Online healthcare marketing is vital to growing your practice. You’re missing critical opportunities to connect with your patients and prospects if you’re not regularly publishing relevant and useful content on your website.
Patients are online researching healthcare issues before connecting with you and during ongoing care. Regularly publishing informative posts to your website and keeping your entire website up to date will encourage patient engagement. This is an effective attraction and retention strategy, improves care outcomes, and is good for your bottom line.
Today’s healthcare consumers are generally in better health over longer lifespans. They feel much less reliant on healthcare providers and organizations. Healthcare consumers do extensive research online to find providers and hospitals. Other popular research includes comparing procedures and costs and healthcare topics. These consumers are very discriminating about their healthcare services. Online healthcare marketing will reach and influence them.
Your patients and prospective patients are healthcare savvy. They demand full transparency and two-way communication from all of their healthcare providers. The days of simply trusting the provider’s word are in the past.
Patients were less proactive about their care in the past. Healthcare costs were lower. Patients generally didn’t delay or reject care based on cost. The healthcare marketing world moved at a much slower pace.
Traditional marketing campaigns were based on print ads, TV ads, radio ads, and direct mail. They were also run without the possibility of making adjustments to strategy based on results.
Online healthcare marketing strategies provide data that can show you whether your marketing efforts are effective. You have the opportunity to make real-time adjustments to your online marketing campaigns to make them more effective.
All the pages on your website need to be optimized for the search engines. Using the right key words and phrases along with good quality content improves the rank of your pages with the search engines. This increases the number of patients and prospective patients who can easily find your practice online.
Your website needs to be updated periodically to reflect changes in your practice. Pages need to be updated to remove outdated information and to add newer, more relevant information. New pages need to be added as your practice expands.
Website content should be engaging, including images, graphics and attention-grabbing headlines. To provide maximum value to your bottom line, your website should:
Your website is the digital entrance to your practice and needs to be informative, easy to navigate, and welcoming to new and returning visitors.
It is critical to publish relevant, search engine optimized healthcare content on your practice’s website frequently. This will put your pages in front of consumers searching for services in your area of practice. This type of inbound marketing provides patients and prospective patients with the right information when they need it.
The presence of high quality and useful information attracts visitors to your website. Publishing timely and relevant information for prospects and patients builds their trust and engagement with your practice. This will encourage increased interaction, patient retention, and practice growth.
The design and responsiveness of your website affects each visitor’s experience. Healthcare consumers compare your website to the retail websites that they visit, such as Amazon. They expect a similar level of satisfaction and responsiveness. Healthcare consumers seek out the content and online experience that satisfies their needs with a consumer-centric and friendly approach.
Healthcare consumers expect that it will be easy to find the information that they need. They also expect that they will find clear and easy guidelines for working with your practice. Consumers want to be able to easily book an appointment, to request information, and to communicate with your office.
Your website design needs to be simple and straightforward. Consumers need to be able to move through your website to find what they need with ease. Online consumers have a low tolerance for frustration. Their response to frustration is to move on to a more user-friendly and consumer-centric website.
Studies confirm that 44% of users who search healthcare websites on their mobile devices go on to make an appointment. This highlights the importance of making their experience as engaging and informative as possible. Ensuring that your website is responsive to mobile devices will help these highly responsive users to engage with your practice.
Google’s studies confirm that almost 65% of all searches start on a mobile device. Your website needs to be able to scale up and down to fit smartphones and tablets, as well as laptops and desktop computers. Website format and readability must be maintained across all of these devices. All other communications, such as emails, also need to be optimized for mobile devices.
Your high quality healthcare content should be shared with patients and prospective patients through the use of social media platforms. Sharing of valuable healthcare information on social media builds trust and engagement. A recent study found that 57% of healthcare consumers’ decisions to schedule care are strongly influenced by the provider’s social media engagement. Consumers trust providers who engage online.
Healthcare consumers expect to be able to easily meet their goals while visiting your website. Your website has great potential to convert visitors into new patients for your practice. To do this, it needs to be well-designed and updated regularly.
To satisfy the needs of healthcare consumers, your website should:
Patients and prospective patients will be encouraged to come back to your website when they need more healthcare information. They will also be more likely to look to your practice for their healthcare needs.
Regular communication through social media will further engage your patients and prospective patients and build trust. Social media engagement gives you the opportunity to share valuable healthcare information. It will also help to keep your practice top of mind with patients and prospects.