7 Effective Healthcare Digital Marketing Trends (Try Them!)

A well-designed website can boost your business or practice, whether you're a healthcare provider, doctor, or dentist. Your website is your online clinic and hospital reception area. A great website provides to your clients and patients everything they need to know about your business.

Follow the latest healthcare digital marketing trends to create a good website. Consider these strategies for your website:

• Content marketing for organic traffic
• Social media marketing
• Video marketing
• Voice search
• Patient reviews
• Micro-influencers on social media
• Local SEO

It’s time for an online marketing overhaul for your healthcare website.

Let’s go!

1. Content Remains a Top Marketing Tool for Increasing Traffic

Good quality, updated, and valuable content will always be one of the best ways to create an effective website. That explains why marketers allocated a greater budget for content marketing in 2022. You can engage patients, increase traffic, and promote your healthcare brand with good content.

Content is not just blogs. You can choose from different types of digital content like videos, webinars, whitepapers, and more. Here are more content marketing strategies to increase site traffic.

• Find out what content your patients prefer. You can ask them through email, social media, or a survey.
• Conduct keyword research to produce optimized content. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner to find the best keywords.
• Create an engaging headline. This headline will entice your patients to click and visit your website.
• Use infographics and share this on your social media accounts. Create your unique infographics using easy online tools like Canva and Wix.
• Write content in a conversational tone. People are more likely to take your offer, tips, advice, or products if you conversationally talk to them. Write the way you talk.

2. Social Media Marketing Helps Reach Patients Easily

More than half the world’s population are active social media users, with Facebook still taking the biggest share, according to Datareportal. So, if you're not on social media, you're wasting a profitable avenue to improve your site traffic, foot traffic, and revenue.

But creating a social media page is not enough. Take note of these social media marketing tips.

• Find out which platform is best for your healthcare business and which platform your patients prefer.
• Check page analytics to find out the audience types engaging with your content. Doing so helps you understand your social media traffic and page visitors.
• Share relevant content, including health news, studies, research, new treatments, events, and more.
• Engage with your patients and provide answers to their health questions.
• Create posts with user-generated content.

3. Video Content Is the Preferred Content

Of all the different content marketing techniques, content marketers prefer to use videos to engage and connect with their target market. Microsoft’s 2015 finding that people’s attention span is only eight seconds led marketers to resort to videos to better retain users’ attention.

Video is great content for your healthcare website. It’s your chance to give your patients a preview of your services, a tour of your clinic, and even profiles of your experts. These tips can help you make better video content.

• Choose the right video type. There are animated videos, live-action videos, whiteboard videos, motion graphics, etc.
• Get the right length. Very long videos might bore your viewer, while very short ones might seem lacking in substance. The ideal length for marketing videos would be about two minutes.
• Invest in tools. You’ll need good quality camcorders and audio recorders on top of video editing software.
• Invest in experts. Experts can guarantee you good quality videos. Besides, since they likely have their own tools, you can save a good amount of money.
• Practice being comfortable and natural on camera. You’ll be a better communicator to potential and current patients if you and others look comfortable in a video.

4. People Now Use Voice Search Often

People are now using their mobile devices more than ever to find out information about their health. One excellent search feature that patients use these days is voice search.

Patients "talk" to their smartphones, tablets, watches, speakers, and other devices in a conversation-like manner to find information. They may say, "How to cure hyperacidity?" instead of "stomach acid cure" or "hyperacidity treatment." That’s why marketers must use a similar tone in creating content.

With conversational keywords, a web page is more likely to be selected by voice assistants whenever there's a search. Here are more ways to optimize your content through voice search.

• Develop Q and A pages to answer your patients’ questions and quickly resolve their issues.
• Create a schema markup that is not only relevant to regular searches but also for voice searches.
• Make local SEO a priority because more people ask “Near me” questions through voice search.

5. Google Uses Patient Reviews as Ranking Factor

Patients read reviews before they select a provider or a practitioner. Also, it may take several reviews before they book a consultation or visit a local service. Google recognizes reviews as necessary in a person's everyday decision-making. That’s why it recognizes reviews as a top ranking factor.

Allow reviews on your website and Google My Business. Of course, it’s a no-brainer that you need to provide stellar service to earn stellar reviews. Strive to be the best solution to your patients' issues. Here are ways to gather reviews.

• Ask for reviews through post-purchase emails.
• Include a review request form on your product pages.
• Add a landing page for customer reviews.
• Ask for reviews through your newsletters, text messages, product packaging, giveaways, contests, etc.
• Give loyalty points or a discount every time a customer writes a review.

6. Micro-Influencers Are Excellent Partners

A micro-influencer has more followers than regular people but fewer than a celebrity endorser. Partnering with a micro-influencer to market your product or service helps you take advantage of their following.

Partnering with a micro-influencer is cost-effective. You don’t need to spend time, money, and effort building your social media followers. Micro-influencers are more passionate and invested in their social media influence and, thus, are more authentic than celebrities or macro-influencers.

Working with a micro-influencer is a popular strategy among many healthcare providers. Follow these strategies to excel in micro-influencer marketing.

• Make sure you partner with a micro-influencer who understands your goals.
• Use healthcare hashtags to find micro-influencers in your niche. You can also send outreach emails, check your followers, or check influencer platforms like Mavrck and #paid to find the right micro-influencer.
• Choose relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) to evaluate your micro-influencer digital marketing. Monitor sales and your average order value per channel to improve conversions.

7. Local SEO Is the New Focus

Drive more foot traffic to your local office or hospital with the help of local SEO. This is an optimization strategy to help your website appear in local searches. That means you will appear in the search engine results pages (SERPs) when someone searches for services like yours in your clinic’s vicinity.

Optimize your pages for local SEO and complete your Google My Business (GMB) listing to be in Google's 3-Pack.

The 3-Pack is three businesses Google displays along the top of local searches. These are pages that Google thinks are relevant to searches. Here are ways to take advantage of local SEO for your business.

• Claim and update your GMB profile. Fill out all the needed information and create an engaging description.
• Include your business in local directories. Your business in these directories signals to Google that you’re authentic and valuable.
• Collect and manage customer reviews. Answer negative reviews politely.
• Ensure NAP is consistent. Make certain that your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) are consistent and updated on all your listings, social media platforms, and website.

Summing Up

You can update your digital marketing strategies to promote your healthcare business using these seven top trends: content marketing, social media marketing, video marketing, voice search, patient reviews, micro-influencers, and local SEO.

Considering the latest trends in digital marketing will help you achieve your goals and effectively connect with your patients. Contact Digital Authority Partners today to learn about healthcare online marketing trends.