When it comes to Internet marketing and SEO for healthcare practices, branding does make the difference. It would seem that branding and hospitals just don’t sound right, but believe us, brands hold a major place in the psyche of patients simply because brands are much more than just brands – they come with the sense of trust and respect in the brand’s abilities to make one’s life better.
Build Your Brand
Branding is therefore important for hospitals and practices as much as it is for retail, publishing, hospitality, engineering or automobile manufacturers. Here are some tips on how you go about strengthening your brand. While much of this is done as part of online marketing, branding requires a dedicated approach:
Focusing on Relevant Metrics – While SEO and social media optimization are some of the key aspects to focus on, metrics are equally important. Metrics help you truly gauge the efficiency of your marketing strategies involving social networking, SEO, content marketing, etc. Shallow social media metrics such as the number of Likes to your posts are losing importance to more relevant ones such as the number of:
- Conversions
- Physician referral calls
- Online appointment requests, and
- Registration for seminars and events
The growth of the email list and downstream revenue are also vital metrics that actually tell you whether your efforts are bearing fruit, or whether it’s time to change strategy. These are key metrics to building your brand.
Continuous Campaigning – Continuous campaigning the year round is essential to cater to patient needs, rather than focusing on certain conditions in certain periods of the year. For this you must continually churn out useful and relevant content in the form of blogs, articles as well as posts for social media.
Brand journalism, by which you use trends and news stories to weave your brand’s perspective into, can also be effective in enhancing your visibility and positioning your hospital as one that really cares about its patients. This will make a world of difference to people’s perceptions. Through all this, SEO optimization of your web channels and content needs to continue.
Engaging Audience – Hosting online or physical seminars at the hospital dealing with some of the crucial services also helps. Contests with interesting gifts or app games can get the audience hooked too.
The key to improving branding is to obviously listen to patients and secure their feedback on what they want and need. It also helps to engage them. Ultimately, all of this would contribute to build up your reputation, which is the key to branding.
A professional SEO company would be able to help you strengthen your brand through well crafted Internet marketing and SEO strategies. Remember, the brand makes all the difference.
