It's a new—and changing—marketing landscape. Are your healthcare campaigns keeping up?
Complex workflows. Unique market structure. Ever-changing consumer behavior. HIPAA regulations, compliance, and other legal requirements. Sound familiar?
Whether you’re marketing a dental firm, hospital, or independent ophthalmologist, you know the complexities of healthcare marketing. What works for one organization may not work for the next.
On top of all this, you’re asked to achieve an array of marketing goals:
- Increase patient acquisition to hit revenue goals.
- Educate patients with engaging, relevant healthcare content.
- Boost awareness of your facility or practice through brand campaigns.
Healthcare marketing can't survive on referrals alone.
In the past, consumers had fewer choices when it came to healthcare. Word-of-mouth referrals from families and friends influenced healthcare decisions above all else.
The modern landscape is more complex. According to Google, 88 percent of consumers research a practice online before they make a decision. Potential patients read reviews. They see who shows up first in search results. They watch informative videos that build rapport with staff.
To be competitive in this environment requires a new level of marketing and advertising efficiency. It also requires staying ahead of digital trends and tactics. A best-in-class digital marketing strategy can help.
“We partnered with Workshop Digital for paid search and SEO to increase our new consultations—and we’ve seen big increases in patient numbers. I highly recommend them for all your healthcare digital marketing needs. ”
Dr. Ken Lipstock, Owner at Lipstock LASIK
Consumers interact with healthcare brands in new ways.
Consumers now have more information and influence than ever to make decisions about which healthcare facilities to visit and whom to trust. They expect choice, customization, and convenience.
They want to see how healthcare practices adapt to their needs. And they’re empowered to make their own purchasing decisions. If your marketing campaigns aren't speaking to those needs—on your website, in ad campaigns, and throughout your content—they'll choose someone else.
Great healthcare marketing showcases your exceptional patient experience.
Consumers are at the center of the patient-customer interaction. To compete, your practice or facility must keep up with the needs of your patients. This means building trust with consumers by delivering on your promises.
Does your practice deliver a unified experience? Ask:
- How do we portray our practice or facility to patients?
- Is there a disconnect between our online presence and the real-life patient experience?
- Are staff members aligned on how to communicate across all patient touchpoints?
Done right, healthcare digital marketing helps you take control of your digital presence. You can reach new patients across multiple channels—while keeping current patients engaged with personalized outreach.
It's the only way to compete in a dynamic, competitive market.
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How Do I Attract More Healthcare Patients?
Effective, Engaging Content
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) helps healthcare marketers optimize their digital efforts around topics that leads are typing into search engine result pages (SERPs). For example, an individual trying to find a cardiology practice may search for terms related to “cardiovascular health” and “open heart surgery cost.” Similarly, they may use more conversational language to search for providers.
SEO also organizes websites so patients can access the information they want to read. It helps healthcare marketers create relevant pages that appear on search engine results for terms related to patients’ search queries. And it informs the development of website content, blog posts, social media campaigns, and ad copy.
Healthcare content should serve a purpose.
That’s why it’s essential to write readable, well-written healthcare content. Developing content that answers specific questions not only helps it get discovered by readers—it increases the rankings of your content. Much like consumers, search engines are also looking for content that serves a purpose. Mapping your content around the healthcare buyer’s journey can help synch your SEO efforts around the needs of your audience.
Answering patient questions and incorporating SEO tactics into your healthcare content marketing strategy—including long-tail keywords and conversational language—helps increase the chances that content is found. It's essential to align your content around the needs of your customers. Ask yourself:
What do your patients care about?
What are your users searching for?
What problems may they be trying to resolve?
Location-Specific Paid Advertising
Healthcare digital marketing can reach prospects across all stages of the buying cycle. But paid search can attract prospects right away. Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising enables organizations to pay for targeted ads across specified geographic locations and channels.
PPC offers healthcare marketers immediate, consistent visibility. For example, urgent care facilities can invest in paid search ads on Google or Bing to target a specific location—for example, “Urgent Care Center in Richmond”—to reach hyper-local patients. Or, a dental firm can invest in paid social advertising on LinkedIn or Facebook to reach users where they’re already spending time.
Refine your ad spend with paid search.
