Over the past few years, digital marketing has been playing a crucial role in almost every industry. Currently the healthcare industry is facing a drastic shift from analog to digital technology and digital marketing for healthcare helps hospitals and medical practices to promote their services, increase patient flow, build customer loyalty and retain the healthcare customers. The old conventional methods of medical marketing are no longer enough. Now there is a definite shift in consumer behavior and many patients today may not even consider visiting a physician or healthcare provider that doesn’t have an informative website.
In the healthcare industry digital marketing has become an indispensable part of marketing strategies. The focus is now on social media marketing, building mobile-friendly websites, search engine marketing, content marketing etc to reach out to the masses that search for healthcare information. To make the best of your overall marketing budget you need to first understand how you have allocated the money. In other words, you must perform an audit on your current marketing spend:
- Calculate the budget allocation for various media channels: Find out how much money is allocated to digital advertising, print advertising, billboards and other channels.
- Consider again the objectives for each expense: You must evaluate your goals in allocating specific amounts to each channel.
- Calculate the returns for each channel: How much revenue are you earning through your marketing efforts?
- Calculate your return on investment: Find out your ROI from the ratio of your marketing efforts to revenue realized.
Use of proper metrics helps in gaining results that will reveal opportunities for further optimization. Keeping an eye on the performance of the marketing channel and use of proper tools are essential.
- Landing pages: Driving traffic to your website is the goal of your marketing efforts. So creating a landing page for each channel is important. The URL listed on the billboard should go to a different landing page than the one on your print and radio ads. This helps to find out where the leads are coming from.
- Call tracking: List different phone numbers for each campaign and this helps in gaining more calls. Whoever answers the call will know which message the caller is responding to even before the call is answered.
- Marketing automation: Measuring the actions taken by recipients of your email marketing materials is easy. How long they spend reading the message, which links they click on, and other relevant details can be measured and analyzed easily. This will help optimize your message in such a way as to attract the most profitable patient populations.
- Web analytics: Understand from where and how the web traffic originates and use those digital marketing strategies that can drive more traffic to your website. This provides a clear idea regarding which messages are effective and which are falling flat.
Your marketing efforts become complete and successful only when the consumer or patient leaves your office happily. Appointment scheduling is one of the most crucial parts of healthcare marketing. Placing the patient on hold or having them deal with a series of voice prompts when they call will have a negative effect. Every phone call should be answered quickly by a real person every time without hold times and voice prompts. Today, healthcare customers are offered various healthcare choices and so they may easily leave you and visit another provider. Just as it is important not to place your patients on hold, you should also take special care not to have them spend hours in the waiting room. It is clear that from the task of building awareness to providing the required service, each and every aspect of your marketing campaign must be carefully evaluated. Digital marketing for healthcare becomes highly significant in this regard. You can hire a reliable SEO company to offer the necessary optimization services, and ensure that your healthcare website is appealing to the targeted visitors and provides them with all the information they are searching for.
