The Role of Digital Marketing for Healthcare Industry in 2022

Every business industry can benefit from promoting their product or service on the Web even more than using traditional advertising methods like TV commercials, print flyers, and brochures, or ads on the radio that have been the mainstream 10 years ago.

Modern businesses prefer online marketing more than any other promotion technique, and healthcare institutions are no exception. Today’s customers are likely to search for your clinic on Google or by browsing communities on Facebook and photos on Instagram than turning to some print material.

If your clinic has been on the market for years and you still haven’t employed any techniques of digital marketing for healthcare, then it’s time to start!

In this post, I’ll try to disclose some key arguments in favor of implementing online advertising for your medical business.

What is healthcare digital marketing all about? + Useful Stats

This is very clear that digital marketing is all about putting your product forward on the Web. Using the web is understood as utilizing the benefits of email marketing, SMM and social media visibility, pay-per-click ads, content marketing, mobile promotion, and, of course, search engine optimization.

So what do the statistics say?

1. Internet Live Stats reports that more than 77,000 people a day are using Google search to find any type of information. This means that about 2 trillion searches are made on Google within a year.
2. According to Statista, in 2018, 281 billion emails were received every day and this number is going to increase many times by 2022.
3. The latest research of GetResponse says that welcome emails are usually opened at least 82% of all the time.
4. 5% of all Google searches are related to health.
5. People searching for nursing homes, physical therapists, and optometrists are more likely to use search engines.

As you see, the customer journey mostly starts on the Web, and this is not surprising since the Web is the most convenient tool for finding anything, buying anything, and booking anything.

Now let’s break down what’s the role of medical digital marketing for converting more target customers and boosting the sales of your medical services.

In other words, let’s disclose why it’s worth investing in digital marketing and which benefits of every online promotion method you actually obtain.

1. SEO

Search engine optimization is something that encompasses both content, keyword research, relevance, and, of course, user experience. The way users perceive your website is that certain component that determines whether he/she stays on your page for longer to make a decision to subscribe, fill out a contact form, or make any other action to bring you the expected conversion.

User experience depends on a website simple-to-navigate, intuitive, fast-loading, and optimized for the voice search.

As I’ve mentioned in my previous post, voice search optimization means that you make your text, your titles, and subtitles in the post look conversational and natural as if it is a human speech. Please read my post on healthcare SEO strategies here to learn more.

When it comes to healthcare online marketing in 2022, SEO plays a crucial role in making your medical business visible. However, to properly optimize your content for the search engines it would be better to address an expert who will make keyword research, analyses the content and strategies of your competitors and develops a step-by-step plan on how to create search engine optimized content.

Healthcare institutions are mostly dependent on the local SEO since potential patients are looking for clinics in their locality.

For instance, you ask Google to find ‘anti-aging clinic in New Orleans” and you receive the search results with a number of clinics just in that certain locality. Such search is more personalized and more effective since you receive the local search results with phone numbers, opening hours, official websites, and more information on a chosen clinic in your required city.

Usually, all of this mentioned information is available in brief format in the ‘Google My Business’ department of Google where you can also read some customer reviews, find a clinic using Google maps, etc.

2. Pay-Per-Click or PPC

When it comes to healthcare digital advertising using PPC methods of promotion also come in handy. Businesses usually use Google Ads to display ads on different platforms and show them to target users.

The ads are targeted based on the search queries of users and they see only those ones that match their interests. PPC or pay-per-click means that your ads are paid ones but you pay for an ad only when it’s clicked by a certain target user.

If you prefer using textual ads for displaying your product or service to the target customers, then your ads are going to appear at the top of the topic-related search results shown to a user in response to their search query.

PPC traffic is considered to be pretty simple to receive. You just arrange the required budget, set up an advertisement campaign, launch your campaign, and wait until you get traffic which transforms into precious leads.

Today you can easily improve the performance of your ads using modern tools and services.

Please see the table below to find some useful tools to employ.

3. Social Media Marketing

Social media is an irreplaceable tool in digital marketing for healthcare since it is almost impossible to find a modern clinic that has no company page on social media like Instagram or Facebook.

Such type of medical services promotion allows people to feel closer to their doctors, be able to ask a question online in the “Discussion’ section, read and learn the profiles of doctors, schedule an appointment right from the comfort of their home and receive notifications concerning some news about the clinic they follow on social media.

Clinics have the chance to properly target their potential customers on social media by gender, age, disorder they are suffering from, interests, etc. This helps them to make their advertisements more person-oriented, create public awareness, and stay connected to their patients.

