We live in the golden era of technology, and in this day and age, the entire world has gone digital. With this technological boom comes the emergence of digital marketing, and today we will go over: digital health marketing.
What is Digital Marketing?
Essentially, Digital marketing is any marketing and promotion, which involves electronic devices. Any advertisement you hear on the radio, the television, or watch on your phones, laptops, or personal computers is the result of digital marketing.
Digital marketing has become an essential marketing strategy, and in order to keep up with growing customer demands, every major industry in relying on it. Nowadays, you can find reviews of anything on the internet, and this includes hospitals and medical professionals as well. This is why the healthcare sector has also started adopting digital marketing strategies to promote their hospitals.
Hospitals and the entire healthcare industry have taken a drastic turn to digital marketing. Here are some digital marketing strategies that are sure to boost a hospital’s digital footprint.
Metrics are the Future
Technology has made monitoring patients much more convenient. Watches now record everything from your heart rate and step count to your breathing as well, and all of this goes to a secure server.
Now, these metrics and data are very useful to healthcare professionals and hospitals, which can perform various calculations when taking this data into account. They can determine patient satisfaction, patient per area density, and other similar metrics, which can assist them in determining which areas to focus on during their marketing efforts.
Patient retention is also a key metric that helps them determine which area would have the highest retention rate for the most return.
Build a Social Media Presence
A recent study conducted shows that approximately 4.5 billion people use social media and their average time on social media is 2 hours every day. This goes to show how lucrative social media is.
Not only does a solid social media presence increase patient engagement, but it also helps you keep your institute’s reputation in check. As you improve your presence, your audience will also start to increase, allowing for an increase in patient acquisition.
Invest in the Internet
Billions of people frequent the internet every waking moment, and a recent analysis conducted that Google processes 40,000 results pertaining to health per second. You can invest in Search Engine Optimization so that your hospital’s website always shows up first in search results. Search ads, specifically Pay per Click (PPC), are said to be very promising avenues of marketing as they appear very frequently.
Another avenue of marketing is boosting your hospital’s profile on Facebook. This will show your hospital’s page much more frequently when someone is scrolling through Facebook, increasing patient engagement.
Set up Blogs
Setting up blogs is also a lucrative avenue for marketing your hospital. Blog posts can impart valuable information to curious patients and make them realize they are unwell, thus increasing patient acquisition. Additionally, the more people visit your blog, the larger your audience will grow.
Email Marketing
Email platforms are a place that has not gone through many updates, which means that it’s accessible to people of all ages. Additionally, people usually only use their email for official purposes, which is why mainly adults tend to use it.
A recent study showed that email marketing had a considerably higher conversion rate compared to social media. This might be because it lets healthcare professionals and patients keep in touch directly, creating a strong emotional bond.
Create Patient Portals
Waiting in lines, being put on hold for minutes on end, and waiting for your turn to come in clinics can feel tedious. Developing an appropriate online patient portal bypasses all that tedious work. Patients want seamless access when it comes to their personal health data, and scheduling appointments and an online portal achieves just that.
A seamless, user-friendly digital process is especially great, and this would increase patient acquisition, and hospital work would also become more efficient as a result.
Keep an eye on patient feedback.
When looking for a good healthcare provider, the first thing we look at is their reviews. If someone says that a hospital was involved in malpractice, the public would obviously avoid going to that hospital. This is why you should always keep track of patient reviews and be responsive.
Responsiveness would create a good impression on the patient, and taking patient feedback into account would also result in better reviews. Reviews and surveys are the best ways to find out what is lacking in your hospital, which is why you should ask for feedback and conduct surveys as well.
Mobile Marketing
People of all ages use smartphones, and you can market your hospital through mobile marketing, targeted text messages, location-based marketing, etc. Mobile marketing considerably broadens your target audience, and it is much more accessible, which is why investing in mobile marketing would result in higher web traffic.
Wrap-up
Promoting your hospital through digital media in this digital age is very lucrative, as mentioned above, and with the option of so many platforms to choose from, a beneficial return on investment is more than guaranteed. Additionally, digital marketing encourages an accessible and efficient way to keep track of valuable data and promote your hospital.
In the long run, establishing a good online presence is very beneficial for your hospital because it allows you to tap into a much wider audience. Additionally, an online presence cements a hospital’s reputation as it accumulates better patient reviews and improves itself according to the feedback.
Nikhil Kore