— Social Media
Killer marketing strategies for healthcare businesses
Solution
India’s healthcare market may see a 300% jump in value and is expected to reach over US$372 billion by 2022. The healthcare industry stood at 4th largest employer employing 319,780 in 2017.
Key components of the healthcare market in India are hospitals (Government and Private), pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, medical equipment and supplies and medical insurance.
Unlike any other industry, the healthcare industry serves a fairly broad audience.
And today’s customers are more dependent on digital mediums like apps and websites looking for reviews, prices etc.
This is why it’s important to stay on top of the game – Online and offline as well.
— Website
1. Easy to navigate Website
A website serves as your ‘virtual office/hospital’ this means that your website needs to be as good as your hospital/office. It typically is the first impression your organization will make and plays a very strong role in the patient’s decision making.
Chances are if someone is on your website, they are looking for answers for themselves or a loved one and want to find what they’re looking for quickly so they can take action.
Example:
It’s simple for visitors to make an appointment, contact, find a doctor at the Mayo Clinic, view resources or log into the patient account. Putting these elements on the homepage makes it’s easy to find so they don’t have to go searching around the site.
— Blog
2. Informational blog
The blog goes hand in hand with a strong, user-friendly, easy to navigate website. With 1% of all Google searches related to medical symptoms and 3.5 billion Google searches, that’s 35 million online medical searches every day.
taking advantage of the massive search hits with user-focused rich blog content that provides information on health conditions, answers to frequently asked questions, tips, and advice readers can get without going to a Doctor.
People take comfort, engage and relate to by reading about other patients who have experienced similar treatment, treatment or surgery that your readers are experiencing or going to experience soon. This helps in your blog’s readership dramatically.
While you can feature case studies and testimonials blogs are a great way to showcase patient stories showcasing stories right from diagnostics until the patient is recovered.
Example:
The Stanford Medicine blog has a steady stream of content that covers a variety of health concerns. Its navigation makes it simple to browse topics by health categories, such as men’s health or heart health. Readers can easily find the blog subscription, and engagement is highlighted by showing the most-commented blog posts.
— Emailers
3. Resourceful emails to patients & potential patients
Patients indeed look up information, but an email is a great way to stay ahead and trigger recall at the right time and what if the information was in their inbox before they even had to look for it?
By sending out monthly newsletters, educating blogs, snippets, how-to’s etc right in time.
The key is to provide your email database with a variety of information to best capture your audience’s interest. Use email personalization, a carefully crafted yearly calendar and segmentation based on your recipient’s interests and needs so they’re receiving information relevant to them right in their inbox.
Send out a video, a current blog post or collate news from the industry like new products, research studies etc. But be sure to plan these ahead of time so they are timely according to what’s going on at your organization or in the health industry.
Example:
Email is proven to be very useful and cost-effective. Based on our industry data, the average open rate for healthcare emails is 23.46% with a super-high 3.62% click-through rate. It’s one of the highest open rates among all industries!
— Videos
4. Videos to educate
and inspire
Audiences increasingly are leaning more toward visual content. According to Wordstream, one-third of online activity is spent watching videos. If you can get your physicians on camera speaking about their area of expertise, it inevitably will add to their credibility and capture an audience that is out there looking for the expertise your physicians have.
Example:
This Cleveland Clinic video series shows doctors speaking passionately about their areas of expertise, and describing their views on caring for patients. Watching a doctor in a video describing a condition or procedure can make a patient feel more at ease about what they’re experiencing, especially if they’re seeing that physician for treatment. Video can make a patient feel as though they’ve already met the physician and increase their comfort level by seeing their facial expressions, mannerisms and even hearing their voice.
Like the blog, another appropriate place for testimonials is in your video resources. The only thing better than reading about another patient’s experience is getting to see it in action through video, and hear the doctor, patient and family members describing the experience from beginning to end. Video is a powerful tool; the lighting, music and story structure work together to draw out emotion when telling the story in ways a blog post can’t. These elements can evoke feelings of passion, hope, courage, fear and many others that the written word alone can’t capture.
