The world is facing a serious shortage of healthcare providers, and sadly, it’s not getting better any time soon.
For example, the United States has a projected shortage of 139,940 physicians by 2036. You’ll find the same trend across other healthcare fields like mental health, general health, and women’s health.
So, with demand exceeding supply, it’s very tempting to adopt the “build it, and patients will come” mentality for your healthcare service.
Well, breaking news… they won’t.
Patients will only come if they know about your service in the first place and trust your expertise. That’s where effective healthcare marketing strategies become important.
Today’s guide will cover some practical healthcare marketing techniques to attract more patients and build a solid base of potential clients.
What is healthcare marketing?
Healthcare marketing involves creating a strategic plan to promote your healthcare service, facility, or organization. The aim is to connect with potential patients, stay on their radar, attract them to your practice, and retain them.
Note that healthcare marketing operates within strict regulations, which makes it quite tricky. For example, in the United States, the Anti-Kickback Statute prohibits offering incentives, like discounts, to encourage referrals for services covered by federal healthcare programs. That’s why you need a marketing strategies in healthcare guide like this one to help you.
Benefits of healthcare marketing
Now, let’s consider some dividends you can expect when you invest in marketing for healthcare.
For starters, effective marketing strategies for healthcare help you reach prospective patients who might not have known about your practice otherwise. Plus, it establishes you as a reliable and knowledgeable healthcare provider in their eyes. This means patients looking for the kind of care you offer will find you, trust you with their health, and become regulars at your practice.
Besides attracting patients, healthcare marketing strategies provide valuable insights to improve your service. By listening to customer feedback, for instance, you can learn what patients need or don’t like. You can use these insights to provide them with better service, which can keep them happy and ultimately boost retention.
And you know, happy patients are more likely to refer others to your practice, thus bringing in even more clients.
7 Strategic Marketing Approaches to Engage Healthcare Patients
Here are seven marketing strategies healthcare businesses can adopt for massive business growth.
1. Build a responsive healthcare website
When potential patients come across your marketing materials and want to learn more about your practice, where do they turn? Most likely, your website. And as they land on your website, 75% of them judge your credibility based on your website’s design alone.
So, what does this mean? If your website isn’t responsive – i.e., it doesn’t look good or render well on their devices – this might affect your credibility. It might even turn visitors away from exploring your services further, potentially costing you their business.
That’s why it’s necessary to ensure your healthcare website is responsive, including its design, navigation, text, and buttons. You can see how these elements adjust to fit different devices on OneMedical’s website, for example.
If you already have a website, you can quickly test its responsiveness using tools like ResponsiveDesignChecker or BrowserStack. If it’s not up to par, talk to your developer about fixing it.
Alternatively, if you’re starting from scratch, consider using a user-friendly website builder to create a responsive site for your healthcare services. It’s quick and easy!
In addition to your main website, you’ll also need landing pages to support your marketing efforts. For example, you might need a lead capture page to collect email addresses from potential clients. These landing pages also need to be responsive to be effective. Lucky for you, we have a seamless landing page creator that can get the job done quickly and efficiently.
2. Leverage email marketing
Not everyone is ready to book a healthcare appointment the moment they discover your practice. That’s where email marketing comes in as an important marketing strategy for healthcare. It allows you to nurture relationships with potential patients, even if they’re not quite ready to schedule yet. So, when they do need a healthcare service, your practice is the first one they think of.
And guess what? This relationship doesn’t end once they become your patient. You can also use email marketing to stay connected with current clients, encouraging them to keep coming back to you and even referring others.
But first, you need to gather those valuable email addresses. You’ll typically collect them from your current clients when they fill out appointment forms.
As for prospects’ emails, you have to be a bit more strategic. Decide on a good offer for which your prospects would be willing to give up addresses. Remember, avoid discounts. Instead, stick with non-sales options like downloadable guides, health quizzes, or free online workshops.
For example, MyMichigan Health offers a free health assessment and requires that patients provide emails to get their results:
Once you have your offer in place, promote it where your audience will see it—on your website homepage, through a popup, or on a dedicated landing page.
After building your email list, start nurturing those relationships by providing valuable content—things like healthy living tips, answers to common questions, or updates on medical research. Here’s an example from Parable Health:
This content helps position you as an expert in your audience’s minds, so when they do need healthcare services, they’ll think of that helpful professional in their emails before anyone else.
Here’s the best part: Our email marketing tool can make your whole email campaign a breeze. It can help you segment your audience, create personalized messages, and determine the best times to send emails. You can even test different elements to see which one will give you the best results.
3. Create a video guide.
The easiest way to establish yourself as a trusted authority in healthcare is by consistently sharing your expertise and insights. When patients see you as a thought leader, they feel more confident entrusting their health to you. And what better way to showcase your expertise and humanize your practice than through video guides?
Thought leadership aside, videos can also directly attract people to your practice. You never know; someone might come across them anywhere and like what they see. This, alone, can encourage them to check out your service.
So, what videos should you create?
You can start by asking your audience. Conduct surveys or social media polls to find out what topics they’re interested in. You can also draw inspiration from the questions you frequently hear during patient appointments. Social listening tools like Brand24 and HootSuite can also help you uncover topics your audience would love.
Once you have these insights, proceed to create compelling videos that address those topics. You don’t need a Hollywood budget; just focus on sharp visuals, good lighting, and high-quality content. And remember to keep your videos informative yet concise to hold viewers’ attention. See this video from the Mayo Clinic, for example.
