your hospital unique in the healthcare industry? What unique products or services can you offer your potential patients that your competitors can’t? Determine in what aspects you are different from your competing hospitals.

• Crafting a Compelling Brand Story and Messaging

These days, savvy patients look for ways to connect with the healthcare products and services they purchase. If such patients find themselves aware of your origin story, they easily build a connection with your healthcare brand.

It will help if you craft a compelling brand story of how your hospital was founded and what hurdles you overcame to turn your practice into success. Additionally, craft a powerful message with which your ideal patients can relate and feel loyal to your practice.

• Healthcare Marketing for Enhancing Online Presence

In today’s digital era, healthcare is all about online presence. Having an online presence in your hospital will help patients find you and learn more about your healthcare products and services. You must regularly work on Healthcare Marketing to maintain a strong and positive online presence.

• • Conduct SEO for the Hospital’s Website

Developing a website is enough to develop an online presence for the hospital. But it’s just a start. It’s crucial to optimise your healthcare website for SEO to lift its rankings in the search engine result pages. Here listed are some ways how you can do SEO for your site:

• • • Conduct healthcare keyword research and phrases and place them through your webpage and content.
    • Include SEO in permalinks.
    • Hyperlink your existing content to other healthcare-related posts and pages.
    • Optimise your images.
    • Improve your page speed to ensure an ideal user experience.
    • Optimise your healthcare website for mobile devices.
    • Leverage technical SEO practices.
    • Regularly update your web pages and content

  • Utilizing Social Media Platforms for Effective Healthcare Marketing

You will need more than just a healthcare site to build a strong relationship with existing patients and attract prospects. It will be advantageous to go to the platform where people are, and nowadays, that’s social media.

As per a survey, 57% of people consider healthcare practice’s social media presence before choosing where to receive medical care.

Creating a business page or profile on the most followed social media platforms, like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, or Twitter, will cost nothing. Make sure to choose the social media channel based on your targeted patients.

For instance, if you target younger patients under 30, consider utilising Instagram for effective healthcare marketing. And post content, images, videos, informational articles, and ads regularly to increase your chance of reaching a wider audience.

• • Implementing Online Advertising Strategies

In your hospital’s earliest days, there are fewer chances of gaining much traction simply by wishing potential patients to find your SEO-optimized website. Consider implementing online advertising strategies such as pay-per-click advertising to reach target patients.

For instance, your hospital is specialised in treating cancer patients. When a potential patient searches for the term ‘cancer’ in Google, the search engine will display a small banner advertisement on the user’s search results page.

Digital ads reach a specific audience and are triggered by specific keywords used by you in your SEO strategy. Such online advertisement will enhance your online presence by bringing organic traffic to your healthcare site.

• Infomercial Marketing through Email Newsletters

An email newsletter is among many Healthcare Marketing strategies that have been around for decades. It is a digital communication that a company sends to its subscribers.

1. • Building and Maintaining an Email Subscriber List

Creating an email subscriber list will help you engage with your existing and potential patients. The following mentioned are a few creative ways to expand your marketing reach by building and maintaining an email subscriber list:

• • • Offer sign-up forms for your newsletters on your healthcare site.
    • When patients purchase a medical product or service, ask them to sign up for newsletters.
    • Offer an exclusive opportunity or deal for your email subscribers.
    • Deliver content your patients will value.

  • Crafting Personalized and Targeted Email Campaigns

Once you are done creating an email subscriber list, craft more personalised, targeted, and engaging email newsletters. First, figure out your email newsletter’s goal. Next, choose a template and personalise it. Add the following listed necessary elements into your email newsletters to make them more attractive and engaging:

• • • Add creative headlines and a strong call to action.
    • Add short and crisp words and pictures to the newsletter’s body.
    • Consider rewarding subscribers with incentives.
    • In addition, your email newsletters must be relevant and consistently scheduled. Now that almost everyone uses mobile devices to check their emails, craft a mobile-responsive newsletter.
  • Nurturing Patient Relationships through Email Communication

Email newsletters can effectively keep healthcare practices in direct contact with existing patients and reach new ones.

According to 59% of customers, marketing email newsletters influence their purchase decision. And 50.7% purchase from a specific company at least once a month.

You can follow these tips to establish and nurture trustworthy relationships with your target patients through email communication:

• • • Deliver the content for which your patients have signed up for your email newsletters.
    • Instead of sending too many emails, focus on improving the quality of your emails.
    • Add a personal touch to your emails.
    • Instead of trying to sell something in emails, deliver informational content.

• Leveraging Patient Testimonials and Reviews

Customers always want to know if others like them had a good experience at a particular hospital before scheduling their visit. Online reviews help healthcare practices gain credibility for current and potential patients.

86% of 1,124 US-based consumers said they trust online reviews like personal recommendations and trust them as a reliable resource when choosing a healthcare professional.

Therefore, leveraging patient testimonials and reviews is another impeccable Healthcare Marketing strategy to drive more patients to your healthcare practice.

• • Encouraging Satisfied Patients to Provide Feedback and Reviews

It will help if you proactively ask satisfied patients to post reviews about your healthcare units to feature positive consumer feedback. Below given are some key tips to encourage patients to leave reviews online:

• • • Make your staff part of the process by educating them about the significance of online reviews.
    • Let your patients know the importance of their feedback and, thus, ask them to post a review online.
    • Send an email as a reminder.
    • Add a link to your hospital’s website and ask satisfied patients to post feedback after their appointments.
    • Respond positively to the patient’s reviews to let them know you take their feedback seriously.

