15 Marketing Strategies for Standing Out in

The change in healthcare consumption has fundamentally changed the way health professionals market and deliver their services. Today's consumers expect an innovative, digitally advanced healthcare experience, as in any sector.

Hospitals, health systems and medical practices have to undergo change in order to meet these shifting needs, so they can hold their competitive strength or avoid falling behind.

With more health professionals offering accessible online services and shortening the red tape in doctor–patient communication, consumers no longer feel the need to visit the nearest option. Instead they are empowered to choose a healthcare business that delivers a consumer experience meeting or exceeding their expectations.

Even if you are happy with your current patient volumes, healthcare marketing — keeping your health brand in people's minds — cannot happen without a planned medical marketing strategy. Let us look together at the reasons consumers decide to change healthcare provider:

Moving house (location)
Health insurance,
Higher costs for the same service,
Limited or no access to a same-day appointment,
Limited or no access to communicating directly with the doctor,
No access to online appointment scheduling,
Dissatisfaction with waiting times,
A negative patient experience,

It is therefore extremely important to have a planned, budgeted healthcare marketing strategy for reaching new and existing customers in your field at the right times.

What is in this article?

What to Consider When Planning Your Healthcare Marketing Strategy

A proverb says "prevention is better than cure". That saying holds for marketing strategy too. That is, rather than leaving your marketing activity to the last minute, it makes more sense to make a plan in advance. It will help you run a successful marketing campaign in the future. Businesses operating in the healthcare sector should therefore plan and apply their marketing strategy in advance.

Healthcare Marketing: A Strategic Approach to Attracting New Potential Patients and Keeping Them Engaged

Healthcare marketing is a strategic approach health businesses build in order to attract new potential patients, guide them throughout their healthcare journey and keep them engaged with the health system, service or products.

Today many businesses in the health sector aim to grow through healthcare marketing. A great many different health businesses — health systems, hospitals, doctors, pharmaceutical companies, medical device manufacturers, health plans, consumer brands — carry out marketing activity.

A successful healthcare marketing strategy gets consumers informed about healthcare, helps them decide their healthcare preferences and wins health businesses loyal customers.

Healthcare Marketing: New Strategies for Moving Potential Patients

Providing personalised, timely information to improve patients' experience and keep them engaged,
Applying strategies that help patients make more informed decisions,
Applying multi-channel, targeted marketing strategy to increase patient numbers and retain existing customers,
Increasing local doctor referrals and positioning doctors as market leaders,
Applying strategies to improve your online reputation and build your brand,
Reviewing and refreshing your strategy to increase your efficiency,
Responding to the rapid changes in the health sector with flexibility and focus,
Hiring a marketing agency where needed in order to apply new, effective marketing strategy,
Developing innovative strategy to differentiate yourself from your competitors and stand out,
Using social media and other digital marketing tools to communicate with your audience directly.

Let us look together at the 15 marketing strategies for standing out in healthcare.

1. Be a consistent health brand

Is your healthcare business different from the others? Probably, but healthcare consumers need to notice that difference. Every doctor has a white coat, and patients do not want to work with someone they do not trust. That is exactly why you need to introduce yourself to your consumers by building a strong, recognisable brand.

First, you need to determine what your brand is about. Are you a distinctive healthcare provider? Is your office family-friendly? Or do you have a spa-like environment? There is at least one thing that makes you memorable to patients.

Once you have settled your brand you should start promoting it. If you have awards and achievements, promoting them will get your customers to trust you. People are meticulous about their health and look for a healthcare provider they trust for the right treatment.

Building a consistent brand in your healthcare marketing strategy will reduce your costs and increase your return on investment. It may take some time at first, but in the end building a consistent strategy with marketing materials that represent your brand at its best matters a great deal for your business.

2. Assessing the online patient experience

The online patient experience is a critical factor in healthcare marketing and service delivery. Today's customers expect digital experiences that meet their needs, are valuable and are easy to use.

To assess the patient experience it is important that the website is user-friendly and easy to navigate. Patients should be able to find the information they are looking for quickly, and the site should be optimised for both desktop and mobile devices.

Value-added experiences such as appointment scheduling, virtual consultations and a patient portal should also be offered, and patients encouraged to engage with the brand.

The website's content and message should be adapted to the audience. Health businesses should reflect their customer base through their contact details, images and words.

Finally, the website — an important part of user experience design — should focus on the patient experience. Simple changes you can make right away, such as moving the "contact us" form to the top, can be enough to do more business.

3. Your health website must be mobile-friendly

A responsive website delivers the same experience when accessed from different devices. It has become the norm in website design today, but search engines prefer a mobile-friendly (responsive) site when crawling medical websites.

Because Google cares about user experience, it has committed to a mobile-first index for all websites. Your health website should therefore be responsive. But even though your site is responsive, it also matters that your content and images load correctly on all types of mobile device.

4. Testing your site speed matters

Healthcare marketers who study user behaviour have proved that customers have less tolerance for slow-loading sites. Load times of more than 5 seconds lead to potential customers being lost. Slow site speed can also affect your search engine ranking. Test your site speed with Google's PageSpeed Insights tool and talk to your web developer about improving it. Check your competitors' site speeds too.

