Complete Guide to Healthcare Digital Marketing (Top Tips and Trends)

The healthcare industry is rapidly evolving. Are your online marketing strategies keeping up?

Below is a comprehensive healthcare digital marketing guide to help your medical practice stay ahead of the competition and improve both patient engagement and your bottom line. This guide shows you how to:

• Set the right tone for your online marketing plan with on-point branding.
• Improve your visibility and drive targeted traffic with medical search engine optimization (SEO).
• Make your business accessible with user-centric mobile marketing.
• Accelerate brand awareness and revenue through cost-effective paid ads.
• Showcase your authority with a solid content marketing strategy.

How do you apply all these? Read below.

5 Potent Medical Digital Marketing Tactics To Scale Your Practice Online

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the digital marketing ideas out on the internet. We’ll streamline everything into a concise guide to help you grow your healthcare business fast while ensuring a solid return on investment (ROI).

     1. Set the Right Tone for Online Marketing Plan With On-Point Branding

What separates Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram? While they're all social media platforms, they also have clearly defined branding.

Your brand is the foundation of your digital marketing campaign. It identifies business objectives, target audiences, and the overall tone of your marketing strategy, from keyword research to website design.

Without it, everything you do will be haphazard at best and confusing at worst.

Use the following questions to help you develop a unique industry brand:

• Why did you open a clinic or choose to become a healthcare provider?
• What are your birth pains?
• What problems are you trying to solve?
• How do you define your core value?
• Where do you see your business in the next three, five, and ten years?
• What is your workplace culture?
• Why do you offer the services you're providing?

     2. Improve Your Visibility and Drive Targeted Traffic With SEO

One simple Google search will reveal the thousands of people looking for a doctor like you. How do you introduce yourself to them? The answer is medical SEO.

Optimizing your website for search results is like fixing a machine with many complex parts. It is best to work with digital marketing experts. For brevity, though, it involves four crucial elements:

• On-page optimization. It is the process of making your website friendly to search engines by improving site structure, metadata, and content. Think about alt text, keyword placements, title tags, page pillars, and content clustering.
• Off-page optimization. This refers to enhancements outside the pages, such as link building, online reputation management, and social media. This element improves domain authority, a ranking factor that predicts your position on the search results.
• Technical SEO. This optimization strategy focuses on the nitty-gritty details of your website. It includes XML sitemaps, schema markup, site speed, and structured data. This one ensures search engines can crawl and index your pages.
• Local SEO. Also called geo-targeting or location-based SEO, you use local SEO to optimize your website for local searches. It is ideal for medical practices operating in various locations.

     3. Make Your Website Accessible With User-Centric Mobile Marketing

A solid healthcare marketing plan today won't work well without mobile marketing. More Americans are booking appointments using their mobile phone, while this technology improves customer satisfaction by augmenting patient care.

But what makes your mobile marketing technique a tour de force isn't a colorful website or a responsive design. It is a user-centric approach that involves:

• Designing with the user in mind. Every website element, from menus to "Book Now" buttons, should be accessible, clear, and understandable. Consider using universal icons, large fonts, and thumb-friendly buttons.
• Offering an excellent mobile experience. In other words, design a responsive page. It should adjust to different screen sizes and load quickly. Also, use accelerated mobile pages (AMP) for a better viewing experience on Google search results.
• Improving engagement with push notifications. They are timely reminders that appear on the upper part of mobile screens regardless of whether the app is open or not. You can use them to promote health tips, new services, or appointment reminders.
• Focusing on the customer's journey. Each marketing activity should guide the patient from one stage of their journey to another. For instance, write a blog post to educate them, use social media to engage with them, and use a call to action (CTA) to prompt action.

     4. Accelerate Brand Awareness and Revenue With Cost-Effective Paid Ads

Paid ads are the shortcut you're looking for to improve brand awareness, deliver leads, and close sales. You can also use them to support other digital marketing strategies, especially SEO, which can take months to work.

However, it can be costly — if you do it wrong. Improve or maintain excellent ROI through:

• Smart keyword research. Know the right keywords to target and use them in your ad copy and landing pages. Consider their intent (informational, navigational, commercial) and match the advertisement. For instance, use "buy now" for commercial keywords and "how to" for informational ones.
• Artificial intelligence (AI). AI can help you automate tedious tasks, such as ad creation and optimization, real-time bidding, and customer segmentation. It also analyzes customer behavior and provides insights to help you make better marketing decisions.
• Retargeting ads. You can decrease the bounce rate and increase cash flow by remarketing to people who have visited your site or used your app before. These ads work by placing a cookie on the user's web browser and using the first-party data to identify the best ads to recapture leads.
• Paid social media ads. These are sponsored posts or tweets on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The audience is more limited than search engines, but it is more segmented and, therefore, targeted.

     5. Showcase Your Authority With a Solid Content Marketing Strategy

Google classifies healthcare websites as "your money, your life" (YMYL) pages. It means the search engine holds your content to a higher standard because you can potentially help — or damage — a person's life (a.k.a. health).

In particular, Google wants you to display your expertise and authority in your niche. And you can do that with a concrete medical content marketing campaign. Start with these:

• Write long-form content. Pillar pages, case studies, meta-analyses, and how-to guides are all examples of in-depth articles that help you establish your website as a credible source by providing valuable, evidence-based information.
• Use owned visual assets. Put a face to the brand and content. Include company-owned photos and videos such as medical procedures, facilities, patients (with consent), staff, and more in your copies. They add more context to the information, make technical articles understandable, and help build trust.
• Leverage user-generated content (UGC). Let your patients speak about your expertise. Encourage patients to leave reviews, discuss their experiences on social media, and appear in corporate marketing materials.
• Stay HIPAA compliant. The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) protects patient information. Violations come with huge penalties, lawsuits, and a severely damaged reputation. Never share content without the patient’s knowledge and permission.

Summing Up

Digital marketing for healthcare providers is not a one-size-fits-all solution. The best way to succeed is by using a mix of strategies that work for your specific target audience, business goals, and budget.

Choosing the right combination is time-consuming and challenging. Simplify the process by collaborating with an experienced medical digital marketing agency.

Digital Authority Partners (DAP) has helped hospitals, clinics, pharmaceutical companies, and other healthcare organizations to achieve their desired results. Schedule a consultation with us today, and let's talk about how we can help you.