— Social Media
5. Engaging social media communication
Social media for the Indian healthcare industry is almost like an unexplored gold mine. If your organization isn’t active on social media, you’re missing a huge opportunity. Social media is an excellent platform to showcase your expertise when used right.
According to Infographics Archive, 60% of social media users are most likely to trust social media posts and activity by doctors over any other group. – revelemd.com
Planning and timing your digital content (Not just limited to social media) is very essential to gain maximum traction on the digital space.
A social media presence expands your reach to patients and potential patients.
Example:
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center has all the elements needed for a successful social media strategy.
The hospital shares videos, blog posts highlighting its staff caring for patients, upcoming events and dozens of positive patient reviews.
A great feature is a “Book Now” button that takes patients to the hospital’s physician page, so patients can easily locate a doctor for their needs.
— Blog
6. Rich Content Based on Patient-Driven Data
Earning the audience’s attention with great content can capture more prospective patients and produce better results for your healthcare business. How do you do that?
In healthcare marketing, you have to be observant, you need to analyse patient-driven data to fuel your content strategy. Moreover, use sentiment analysis tools and patients’ feedback management platforms to find out what exactly your patients’ experiences are, and what you can do to increase patient loyalty and leverage that data to use remarketing tools on platforms like facebook & Google for precise targeting and a lot better engagement.
Example:
You can also use an automated patient satisfaction survey tools, like RepuGen, to assess you and your team’s performance as well as to identify and categorize trends in feelings and emotions of your patients at large. Then generate content and case studies that educate and answer the questions that patients are searching for.
— Local Targeting
7. Capturing Local Prospects Using Social Media
According to a report by ELK Asia pacific journals, 76% of Indian consumers are ‘easily’ influenced by articles and reviews given by other customers on social media and other websites.
A medical facility or a specific doctor has now become a very valuable business development asset to health care organizations which always boosts in the trust factor.
Precisely targeted ads to local communities, segregate your audience into various profiles to communicate relevant information at the right time to the right audience.
— Reputation Management
8. Proactive Online Reputation Management
Too many negative reviews can drive your patient far, far away. Why? Almost 60% of patients do their research and look for online reviews and other sources of information as The first step of decision making for choosing a doctor / a hospital or an insurance company. According to EKL Asia pacific Journals, over 2.8 billion people have access to the Internet and 74% of online adults use social media or any other discussion platform. It’s a no brainer that there are a lot of platforms where patients can share their experiences with the organization. Sending an SMS/email with a link to your facebook/google/website pages right after a patient’s visit and share their feedback immensely helps with gaining reviews. However, once you receive your reviews (positive or negative) it is essential to respond to them as 65% of patients feel that it’s necessary for doctors or hospital staff to personally respond to reviews.
Example:
Do remember whether you receive positive, negative or fake reviews, once posted by the customer or the patents on sites like facebook/google it cannot be deleted or edited by the company. In order to maintain and build a stellar online reputation, healthcare organizations need an online reputation management tool like Brand Grader, similarweb, social mention etc. even a simple google reverse search could help in understanding sentiments of your customer/patient and build your reputation management strategy around it.
— Analytics
9. Measure, analyse and optimise OPTIMISE
For any marketer, it is important to track and evaluate what campaign/strategy works and what doesn’t so that marketeers can future optimise or course-correct their campaigns and strategies.
A 2015 Forbes Insights Report indicates as much, noting that only 22% of marketers have data-driven initiatives achieving significant results.
With use of analytics tools, marketers can see their customer’s sentiments towards the brand the data can include everything right from the traffic on your website to the likes and comments you get on your social media pages. Collecting, aggregating and calculating this data allows insight into what’s working and what’s not, what can be improved and the returns on investments on your methods.
Do ensure that your marketing strategy takes into account your ROI metrics in terms of cost per lead (CPL), patient acquisition, admission rates, patient retention rate, patient engagement, and referrals.
Marketing a healthcare business is evolving and growing steadily and rapidly. This has massively changed the way healthcare marketers operate. To improve your patient engagement, retention and loyalty,
call us at +91 9980233132 or write to us at [email protected] to learn more.
At whyfi, we are a team of professional marketers who will fully utilize techniques acquired over the years of advertising experience and more to get you the most effective results.
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