4. Content Marketing

Today many folks of any age are running blogs and vlogs to earn with their content and this way they promote and establish their names as a kind of a brand.

Companies also turn to blog as a type of promotion to engage more target users through subscriptions on YouTube or Vimeo or just by attracting subscribers to the traditional blogs they are running on their websites.

For healthcare digital marketing content promotion is a comprehensive concept which supposes more than just blogging and creating SEO articles. You can mix standard blogging with filming videos for your vlog, add some research results and infographics to your articles, or even create guides and sell e-books right from your website – and all of this is content marketing which brings traffic to your web page and increases your chances for increased conversions.

Since modern search engines are based on NLP (natural language processing) methods which means that they try to understand the structure of natural human speech and voice search queries, blogging will be a great way to choose for your promotion.

One of the main tips for creating a cool blog post is “write as you speak” and such naturally spoken phrases are going to be great to properly index and rank your website in the search engines.

People love content like “top 5 tips from an expert”, “how to create smth…”, “how to build a business in 5 days”, etc., so such articles are going to drive traffic you need and going to do yourself a favor on the way to recognition.

If you need keyword research done professionally before you start writing your unique SEO articles, feel free to get in touch with our team of experts right away.

5. Email Marketing

It’s impossible to imagine modern advertising without email marketing. Any new product release, sell-outs, seasonal discounts, or even post-publication is currently followed by email messaging with tempting announcements to buy something at a bargain price, to book a ticket, to subscribe and receive a tremendous discount, etc.

Emails are sent to subscribers that are segmented by specific characteristics like age, social status, gender, marital status, previous actions and purchases, interests, and more. The segmented recipients are going to be potentially interested in receiving such types of newsletters.

If you’re running a blog and you’ve got a number of subscribers who have shared their personal emails using your subscription form, this is a perfect audience for your email marketing campaign.

For instance, if you’ve got a blog on WordPress, there is a great ‘Subscribe and Download’ plugin which allows you to collect your subscribers’ emails and then export the list of emails in CSV format to then upload it to any email marketing service you’ve resolved to use.

I prefer using MailChimp as I consider it one of the most convenient email marketing tools. Importing your subscribers’ list in CSV format into MailChimp is a very simple task. You just go to the Audience section and go step-by-step from clicking the ‘Import your contacts’ button, to choosing the type of list upload, organizing and tagging your contacts to sort them by the types of the audience like customers, subscribers, newsletter, etc., and then finishing your import.

Except for MailChimp, there are such services as:

• SendinBlue;
• ConstantContact;
• Drip;
• AWeber;

or some others.

Of course, anyone can use them, but to make the email campaign effective and your emails clickable, it would be better to find an expert able to provide a professional approach.

6. Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing is something which has become much popular when we started using mobile apps for everything. Almost any social media, catering business, marketplace, forum, or other website is available as a mobile app for Android and iOS.

Except for apps, marketers use standard SMS messaging, in-game promotion, mobile image ads, and a number of other advertising methods on mobile to reach the target audience either based on their interests, locality, or history of their actions.

Why investing in digital marketing is beneficial for the healthcare industry?

Let’s sum up the key benefits of digital marketing that a medical institution obtains. They are pretty obvious:

1. Getting access to multiple online tools and services for driving traffic and good leads;
2. You are able to target potential customers by their age, interests, status, location, and more specific parameters instead of showing your ads to everyone like it was usually performed on TV;
3. You can track the behavior of users on your website and create your content, email, or mobile promotion campaign based on the data you’ve received and analyzed;
4. Your site becomes visible on the search engines and available for being searched and browsed by the target audience which increases your chances for conversion;
5. Advertising possibilities online are almost limitless.

The Takeaway

If you’ve already resolved to turn to digital marketing methods for promoting your clinic, private practice, or hospital, our experts are happy to help you build your reputation online and make your brand recognized. Contact us to apply for services like organizing email campaigns, SEO analysis, social media promotion, and much more.

In addition, we’ve got an experienced team of developers and designers ready to create a website for your medical institution from scratch or based on a chosen template you offer. Every step of development is discussed with a client in detail to get the perfect results. We can create, customize, optimize, and promote your business website professionally.

It’s time to increase your audience and boost the sales of your healthcare services to make the nation healthier and happier. Your business area is generous and useful, so let’s make your clinic visible and recognized together. Go here to browse all of our services.