16 Healthcare Marketing Strategies To Grow Leads

Healthcare is an ever-growing market with unique challenges, particularly in the wake of the global pandemic. Between HIPAA compliance, pandemic restrictions, and the evolving privacy landscape, healthcare marketers are looking for healthcare marketing strategies to help them target and reach new patients.

Google revealed that approximately 5% of all Google searches are healthcare-related. These consumers researching health-related topics are likely to reach out to a provider. Thus, healthcare marketers will succeed if they can ensure their digital marketing campaigns appear on the pages that potential customers turn to for their healthcare information.

What Is Healthcare Marketing, Exactly?

Healthcare marketing is the process of developing communication and marketing strategies to reach new patients, bring in new healthcare consumers, guide them through their healthcare journey and keep them engaged with the product, service, and healthcare system.

The best healthcare marketing strategies deliver valuable content and resources to patients across the healthcare continuum using online and offline efforts to increase engagement and growth. All of which focus on market-specific critical performance indicators and ROI.

Why You Need To Get Healthcare Marketing Right

Healthcare marketing is essential to develop and execute marketing strategies tailored toward educating and engaging patients on their healthcare journey.

The most effective marketing strategy in healthcare is patient-centric, emphasizing who the patient is, what information they value, and building a relationship.

The healthcare industry is constantly growing, and patient education and valuable information are rapidly becoming the point of attention.

The healthcare market is competitive, and as local competition increases and large healthcare systems come into the mix, it becomes more challenging to stand out and promote your healthcare services.

Healthcare marketing helps you improve your visibility from your competitors on social networks and local search engines.

Another reason why it's important to get healthcare marketing right is that an effective marketing strategy can deliver the ability to reach prospective patients and position you as an authoritative thought leader in your specialty.

16 Effective Healthcare Marketing Strategies

The ever-changing healthcare landscape can present unique challenges to even the most seasoned marketers.?Healthcare marketing teams must adapt to the latest industry trends and tips to ensure they’re crafting an effective and engaging strategy maximizing their impact on the health system’s bottom line.

Here are 16 strategies to include with your well-planned healthcare marketing approach.

1. Get HIPAA-Certified

The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, HIPAA, enacted in 1996, strictly overlooks how patient information is handled and shared in the US. Having the HIPAA certification gives those working with you the confidence and peace of mind that you understand current privacy rules and how to secure patients' personally identifiable information (PII).

Although healthcare marketing tech still lags behind that of other fields, patients still expect some dynamic digital experiences. According to a CDW Corporation Healthcare survey, 89% of patients prefer simple, seamless access to their personal health information. And 98% prefer communicating with healthcare providers digitally — through mobile apps, texting, online chats, or live video.

Regardless of your healthcare marketing strategy, ensure you take the necessary steps to minimize your risk of a HIPAA compliance breach.

At Goodway, we are currently HIPAA-certified and get recertified every two years. This enables us to understand patient privacy and ensures we diligently follow all regulations. We secure all patient data via a secure hashing process that anonymizes hospital customer relationship management (CRM) data before targeting. It then deletes the data when the campaign is over.

2. Value-Based Marketing

Value-based marketing focuses on appealing to a customer’s values and ethics. It shifts from a product-centric marketing approach to a customer-centric one.

Whereas the conventional volume-based healthcare model needed little regarding marketing budgets, value-based healthcare has upped the game as providers now compete for business depending on quality and price. This has forced healthcare marketing teams to review their strategies for marketing and patient outreach to strengthen the connection between provider and patient.

As healthcare practices focus on providing more value, communications and marketing strategies must also adapt. A one-size-fits-all marketing strategy is no longer adequate.

In healthcare marketing, delivering value involves connecting with patients personally and crafting content that addresses their most pressing issues and provides valuable health information. For example, if long wait times at a walk-in facility are a common concern, publicize the ability to pre-register and book a spot online.

3. Collect and Leverage First-Party Data

When it comes to healthcare target marketing, nothing helps marketers strategize more than looking at the current patient data. With increasing privacy concerns and third-party data becoming scarce, healthcare marketers must understand what first-party data is and how to leverage it.

Whether you’re looking to increase appointments for a particular service line or build awareness about a new location, it's always helpful to know your existing customers more to continue reaching them and potential patients as well.

Besides, the old adage that acquiring a new customer costs 5x more than it does to retain an existing one is still true, according to Chief Customer Experience Officer at the Cleveland Clinic, Adrienne Boissey, who says it costs 7x more to bring a lapsed patient into their health system than retaining and building upon existing patient relationships.

A comprehensive understanding of first-party data forms the foundation of retention marketing plans. Understanding where patients are likely to lapse, the opportunities to influence their behavior towards better and more consistent healthcare outcomes, and how much revenue is expected to be generated across the patient lifecycle must be measured and calculated to truly understand how patients are (or aren’t) interacting with points of care across the health system. It also helps you understand how to tailor digital communications appropriately to influence patient behavior.

