Healthcare Marketing
Solve the Challenges of Healthcare Marketing with Overdrive
Healthcare marketing professionals face a different set of challenges than traditional marketers. While most buying decisions are based more on emotion than on rational decision-making, this is especially so in healthcare where the stakes are literally life and death. Above all, healthcare consumers want to trust that the providers they are choosing are both highly qualified and indisputably working as advocates for their best interest. Consequently, healthcare and medical marketing campaigns must focus predominantly on building trust rather than demonstrating value or competing on price.
Healthcare marketing teams also must operate in a marketplace that is constantly evolving, and one where complicated buying journeys make measuring success more difficult than in other industries. To assist healthcare organizations in planning, executing, and measuring successful healthcare marketing campaigns, Overdrive Interactive – an integrated digital marketing and healthcare marketing agency – offers proven and comprehensive digital marketing services designed to increase sales, maximize ROI, and build lasting relationships with customers.
Becoming a Marketing Engineer – Webinar Slides & Video
Learn how all the best practices and platforms we use come together to create a marketing infrastructure, customer journey, and sales funnel.
Best Practices for Healthcare Marketing
To get a greater return on your healthcare marketing investment, Overdrive incorporates these best practices into every campaign.
- Build trust with content marketing. Quality content marketing is a highly effective way to reach healthcare consumers who are actively researching symptoms, treatments, and providers.
- Deliver an exceptional online experience. More than 80% of patients visit a hospital website before booking an appointment. Ensuring that their online experience is positive and frictionless is critical to developing trust and continuing the relationship.
- Create a mobile responsive website. Most web traffic today comes from mobile devices, and the healthcare marketplace is no different. Healthcare marketing teams must make sure their company website and marketing campaigns use responsive design and a mobile-first process that guarantees users will have a superior experience on any device.
- Say it with video. High-quality video not only wins attention on webpages and in email campaigns, it can significantly personalize a brand and create a human connection in a marketplace where healthcare consumers crave contact with authoritative professionals.
- Cultivate a five-star reputation. From reviews of doctors to testimonials about healthcare organizations, content that vouches for the skill, professionalism, and results of your healthcare providers will help to maximize conversions. Our programs build and protect the reputation of your organization and providers.
- Invest in social. Social media is a great space for reaching your audiences where they live online and for humanizing your organization and healthcare professionals. Invest in creating social content that will position your organization and practitioners as experts, that will be considered valuable by your target audience, and that will build relationships with influencers who can share and pass along your content.
- Location-based SEO. For healthcare organizations that provide services on a strictly local basis, a local SEO strategy is an effective and cost-efficient way to drive traffic.
- Get up to speed on geo-fencing. Geo-fencing enables you to deliver highly personalized messaging at the specific times and places where your target audience is most likely to pay attention. For example, geo-fencing can allow you to share authoritative content on nutrition and exercise with people who are visiting their gym to workout.
- Simplify with marketing automation. Healthcare marketing is a prime opportunity for nurture campaigns that can be automated to continually reach out to your target audience and move them methodically toward a conversion.
- Optimize landing pages for conversion. Healthcare marketing is typically highly targeted – customers are interested in treatment for very specific conditions. Landing pages that are focused on a single subject and a single call-to-action can be highly effective at engaging and converting audiences.
Marketing Minute Video: Understanding Integrated Digital Marketing
Today it’s not enough to just understand search engine marketing (SEO and SEM), online media, persuasive creative, or even marketing analytics. Watch Harry J. Gold, CEO of Overdrive Interactive, explain how all the elements of digital marketing work together, so you can succeed!
SEO for Hospitals and Healthcare Marketing Professionals
Optimizing for search can significantly improve your visibility and position your people and organization as authorities for condition-related content.
Overdrive recommends these best practices for healthcare marketing SEO:
- How to optimize for local search:
- Create and verify locations and departments on Google My Business.
- Create a Wikipedia page for your organization.
- Make sure your organization appears on Yelp, Foursquare, and other location services sites.
- Make sure your provider profiles and office locations appear on HealthGrades, ZocDoc, and WebMD.
- Create a separate webpage for each location to maximize location-based search results.
- How to build trust with your audience:
- Create a blog that provides medical information and positions your writers as medical authorities.
- Embed images of awards on department or doctor pages.
- Include testimonials.
- How to improve conversions:
- Include micro calls-to-action (e.g., watch a video or download an eBook) and macro calls-to-action (book an appointment, schedule a visit, find a doctor) on each page.
- Identify and track conversions to evaluate the success of marketing programs year-over-year.
Ultimate SEO Dashboard for CMOs – Video & Slides
Know what SEO elements you should be keeping an eye on.
Learn how to create an SEO dashboard that will captivate and educate CMOs to reveal the true value and ROI of SEO. Watch the video and download the slides.
Overdrive Services for Healthcare Marketing
To support healthcare organizations, Overdrive offers comprehensive end-to-end marketing services that include:
- Demand generation campaigns that create awareness and drive prospective customers to your website and content.
- Lead generation campaigns that deliver measurable results and keep your sales funnel full.
- Search engine optimization services that help your organizations dominate rankings and capture prospective customers in all phases of the customer journey.
- Media planning and management services that put your message in front of the right people at the right time.
- Search engine marketing that leverages buyer intent to drive sales and ROI more quickly.
- Social media marketing that creates a genuine and trusted social presence.
- Creative services that build brands and encourage users to act.
- Web development services that deliver better outcomes across the board.
- Content creation and marketing services that establish authority, build trust, and satisfy your users’ need for highly valuable information.
- Marketing automation services for nurture and email campaigns and personalized web experiences that keep prospects moving through your funnel while simplifying day-to-day marketing management.
- Reports and dashboards for healthcare marketing analytics that measure success and optimize healthcare marketing
FAQ
Healthcare marketing is a segment of digital marketing that refers to specific campaigns and strategies designed for players in the healthcare industry. These players could include hospitals, healthcare providers, insurers, suppliers, and pharmaceuticals.
The goals for healthcare marketing is to educate and assist potential patients and to spread awareness of available healthcare benefits.
Marketing for a specific industry, like healthcare, utilizes many of the same strategies as marketing for a defined target audience. The key lies in understanding your consumer journey. Knowing how your audience discovers you and what problems they have at each stage of the process will let you tailor your communications for each step.
In the context of the healthcare industry, this means knowing how patients discover your services, and what problems they face as they discover and engage with you.
Healthcare marketing carries some specific rules that go beyond your typical marketing strategy.
First, you need to be up to speed on the healthcare regulations for your medium. This includes what you can say in the copy, what information you can use from you audience when targeting them, and what type of taglines you can use for your offers.
Additionally, you have to be up to date on all the rules surrounding marketing pharmaceuticals and other drugs. The FDA has laws surrounding the approved uses of drugs, and how the drug must be marketed. In the healthcare industry, these rules must be followed to the letter.
Attracting new patients means knowing what they are going through at every step of the research process. Once you understand the mindset of someone who’s looking for healthcare services, then you’ll know how to speak to them and make sure their needs are well received and cared for.
Above all, the key to success for healthcare marketing is to maintaining a transparent and empathetic message for your services, and to ensure you always prioritize efficiency and sustainability in your campaigns. In this industry, you must be able to meet and exceed all the claims in your communications if you want to maintain your reputation in the eyes of your target audience.
