DIGITAL MARKETING IN HEALTHCARE

Digital Marketing provides a “virtual platform for the promotion of products and services”. It involves in building and maintaining the customer relationship through various digital channels such as search engines, website, social media, email and mobile apps.

Digital marketing is a real-time tool that helps to monitor things like what is being viewed, how often and for how long, sales conversions, what content works and doesn’t work etc. Digital media being colossal allows everyone to access information at any time therefore aiding in positioning the brand among public in an economical way. In the present digital era, what the media, friends, relatives, peers etc., are saying influences a lot rather than what a company says about its one’s own brand. Therefore, it is of mere importance that digital marketers should have a deeper insight of consumer’s behaviour and preferences to attain better reach.

The success of digital marketing lies on developing and maintaining a digital strategy. “Opportunity -Strategy- Action” are three essentials to improve digital marketing and on other hand it helps to compare the present position to assess the potential for achieving the future reach. Three vitals for digital marketing are as follows:

1. Manage convivial relationship with customers across a variety of channels.
2. Customized and dynamic customer interaction.
3. Extract value from big data to make better decisions faster.

TYPES OF DIGITAL MARKETING

Various methods of promotions followed under digital marketing:

The entire methods followed can be classified broadly into:

1. Organic Reach
2. Inorganic Reach (paid reach)

The organic reach can be further classified into Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Optimization.

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO):

It is the process of optimizing the website to “rank” high in search engine result pages in response to a search query. Therefore, SEO increases the organic traffic from search engines. Search engines perform several activities like crawling, indexing, processing, calculating relevancy, and retrieving to deliver search results so it highly important that one’s website addresses these technicalities. A successful SEO campaign relies on the fact of choosing a right keyword that describes the site and are supposedly of interest to the users and placing these keywords at a right place like in URLs and file names, headings and page details.

Search engine optimization shall be broken down into 2 basic areas: on-page and off-page optimization

On page Optimization:

On page optimization involves in ensuring whether a particular webpage is structured in such a manner so that it gets found by the search engines for given keywords and key phrases. It not only helps in getting good search engine ranking but also increases overall readability of the site. 5 key elements for successful on page optimization are as follows:

1. Page copy

The content shall be original, unique and relevant to have a great impact on ranking high in search engines. Keywords and quality over quantity are the two essentials for a good content.

2. Title Tags

Title tag contains the words which appear in the clickable link of the search engine result. So, it is of paramount importance that the title tags are keyword-relevant yet concise.

3. Meta Tags

Meta data is a well written description summarizing the content of a particular webpage. It can’t influence search engine rankings but do help in getting a high ‘click through rate’. Meta description works more as an ad copy for the organic search results which influences the readers to click on a particular link.

4. Heading Tags

These are the tags which define the content of your page, section wise just like traditional headings and subheadings.

5. Interlinking

It involves in strategically linking one website pages to other similar pages on website providing context to the search engine and to the readers as well.

Off-Page Optimization:

           Off-Page SEO is all about online reputation of the page. It is a long-term process and takes time to improve. Off page optimization includes acquiring backlinks to the page from authority sites.

 Off page optimization involves the following ways:

1. Acquiring Backlinks
2. Leveraging social interaction with your site
3. Promote your content via social channels
4. Add social book markings
5. Guest Blogging

 Web Analytics

Web analytics is the process of analysing the behaviour of visitors to a Website. It involves in collecting, measuring, understanding, analysing, planning, reporting and predicting the web activities for a business. It helps to attract more visitors, retain or attract new customers for goods or services. This improves the ratio of revenue to marketing costs by customizing the website to the needs of customer.

Example for Search Engine Optimization

•  Content Marketing:

Content marketing is the marketing and business process for creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action. The content must be in such a way that it brings out a relation to the stage of business in buyer’s journey. Various stages are as follows:

·        Awareness Stage: Prior to awareness a customer may have a need, but they are not aware there is a solution. For this type of customers Blog posts, Infographics, Short videos can be used.

·        Consideration stage: At this point the customer starts comparing different services from different healthcare providers to make sure they’re getting a high quality service at a fair cost. Ebooks, Research reports, Webinars can be used to influence the customers at this stage.

·        Decision stage: The customer makes their decision and moves forward for treatment.Case studies and testimonials acts as an important tool to persuade the customers.

•  Social Medial Optimization(SMO):

Social media optimization (SMO) is the process of increasing the awareness of a product, brand or event by using a number of social media outlets and communities to generate viral publicity. Social media optimization includes using RSS feeds, social news and bookmarking sites, as well as social media sites, video and blogging sites. SMO is similar to SEO (search engine optimization) in that the goal is to drive traffic to your website.

• Search Engine Marketing(SEM):

Search Engine Marketing or SEM is the comprehensive strategy to drive traffic to the business, primarily through paid efforts. Hence it is also called Paid Search Marketing. The universe of SEM is diverse and complicated. PPC (pay-per-click) or CPC (cost-per-click) model, or CPM (cost-per-thousand impressions) model are most commonly used method for SEM.

Example: Text Ads

·      Pay-Per-Click (PPC)

A method of driving traffic to your website by paying a publisher every time your ad is being clicked. One of the most common types of PPC is Google Adwords. It allows advertisers to bid for ad placement in a search engine's sponsored links when someone searches on a keyword that is related to their business offering. For example, if we bid on the keyword “PPC software,” our ad might show up in the very top spot on the Google results page. SEM also includes Display Advertising, Search Re-targeting & Site Re-marketing, Mobile Marketing and Paid Social Advertising.

Example:

·     Email Marketing

It is the method in which companies use emails for communicating with their audiences. Email is often used to promote content, discounts and events, as well as to direct people towards the business’ website. 

 ·     Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing involves the use of ads that appear on mobile smartphones, tablets, or other mobile devices. The ad formats, customization, and styles for mobile marketing can vary, as many social media platforms, websites, and mobile apps offer their own unique and tailored mobile ad options. Some varieties of mobile marketing strategies are as follows:

1. App-based marketing
2. In-game mobile marketing
3. QR codes
4. Location-based marketing
5. Mobile search ads
6. Mobile image ads 
7. SMS

• Social Media Marketing(SMM):

It is the practice of promoting the brand and content on social media channels to increase brand awareness, drive traffic, and generate leads for business. Social media itself is a catch-all term for sites that may provide radically different social actions. For instance, Twitter is a social site designed to let people share short messages or “updates” with others. Facebook, in contrast is a full-blown social networking site that allows for sharing updates, photos, joining events and a variety of other activities. Social media has become a platform that is easily accessible to anyone with internet access. Increased communication for organizations fosters brand awareness and often, improved customer service. Additionally, social media serves as a relatively inexpensive platform for organizations to implement marketing campaigns.

Example:

===================

More from FrontEnders Healthcare Services

Click "Follow" if you would like to know more from us and feel free to connect via Facebook & Twitter.