DIGITAL MARKETING FOR HOSPITALS
Are you planning to market your hospital/clinic through digital means? In this article Hospaccx Healthcare Consultancy has taken an initiative to understand what role digital marketing plays in a hospital and how to deal with it in detail.
INTRODUCTION
Digital marketing is the use of the Internet, mobile devices, social media, search engines, and other channels to reach consumers. Some marketing experts consider digital marketing to be an entirely new endeavour that requires a new way of approaching customers and new ways of understanding how customers behave compared to traditional marketing.
TYPES OF DIGITAL MARKETING
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Content Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Pay Per Click (PPC)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Native Advertising
- Marketing Automation
- Email Marketing
- Online PR
- Inbound Marketing
- Sponsored Content
DIGITAL MARKETING CHALLENGES
- Digital marketing poses special challenges for its purveyors. Digital channels are proliferating rapidly, and digital marketers have to keep up with how these channels work, how they’re used by receivers, and how to use these channels to effectively market their products or services.
- In addition, it’s becoming more difficult to capture receivers’ attention, because receivers are increasingly inundated with competing ads.
- Digital marketers also find it challenging to analyse the vast troves of data they capture and then exploit this information in new marketing efforts. The challenge of capturing and using data effectively highlights that digital marketing requires an approach to marketing based on a deep understanding of consumer behaviour.
- For example, it may require a company to analyse new forms of consumer behaviour, such as using website heatmaps to learn more about the customer journey.
WHY DO YOU NEED DIGITAL MARKETING FOR HOSPITALS?
- To attract patients to your hospital and offer them the best service, you need to get in front of them first. This is what Digital Marketing can do for you as a first step.
- There are multiple digital channels where you can make a solid presence and appear before the target audience; your patients. These channels can be social media, search engines, email, other websites etc. As we are becoming more and more digital every day, more people will start using digital platforms to look for services that they need. This would also include hospitals and other healthcare related services.
- Apart from all these, digital marketing, unlike other traditional media, offers features like targeting, measurability and remarketing which are crucial for every other advertiser looking for a better ROI.
HOW TO CREATE A DIGITAL MARKETING STRATEGY FOR YOUR HOSPITAL?
Before you start to work on your digital presence, you should essentially have a strategy in place.
Digital marketing strategy for a hospital should ideally contain the following things:
- Objective
- Current Scenario
- Audience
- Methods/Channels
- Budget
- Timeline/Frequency
- Measurement
- Best Practices
- Define your objective
The objective of your strategy will define what you are trying to achieve from your actions.
For example, this could be creating brand awareness or generating leads in case of a digital campaign. Your objective will also decide the further steps that you have to include in your strategy.
2. Analyse your current scenario
It’s good to understand where you stand in your journey before you plan something new.
This should ideally answer questions like the following.
Do you have a digital presence already? If yes, how effective is it?
What are the channels you are leveraging currently?
What is your current spend on digital marketing?
What is currently lacking in your digital marketing activities and where do you want to improve?
3. Identify your audience
This is an important step in digital marketing for hospitals. You should have your buyer persona defined before planning any marketing activities.
Identify the characteristics of your audience well. Collecting the below details about your audience will help you define it easily.
- Age-group of your audience
- Gender
- Social class
- Residing location
- Education
- Family status (single/married/parents)
Choose your methods/channels
Your strategy should define which are the methods and channels that you are going to employ to promote your hospital.
In Digital Marketing, we can broadly classify these methods into two:
- Organic
- Paid
Organic (non-paid) methods include SEO, SMM etc. And all the ads would come under paid methods.
You should also finalize which are the channels that you are going to use for promotion. This can be search engines, social media, email campaigns, video hosting platforms etc.
Among social media, you can choose the right options according to your target audience. For hospitals, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn work well.
- Decide your budget
This is an important step in building a fool-proof digital marketing strategy for your hospital. Once you know which channels or methods you want to leverage, you can fix an overall budget and divide it among the channels.
Or if you don’t have the exact budget while creating your strategy, have an approximate amount and decide how much you want to invest in PPC, how much in social media and so on.
Having a clear roadmap of the budget division will make your strategy implementation a lot easier.
2.Fix a timeline/frequency
This would include deciding when to start and stop a digital campaign or activity.
In the case of social media, having a campaign calendar would make things easier. It would define when to start and stop a campaign and also the frequency of your actions.
3. Measurement
One of the biggest advantages of digital marketing is its measurability. You can track the performance of your campaigns and see what actions your audience is taking.
Normally, setting up a Google Analytics account for your website will help you see the number of visitors, page views, specific actions like conversions etc.
As part of your Digital Marketing strategy, you should define what is your end goal and how you are going to track them.
4. Best practices
As a marketer, you would have figured out certain nitty-gritty tactics that can actually make a difference. Such things can always be added as best practices to your strategy. This will also help your team to follow the same and achieve better results.
For a Hospital, below are the most important areas to focus in Digital Marketing-
- Social Media Marketing (SMM)
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Content Marketing
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
Social media is a great place for businesses. It’s the place where you can find your prospects, build a community and engage with your audience.
For a hospital, social media presence is crucial. Your social media accounts can attract new patients and it will also help you engage with existing customers.
For any hospital, 4 social media accounts are a must:
- Facebook is the ultimate place where you can build a community and nurture it.
- You should have a Facebook page with a professional looking bio, attractive display picture and cover image. It should also list out the services and specialties that your hospital offer. Try to fill in all the fields present in the page to make it look more credible.
- Consider posting consistently on your Facebook page with attractive images and text that are useful to your audience. If you want to see a rapid growth of your audience, try posting daily on your Facebook page.
