How do you use online marketing to educate and empower your healthcare customers and patients?

1 Define your goals and audience

Before you launch a viral marketing campaign, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to achieve and who you want to reach. Do you want to raise awareness about a health issue, a treatment, or a product? Do you want to generate leads, conversions, or referrals? Do you want to target a specific segment of your market, such as a demographic, a geographic, or a psychographic group? Having a well-defined goal and audience will help you craft a relevant and compelling message that resonates with your target.

2 Create a valuable and shareable content

The key to viral marketing is to create a content that offers value to your audience and encourages them to share it with others. Value can come in different forms, such as information, education, entertainment, inspiration, or emotion. Your content should also have a strong hook, a clear call to action, and a viral element, such as a hashtag, a challenge, a quiz, or a contest. Depending on your goal and audience, you can choose different formats for your content, such as a video, a blog post, an infographic, a podcast, or a webinar.

3 Choose the right channels and platforms

Once you have created your content, you need to distribute it to the right channels and platforms where your audience is most active and engaged. You can use your own channels, such as your website, your email list, or your social media accounts, or you can leverage other channels, such as influencers, media outlets, or online communities. You should also optimize your content for each channel and platform, using the appropriate keywords, hashtags, tags, captions, and descriptions.

4 Monitor and measure your results

To evaluate the effectiveness of your viral marketing campaign, you need to monitor and measure your results using various metrics and tools. Some of the metrics you can use are reach, impressions, views, shares, likes, comments, clicks, conversions, referrals, and revenue. You can also use tools such as Google Analytics, Facebook Insights, Twitter Analytics, or YouTube Analytics to track and analyze your data. By monitoring and measuring your results, you can identify what works and what doesn't, and make adjustments accordingly.

5 Learn from the best examples

Learning how to use viral marketing in healthcare can be done by looking at some of the best examples from the industry. For instance, the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge raised awareness and funds for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) by challenging people to dump a bucket of ice water over their heads or donate to the cause. This campaign went viral in 2014, reaching millions of people and celebrities, and raising over $200 million for ALS research. The Real Cost campaign aimed to prevent youth from smoking by showing the harsh and graphic consequences of tobacco use. It used various media, such as TV, radio, print, online, and social media, to deliver its message to the target audience of 12-17 year olds and has been credited with preventing over 350,000 teens from smoking. The Man Flu campaign promoted a new product called Man Flu, a natural remedy for the common cold, by poking fun at the stereotype of men exaggerating their symptoms when they are sick. This campaign used a humorous video, a website, and a social media campaign to generate buzz and interest for the product, achieving over 10 million views, 100,000 shares, and 50,000 comments.