5. Optimise search engine results for potential health patients

SEO gets you ranking at the top in search engines by optimising your website with the right keywords. But keyword frequency is no longer enough unless you use them naturally and readably. Using organic SEO tactics you can rank for relevant health terms. Because readability is Google's highest priority feature, you should fold keywords into your content naturally.

Other best practices for healthcare SEO:

Creating high-quality, keyword-optimised content pages
Building internal links back to relevant pages
Obtaining backlinks from reputable health sites
Sitemap and indexing management
Listing your health website in Google Business Profile with accurate, complete information
Filling in every section for each location
Including photographs and videos
Optimising local listings and reviews
Publishing frequently asked questions in the Q&A section
Optimising your site with local SEO tactics

6. Use PPC and display ads for healthcare marketing

Search engine optimisation (that is, "healthcare SEO") is an organic marketing strategy used to gain more visibility online for a health system, hospital or practice.

But even though you rank first organically for a search term such as "surgeon in Tulsa", there are still 3 or 4 paid ads above your organic web page.

PPC (pay per click), or paid search ads, are targeted at appearing in first place on the search engine results page (SERP) for a particular set of search terms. With paid search you can manage your budget and decide how much you want to spend to keep your site at the top of the SERPs. With both PPC and display ads, which appear in the sidebar or at the top of other websites, your return on investment is clear and defined.

7. Use social media the right way

Many hospitals and health practices rely on organic social media alone for a large part of their digital healthcare marketing strategy. Organic social media means posting photographs, updates, events and so on directly to Facebook, Twitter or YouTube. That is a valid brand-building strategy and lets potential patients in healthcare know what is happening.

But it should not be your only social strategy. Paid advertising on social media is a better way of reaching the right people looking for your services in far greater numbers — even if they are not connected to you yet. The truth is: people generally do not share local healthcare organisations' posts online unless they are already associated with that group or, better still, work there.

Paid social media is more than pressing the "boost post" button that appears when you post from your business page. Like PPC or display advertising, it involves strategy and budgeting aimed at the audience you are targeting.

8. Ask patients receiving care for reviews

Actively asking for reviews matters in order to get feedback from patients in healthcare. Patients want to see that other people have had good experiences before booking an appointment, and online reviews are regarded as sources as trustworthy as personal recommendations.

But patients generally only leave a review when they are motivated, so you may miss positive feedback. Adding an automated review platform integrated with your CRM to your healthcare marketing strategy is therefore important for tracking consumers' feedback.

9. Patient feedback is an important factor to track in your marketing efforts

If a potential patient shares a negative opinion about you on external review sites such as Google or Facebook, you need to respond and show you are trying to solve the problem. With the right follow-up process, patients may update their review after seeing you solved their problem quickly and tell others about it too. But rather than being defensive towards negative reviews, treat them as learning experiences and deliver the best patient experience going forward by updating processes and equipment where needed. Positive feedback should be handled the same way and made usable for increasing your healthcare services' effectiveness. All that feedback is an important part of your marketing efforts and plays a key role in your business's development.

10. Look at traditional media options

Many health businesses hesitate to invest in external media opportunities such as traditional advertising sources — radio, television, billboards and newspapers. These can be significant investments, so you should pay attention to where you spend your money and choose the right places to see the best, concrete results.

11. Fold doctor referrals into your medical marketing plans

Doctors can win you new customers by referring their potential patients to you. But you need to build a good relationship with doctors and stay in regular contact with them. To do that you can use a physician liaison, educate doctors about your clinics' services, expand your team and build an incentive programme for doctors who refer. Doctor referrals matter for your healthcare business's growth and should be part of your marketing plans.

12. Stay in touch with your existing healthcare consumers

Although it cannot be compared with digital advertising, referrals should always be part of your medical marketing strategy.

Get in touch with patients after their appointments or procedures and ask how they are. Ask about their families or send birthday cards with a personalised touch. Also send email and text reminders for follow-up appointments in person or by telemedicine, and do everything you can to maintain a positive relationship.

Patients will always appreciate you getting in touch and may do everything they can to recommend your business to their friends and family.

13. Be an authority in your medical field

Potential health patients remember brands that establish themselves as an authority in their medical specialism better. Your public relations strategy should involve reaching suitable media sources, which is almost free advertising for your health brand.

Try to stay current on your particular health industry niche through LinkedIn groups and other online forums.

14. Monitor your marketing strategy

You should monitor your healthcare marketing strategy continuously in terms of its return. Your healthcare marketing budget should be adjusted each year depending on what you want to focus on and based on the data in your performance analytics dashboard. There are many ways of engaging with your patients:

Use a CRM (customer relationship management system) to track how your patients engage with your campaigns through emails, call centres or landing pages. Use Google Analytics to determine which terms you rank for and which you are missing. Set up Google AdWords to monitor your PPC campaigns. Use a call tracking system to see the return on your paid ads and to monitor your front office.

15. Audit your call centre's response to your healthcare marketing initiatives

However good your healthcare marketing strategy is, you can lose customers if your call centre cannot handle calls properly. By auditing your call centre you can identify the problems your customers experience. By solving problems such as long waiting times, confusion or misinformation and a slow appointment system, for example, you can increase customer satisfaction. Training your call centre staff so they represent your brand at its best therefore matters.

Ready to update your marketing plan? Apply these 15 strategies to attract and retain potential patients and grow your business.

Explore our marketing services to see how we can help you grow your health practice or business.

15 Marketing Strategies for Standing Out in Healthcare