  • Sharing Patient Success Stories to Build Trust and Credibility

Patients’ success stories act as social proof. Their testimonials will serve as a way for you to say, ‘Don’t take our word; instead, know what our patients think of our hospital.’ Sharing these testimonials will enable you to earn trust and attract new patients.

Patient success stories tend to have the highest effectiveness in content marketing. So, ask your longtime patients if they can provide a testimonial. If yes, see that the testimonial is relatable, authentic, and persuasive.

• • Monitoring and Addressing Negative Reviews or Complaints

You should continuously monitor and address negative reviews or complaints, as they can greatly impact your hospital’s reputation. You can use AI analytics tools to keep track of negative reviews and complaints.

Here are some valuable tips for handling and addressing negative reviews and comments:

• • • Don’t ignore or delete negative reviews. Instead, it will help if you answer every mention.
    • Remember that negative reviews or complaints demand a quick response.
    • Be polite, considerate, and patient when responding to negative reviews.
    • Show your gratitude for receiving your patient’s feedback and let them know their problems are being acknowledged.
    • Try to explain the cause of the inconvenience clearly.

• Partnering with Influencers and Referral Networks

Partnering with influencers and leveraging referral networks are the most popular Healthcare Marketing approaches to engage and attract new patients.

• • Collaborating with Relevant Healthcare Influencers

The popularity of healthcare and medical topics is increasing on social media platforms. Many influencers and healthcare professionals leverage these platforms to share details about their health challenges and offer experienced healthcare advice to their followers.

A survey conducted by Google tells that 40% of millennials trust influencers more than their close ones. So, an excellent way to promote your healthcare practice, brand image, products, and services is by tapping into the power of healthcare influencer marketing.

• • Implementing Referral Programs to Drive Patient Referrals

Implementing physician referral programs is one of the best organic marketing strategies to attract new patients to your hospitals. One helpful way to receive more doctor referrals is by leveraging the physician liaison service.

You can also partner with local healthcare professionals and build strong relationships with them. Follow up regularly by thanking referring doctors for contributing to your hospital’s increased patient base.

How to Analyse Your Healthcare Marketing Campaigns?

Analysing Healthcare Marketing campaigns is the best way to know what improvements can be made in the next marketing campaigns. Even though no way is right or wrong to analyse marketing campaigns, you must always use multifaceted and accurate data sources.

• Setting Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

Traditional and digital healthcare marketing will have their respective KPIs depending on the platforms and channels you have leveraged for marketing your hospital.

For traditional marketing KPIs, you can consider the total number of viewers on broadcast or the number of people who bought magazines where your campaign ads were published.

And for digital marketing, you can consider social media and website KPIs, such as views, clicks, reach, conversion rate, return on investment, website visitors, etc.

• Utilizing Analytics Tools to Track and Analyse Marketing Campaigns

Analysing data is the best friend of every healthcare marketer to know what is working well for the marketing campaign. However, tracking and analysing enormous amounts of data to determine the marketing campaign’s performance can be time-consuming and exhausting.

Marketers can access dozens of tools for accurate and quick tracking and analysis of healthcare marketing campaigns:

• • Google Analytics
  • MixPanel
  • Whatagraph
  • Cyfe
  • Heap Analytics
  • Zuko
  • The AdWords Performance Grader
  • Klipfolio

• Making Data-Driven Adjustments to Optimise Marketing Strategies

You must review the results once the marketing campaign ends and record the statistics. Next, compare the actual statistics with planned results after a detailed analysis. If your results fall short, determine what adjustments you can make in your next healthcare marketing campaign based on recorded data.

How to Get the Best Healthcare Marketing Strategies for Hospitals?

Many healthcare professionals struggle to manage marketing duties while providing medical treatments and services. Moreover, a physician often finds it difficult to understand the working of all marketing channels and platforms.

Hiring professional Healthcare Marketing and advertising expert can take your hospital to the next level. So, you should invest in the right service provider.

• Find a Professional Healthcare Marketing Service Provider

Handing off your healthcare marketing efforts to a third party requires much trust, as they will manage your brand and communicate with your patients. Consider following these practices to hire a reliable, trustworthy healthcare marketing service:

• • Identify Your Hospital’s Goals: Be specific about your hospital’s marketing goals, like you want to boost sales or increase visits to your practice. Understanding your business goals and setting KPIs will aid in opting for the right healthcare marketing company.
  • Consider Industry Expertise: Industry-specific marketing is best for your hospital. So, check out if the potential healthcare marketing professional has experience working with hospitals similar to yours.
  • Shortlist the Marketing Company: Once you have identified the marketing professionals fitting your hospital’s goals and have industry experience, shortlist the candidates for further review.
  • Ask for Work Samples: Ask each shortlisted marketing company for their work samples to assess their skills.
  • Consider Online Reviews: Check for online customer reviews and testimonials backing up the potential healthcare marketing company’s expertise.
  • Sign a Short-term Contract: Consider signing a short-term contract once you select the marketing company. Reassess your marketing progress to determine whether to renew the contract with the marketer.

Summing it up all!

Healthcare Marketing is a strong resource to build a brand reputation, gain patients’ trust, nurture strong relationships with them, and attract new patients to your hospital. While standing out from the competitors can be tough, especially with all hospitals providing nearly the same products and services, implementing innovative marketing strategies can help you differentiate your offerings and specialisations.

When planning to leverage the Healthcare Marketing services of a professional marketer, consider partnering with ZealousWeb. This web marketing agency is acquainted with qualified marketers updated with the newest marketing trends and, thus, can help drive more patients to your practice.