After creating your videos, share them across all your marketing channels. Also, remember to reformat the videos to be native to each platform for maximum engagement. You can re-edit your video to be shorter and with a 9:16 aspect ratio if you’re using it for YouTube shorts, for example.
4. SEO-optimize for the target
When done right, SEO ensures that your website appears on the first page of search results when people look up relevant healthcare queries. So, you’d have a good chance of getting noticed by people who might eventually need your healthcare service down the line.
For instance, you can see that korbtaylor.com and oralfacialsurgery.net show up as top results when someone searches for “what should I consider when looking for an oral surgeon.” Such prospects are more likely to check out the top results than another option on the second page or down below.
There are three components to consider for effective SEO.
- Onsite SEO
- Offsite SEO
- Technical SEO
On-site SEO involves optimizing your website directly to improve its search engine rankings. The first step is optimizing your website for keywords your audience is mostly searching for. So, when they search for these keywords, you’d have a good chance of appearing as a top result.
You can use tools like Google Keyword Planner or Ahrefs to uncover these keywords. After you do, incorporate them into your content, meta description, page titles, and even alt tags.
Off-site SEO focuses on building your website’s authority and credibility through external factors like backlinks from other websites. Good ways to earn these links are through guest posts, HARO (help a reporter out), and even local directory listings.
Finally, technical SEO often involves improving technical aspects of your website, like speed and architecture. The goal is to keep your website search engine-friendly and crawlable.
Tools like SemRush, or Google PageSpeed Insights (PSI) can help you perform a technical audit of your website and identify areas for improvement. See PSI, for instance.
After identifying areas for improvement, work with your developer or a technical SEO expert to implement these recommendations.
5. Use programmatic display ads.
If your budget allows, you can consider paid ads like programmatic display ads (PDA) for better and more targeted reach. These ads typically appear as banners on various parts of websites, such as headers, footers, and sidebars, similar to regular display ads. They can also show up as video ads on platforms like YouTube or blend seamlessly with non-ad content on websites.
Here’s an example:
What makes programmatic display ads unique is their potential for broader reach and automation. For instance, display ads are limited to websites on Google Display Networks. But here, you can place your ads on any website, as long as they’ve advertised an ad space on a seller-side platform.
Speaking of automation, a demand-side platform (DSP) automatically helps you identify websites that align with the audience you’re looking for. Then, it helps you bid for a spot and places your ads on such websites.
How exactly can you take advantage of PDA?
First, specify the audience you want to target. For example, if you’re a gynecologist, you might target women aged 25–45 who have shown interest in topics like fertility awareness or prenatal care. This targeted approach typically yields better results than broadcasting your ads to a wide audience.
Then, choose a suitable demand-side platform (DSP). RocketFuel and MediaMath are good options. Set up your campaign on this platform, including your budget, audience criteria, and ad content. Afterwards, launch your campaign.
Keep in mind that the cost of programmatic display ads can vary depending on factors like competition and your chosen DSP. But be prepared to spend anywhere from $1 to $5 per thousand impressions.
6. Request feedback from healthcare service users
Your potential clients are more likely to trust what your current clients have to say about your services. After all, they’ve experienced your care firsthand, so their opinions carry significant weight. That’s why it’s important to regularly ask your patients for feedback and showcase positive reviews across various channels to enhance your credibility.
Remember we also mentioned that feedback can help you identify areas for improvement and ultimately increase client retention?
So, after a successful appointment, take a moment to ask your patients for their honest thoughts about their experience. You can also send post-appointment surveys if they prefer to provide feedback later. An even more effective way to develop patient engagement is to establish two-way communication by using a survey tool that integrates an automatic PDF report generator.
Additionally, encourage them to leave reviews on reputable healthcare review websites like HealthGrades or Doctor.com if it’s more convenient for them. For instance:
You may then display positive reviews on your website and marketing materials as client testimonials. But be mindful of privacy laws while doing this. For instance, the HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) Privacy Rule mandates that you receive explicit, signed consent from the client before using their information for marketing purposes.
For the negative ones, make sure you take them seriously. Investigate the issues and address them. And when you make the changes based on the feedback, inform the patient.
7. Monitor the marketing strategy
Just like any successful campaign, healthcare marketing strategies require ongoing monitoring and analysis. This helps you determine whether your strategies are effective or if they need adjustments to achieve better results.
First, you need to set a centralized goal for your marketing campaign. This could be generating awareness, acquisitions, or even retention. Ideally, all your channels should work towards this goal.
Once your goal is set, identify and track relevant KPIs for it based on the specific platform you’re using. For example, if you’re focusing on brand awareness, SEO KPIs might include organic traffic to your blog posts, while social media KPIs could center around engagement and follower growth.
Finally, use the analytics tools provided by each platform to monitor the performance of your campaigns, i.e., Google Search Console for SEO and Instagram Analytics for Instagram.
Conclusion
You need a solid healthcare marketing strategy to get people to see your healthcare practice, reel them in, and retain your existing patients.
This article covered seven effective healthcare marketing strategies you can use to successfully market your healthcare practice, both organically and through paid options. Consider combining two or more of these strategies to scale your marketing efforts. And in the end, don’t forget to monitor your strategies to see what’s working and what needs a change.