Paid search can also help you get granular with your ad spend. For example, a LASIK firm may have already paid to target LASIK-related keywords on paid search channels. To reach an even more targeted group of prospects, the firm can turn to terms in the cataract surgery niche. While many patients are searching for general terms surrounding vision care and surgery, you can assume that others will search specifically for cataract-specific terms.
Because paid search enables businesses to bid on keywords related to their business across relevant search engines, users will see your ads only when they’re searching for exact cataract surgery services and products. While it’s true that overall search volume may be higher for LASIK-related terms, it’s also important to consider quality over quantity.
Paid search marketing can help you deliver hyper-targeted campaigns and ensure you’re targeting the right people with the right message. Targeting prospects further down the customer journey helps healthcare marketers reach qualified patients who are more likely to visit their practice. Paid search allows you to control the message that your local audiences see.
Local SEO
Many times, healthcare searches are dictated by location. Consumers are often searching for a healthcare provider in their own backyard. And whether you’re facing national or local competitors, every facility or practice needs points of differentiation to prospective patients. That’s why local SEO plays a prominent role for any team operating in a specific geographic area.
Online Business Listings
Excluding hospital or clinic websites (34 percent), Google is the leading place for patients to find a practice (29 percent), according to some research. And the first thing that many people see when performing a Google search is your Google My Business listing.
Whether you’re a single-location LASIK practice or a national urgent care chain, your local rankings are affected by these listings. According to Moz, GMB signals—including proximity, categories, and keywords—are primary ranking factors. Claiming, optimizing, and maintaining a listing increases visibility in local search and maps and provides a better customer experience.
In addition to GMB, it’s important to maintain visibility across numerous channels, websites, and third-party aggregators. A local citation is any mention of your organization online and can happen on social platforms, or industry-specific directories. Citations help shape your local search engine rankings. And accurate, high-quality local citations send trust signals to Google, which helps build your authority. Ultimately, ensuring your practice or facility is listed correctly and consistently across a mix of high-quality platforms helps you rank well in local SEO efforts.
Patient Reviews
Reviews are another central component to your SEO efforts. In fact, 86 percent of consumers read local business reviews, according to BrightLocal. Plus, an industry survey found that more than half of U.S. respondents share healthcare experiences online.
Not only do reviews build trust with prospects, Google considers them a key indicator of webpage quality. Plus, Moz confirmed review signals as a critical local search ranking. Unsurprisingly, building a strong review presence begins with Google. However, ranking signals also include popular sites like Yelp, Foursquare, and Angie’s List. The most credible aggregators rank well in search queries related to your practice or facility.
Ultimately, positive mentions on sites with high domain authority helps increase patient trust and site authority. This helps your organization get found by search engines and new patients.
Attract more leads. Convert more patients.
Digital marketing helps your healthcare practice or facility reach new patients—and drive real results.
Why is Digital Marketing in Healthcare Important?
The way that patients interact with healthcare facilities is dependent on their wants or needs. For example, people may proactively search for a new primary care physician. Or, they may need an urgent care facility following an emergency. Regardless, people use search engines to look for specific solutions to their problems. If your medical organization isn’t investing in a digital strategy to meet these needs, you’re missing out on new business.
Digital healthcare marketing drives real results.
Digital marketing enables businesses to track results in real-time. This includes things such as ad copy, web page layout, conversion buttons, and contact form placement—all of which show how patients interact with your practice or facility. Using the right data not only helps uncover what patients are most interested in, it can show you how they search for information.
What’s your healthcare marketing strategy?
Perhaps you’re not reaching a local audience. Maybe you want quick, reliable results from your website. Or, you’re having a tough time discerning which services will help your team. Our free SEO assessment can help illustrate where you should begin. Uncovering insights about your website and its performance helps outline your next steps—and which approaches to pursue.
A free assessment from can help determine:
- How your website performs on search engines like Google
- How your organization’s website compares to your competitors
- How to make your content more compelling for your patients
- How to improve your website rankings and get you found faster
Digital marketing helps you reach new patients and increases the likelihood that they visit your practice or facility. But healthcare marketing strategies are about more than throwing money at a set of keywords or demographics. It’s about devising solutions based on your needs. Workshop Digital helps figure out what services make the most sense. We’ll help you dominate both paid and organic search to increase traffic and drive new patients.