- Unlike before, the organic reach on Facebook pages have come down due to algorithm changes. So, if you want your posts to have a better reach, doing some sort of paid promotion on Facebook is also recommended.
- Instagram is a great platform to build an engaging audience if you have appealing images to post. If you create unique, appealing and real-time content on Instagram, it can complement your brand’s growth in a great way.
- Twitter, though less engaging when compared to Instagram, has a great user base in certain regions. It also acts like an official channel where you can make announcements as a brand. Having a verified Twitter account will make your tweets more credible.
- Also, build a great LinkedIn company page that contains information about your hospital on an organizational level. Having an optimized LinkedIn company page will help you generate brand awareness, increase brand value and hire quality employees.
- Apart from organic (non-paid) promotions on social media, you can also rely on paid methods to achieve more traction. Channels like Facebook and Instagram offer great advertising options for brands including hospitals.
- You can create conversion or lead campaigns using Facebook Business Manager and collect leads. For a hospital, if you are organizing a free health check-up camp at a particular location, collecting registrations through Facebook ads is a convenient option.
- Also, by using Facebook Business Manager, you can place ads on Facebook newsfeed as well as on Instagram.
- You can also try advertising options available on Twitter and LinkedIn. Both these channels offer a different kind of audience when compared to Facebook.
- All these social media channels offer targeting options based on age, location, gender, interests etc. They also offer excellent tracking of your campaign performance and remarketing (retargeting) options.
- Apart from all these, a hospital should put a lot of importance on managing their online reputation through these channels. This can be done through sharing quality updates and posts, responding well to customer queries and accumulating positive reviews on channels like Face Search Engine Marketing is a channel that is unavoidable for hospitals. In reality, you only have to focus on a search engine like Google to establish a good search presence. The traffic that is generated by other search engines are very minimal when compared to Google.
- Search Engine Marketing
- It is a paid advertising method to get a top position on search results for your desired set of keywords (search terms). Google offers this feature through their search advertising platform called Google Ads (previously known as Google AdWords).
- Search Engine Optimization is the organic method of getting a top position in the search results. It involves certain practices to optimize your website for a better search presence.
- SEO is always better than SEM in bringing quality traffic to your website. But unlike SEM, SEO takes time to see results.
- Just like what we saw in SEM, we can find, and target keywords based on location, specialties, treatments offered etc.
- You can start with Google My Business for local SEO and go further with other business directory listings. In the case of Google My Business, it also acts as a place to accumulate customer reviews for your hospital which can contribute to your reputation online.
- SEO works by creating quality content and building authority. This is dependent on a lot of factors.
- Other than keywords, there are a lot of on page SEO practices that you need to get right. This small guide on on-page SEO tactics could be of help.
Content Marketing
It is a long-term but highly effective strategy that will help you build and nurture a targeted audience who can later turn into customers. Content Marketing involves creating and distributing value-adding content consistently. Like many other industries, Content Marketing works great for hospitals as well.
Here is a step by step process that you can follow in getting started with Content Marketing for your hospital:
- Identify your audience: Who are your audience, and what are they searching online? For example, if your audience are infertility patients, they will surely be reading up a lot on infertility treatment and options like IVF. You also need to identify the exact search terms they are using on a search engine like Google. This is the primary step before working on your content.
- Decide the type of content: Content can be in various forms including text, images and videos. But for hospitals text and video format will work great. A blog/resources section on your website that offers authoritative articles and a YouTube channel that pushes informative videos are good to go with.
- Start creating content: Now you can start creating content that is value adding. Your audience should be able to find a solution to their problems through your content. This is where content Marketing wins. If you are able to provide reliable information through your content to patients, they tend to trust you and you are adding them as part of your audience.
- Further promotions: Now, if you are able to attract a lot of targeted audience to your content, your content marketing efforts are in the right direction. You will also need to integrate some of the SEO best practices getting visibility for your content on search. Apart from this, you should promote your content through other channels like social media and emails.
When you create a group of trusted audience, it is easy for you to turn them into paying customers later. That is the idea behind content marketing.
- Email Marketing
- Email Marketing is one powerful method to be in touch with your audience. It also compliments content marketing in a great way.
- When you have interesting content on your website, it is easy to get visitors to your website. But that’s not all, you can turn these website visitors into email subscribers by offering them a free lead magnet. This can be a free download like an eBook, checklist or something that adds value.
- Once you convert each of your website visitors into email subscribers, it is easy for you to reach them again whenever you want to. This can be automated with drip email campaigns and triggered emails to save a lot of time and prevent mistakes.
- Email marketing, unlike social media, is more personal and has the best ROI.
- You can send informative content, special treatment package offers, updates about your hospital specialties etc. to your email list.
2. Other Listing Sites
- There are multiple websites and platforms where hospitals, clinics and doctors can be listed. These listing sites help patients to find the best doctors and hospitals in their locality. These platforms are also helpful for doctors and hospitals as they get a lot of new patients through them.
- One example is Practo.com in India. A patient can search for specialist Doctors in his/her locality through this platform. The patient can see reviews for each doctor/clinic/hospital and also book appointments through Practo.
CONCLUSION
As of 2019, there are about 4.39 billion internet users worldwide, and all industries are moving more towards digital media today. They are investing more than ever in social media, SEO, PPC and other digital platforms.
Therefore, digital marketing for hospitals is in short ‘need of the hour’.
It is a superficial macro level study. For more details kindly contact Hospaccx Healthcare business consulting Pvt. Ltd on Hospaccx.india@gmail.com
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