4. Utilize Chat Widgets and Text Messaging

Now more than ever, businesses understand the need to meet customers where they are. Whether it's communicating via text message or providing convenient customer service over chat, conversational marketing is becoming more prevalent in marketing and more important to consumers.

Chat widgets are software apps that can hold natural conversations with humans. Building on current breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, these software tools are coming on fast and are becoming more commonplace. Your hospital chat widget can work around the clock without complaint, gather valuable voice-of-the-customer data insights, deliver consistent and high-quality customer service, and become your site visitors’ preferred communication channel.

5. Offer Telehealth and Online Scheduling

As current healthcare consumers demand high convenience, healthcare brand loyalty is declining. This means patients who were once loyal to a specific provider will easily switch doctors for a new experience. Over one-third of patients have ditched a healthcare provider in the last two years, with a lack of access reported as the top reason for the switch.

How can healthcare marketers prevent attrition?

Improving patient access and convenience will often satisfy patients better than competitors. Telehealth and online scheduling do both.

As an aspect of health transformation, the Empowering Patients with Telehealth by Delloite states:

“Telehealth—the provision of high-quality, real-time video encounters between patients and providers—is a powerful tool that can support healthier patients. At its core, telehealth aims to provide care anytime, anywhere, on any device—a web browser, a mobile phone or tablet, or a standalone kiosk. When telehealth is fully integrated into an existing health care system, patients can access on-demand care from an accredited provider with the touch of a button.”

If your marketing strategy doesn’t yet include online scheduling and telehealth practices, it's time to leverage the approach. These basic digital opportunities can deliver immediate patient satisfaction: 73% of patients prefer to schedule their healthcare appointments online. Plus, the national no-show rate is around 20%. Telehealth and online scheduling are among the best marketing strategies to reduce no-shows, improve patient satisfaction, increase staff efficiency and reduce scheduling errors.

6. Monitor Review and Leverage Social Proof in Your Marketing

Research has found that 59% of Americans consider patient reviews important when choosing a physician. Most patients want to see that others like them have had a great experience with you before scheduling their visit. That’s why it's crucial that health systems solicit and monitor positive reviews from satisfied patients.

Online reviews and social proof continue to gain credibility for current and potential patients. 86% of US consumers trust online reviews as much as personal referrals and believe they’re a reliable source when choosing a new provider.

Monitor consumer feedback and respond to negative reviews in an empathetic and HIPAA-compliant way. Incorporate automated, HIPAA-compliant review platforms into your marketing strategy.

7. Lock in Private Marketplace Ads (PMPS)

An efficient healthcare marketing strategy will often include multiple channels of advertising.?However, many healthcare practices waste advertising money on platforms that simply fail to provide the targeting needed to identify the best potential customers.

Private marketplaces offer the ability for marketers to layer on advanced data targeting to identify the patients most ideal for the care they provide. For instance, with private marketplace ads, you can include behavioral targeting to show your ad only to individuals who have searched for or interacted with content related to health conditions you treat.

And since many private marketplace ads appear in mobile apps, it's excellent at defining hyperlocal audiences; for example, you could develop a geo-fence of anyone who passes by your location. Or, you can use a third-party data provider with a better model to predict the propensity of a target to be among your desired audience. You can do all this in compliance with HIPAA and industry guidelines to ensure privacy is preserved for potential patients.

8. Combine Text Search Ads With Extensions

Gone are the days when text search ads were simply a headline and a description. To gain a competitive edge in search results and exceed text character limits, PPC networks such as Google Ads offer search ad extensions.

An ad extension is a feature that enables you to add extra business information in a search ad, like an address, phone number, or webpage links.

Extensions expand your search ad with additional information giving prospects more reasons to choose your healthcare system. These may boost a search ad’s clickthrough rate by several percentage points.

By adding more to your search ad, extensions grant your ad greater visibility on the search results page. This means you get more value from your search ad. Extensions also increase your total number of clicks and allow people additional engaging ways of reaching you, like via calls or maps.

9. Create a Whitelist for Your Display Ads

Ensuring an advertisement appears on the right platform is more complicated now than ever. Sites that publish inflammatory, controversial, or propaganda content or content that otherwise does not align with mainstream brand values are created en masse daily.

When you run a display ad or programmatic marketing campaign, the possibilities are almost endless. Theoretically, your ads could appear on any website with an available digital inventory.

Practically, you need some control over where your display ads show. Enter white lists.

A whitelist is a list of sites where you explicitly wants your display ads to appear. Unlike black lists that find bad sites and create a ban, whitelisting narrows down good sites you wish to advertise on and puts them into a good list. Typically, whitelists include sites you know are trusted, authoritative, and often visited by respected local news outlets.

Whitelisting is proactive and reduces the risk of your ad popping up on an undesired website.

10. Be Careful With Retargeting

Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is a marketing strategy that allows you to track website visitors once they leave your page. On average, only 2-3% of online users will convert on their initial visit; retargeting helps you convert the other 98%.

When you place a code, or pixel, on your site, you can deliver ads to visitors who leave your website without converting, motivating them to convert later. Retargeting helps lower wasted marketing spend by ensuring your ads are aimed directly at individuals who have already shown an interest in your services.

However, healthcare retargeting can be complex to navigate, and it's crucial that you operate with HIPAA guidelines. Any ads you run must not include information that could imply any prior knowledge of the user's health record. Due to the sensitive nature of retargeted ads, you must be creative with your copy.

Any ads you run should draw attention to your expertise in a particular department without specifically referencing any medical condition.

11. Use Contextual Targeting

Contextual Targeting is an advertiser runs a marketing campaign only targeting content pages that are contextually relevant to the service or product they are marketing. An example would be running an ad for Blood Glucose Monitors for diabetic patients together with various types of diabetes and diabetic content.

This strategy uses sophisticated algorithms to target ad placements depending on website content, keywords, and metadata. This allows users to receive ads based on the content they are consuming at the exact moment. For example, a user looking for how to treat runny eyes might research online for home remedies. With contextual targeting, a healthcare practitioner can target metadata related to that topic, such as the keyword “cold remedies.” This ensures the ads show up on pages that are relevant to a user in a receptive mind frame when it comes to what will help their medical condition.

Aside from the advantage of reaching niche audiences in extremely relevant environments, contextual targeting can help create strong brand affinity.

12. Supplement Paid Advertising With Organic SEO

Search Engine Optimization, or healthcare SEO, is an organic marketing strategy that healthcare systems or practices use to earn greater online visibility.

However, even if your website ranks high organically for a search query, there are still some paid adverts above your organic web page that users will see first.

Paid search advertisements or PPC (pay-per-click) are laser-targeted to show first in SERPs for a set of search terms.?

13. Use Location Marketing?

Marketing to local healthcare customers wasn’t easy in the early digital days. Most channels were designed to serve broad audiences, and targeting based on geographical location was imprecise.

Over the last few years, however, that’s changed significantly. Thanks to modern technologies and platforms—most importantly the broad adoption of GPS-enabled devices— it's now possible to market to users based on location, with high accuracy and cost-effectively.

For healthcare marketers, this is a crucial evolution. Several healthcare products and services are targeted to local consumers, and being able to communicate to these specific audiences can drastically enhance the effectiveness of marketing spend.

You know patients aren’t traveling thousands of miles for a checkup if they can help it, so using location to map the consumer journey of your target customers will help you reach the right audience in the right place. Strategies like geofencing make it easy for healthcare marketers to reach a more segmented audience.

14. A/B Test Campaigns

Medical research depends on tests with reproducible outcomes; the same maxim applies to healthcare marketing. Marketers need to understand what works and what doesn’t as well as the delivery methods that resonate with patients.

Therefore, marketing should be assessed using A/B testing. This is a method for comparing two marketing performances in a statistically significant manner. For example, you could test direct email content sent to a random sample of consumers (A) compared to another (B) or the number of your web page visits vs. another. A is your test, and B is the control.

15. Iterate Continuously

A seasoned marketer can make reasonably informed insights about what a target audience will respond to. It’s the starting point of any new marketing campaign. And by monitoring analytics, those informed insights can be easily measured.

But even if your marketers’ initial insights exceed your conversion goals, it's only your starting point. Chances are, you didn’t master the optimization of every campaign detail on the first trial.

Even if you’re satisfied with your conversions and ready to call it adequate, consider the fact that an audience’s responses change over time as it evolves and grows. What works now may not work for you so well next year. It's not enough to continue doing what’s worked in the past.

That’s where continuous iteration comes in.

This is the process of constantly improving your site and marketing efforts to optimize your conversion rates. This is achieved through watching trends in analytics and A/B testing. It's not a one-time strategy —it’s a vital best practice that should be part of your marketing strategy on an ongoing basis.

16. Develop a Multi-Channel Digital Media Campaign

There are several reasons why having a multichannel marketing strategy is so critical and effective, especially within the healthcare industry. Relying on a single channel to capture your target’s attention simply isn’t enough. You need to connect with them wherever they are, whenever they are looking for information.

Multichannel marketing lets you connect with your target audience how, where and when they want. Multiple channels allow your prospects to see you often and have a better idea of your services, so when it's time to book an appointment, they are likely to call your office.

At Goodway, we leveraged a multi-channel digital marketing strategy for a hospital client. Their site traffic experienced a 196% increase, and visits to their custom landing page experienced a 252% increase throughout the campaign.

Wrapping Up?????

Marketing for healthcare is an ever-evolving world but with endless possibilities for healthcare practitioners to reach the audience they desire, grow their patient base, feature physicians, educate patients and scale their practice.

When planning your healthcare marketing strategy, it's best to work with a partner that understands the space and focuses on your healthcare marketing goals.