How do you describe color to a blind person?
How do you describe a song to someone born deaf?
Marketing in the healthcare industry can often feel like trying to translate English into simpler English. How do you sell services to fix a problem most people don’t even know they have?
How do you make someone interested in a topic they’re afraid of, or not used to talking about?
Have no fear. There are some easy ways to be successful with your marketing. Here are eight things to keep in mind while marketing in the healthcare industry:
1. Market at Events
A great way to get new people interested in your brand is to tell them about it yourself, face to face.
You can do this by:
- partnering with local businesses and hosting on-site Q&As
- hosting fundraising events that include signing up for an email list
- holding free classes and seminars for local families
- hosting online webinars
2. Embrace Social Media
Recent studies show that over 75% of Americans use social media to research health-related symptoms.
Put your brand where potential customers are already looking! Posting relevant content focused on your target audience’s needs will help build an engaged community. If you have the manpower, have someone monitor your social media accounts and be ready to respond ‘live’ to answer questions or assist in scheduling appointments.
Make sure you are on the right social media channels though. You don’t need to be on every social network, but rather, only where your target audience is.
3. Take Advantage of Trends
Stay up to date with the latest digital trends, tools, and software.
More than that, prove you can stay on top of topics that are relevant today. Newsjacking is an easy way to humanize your brand and put yourself in front of all the users following a recent event.
Tools like Feedly or Right Relevance provide a platform to organize articles related to your interests based on topics you input. They save you a lot of time as well.
4. Engage with Your Patients
Build meaningful relationships with the people who follow your brand. Encourage comments and feedback on your website. Ask and answer simple health questions on social media. Surveys are also a great way to learn about patients needs and get them to engage with you.
As mentioned previously, live webinars with a Q&A are a great way to engage with your patients.
5. Provide Free and Valuable Content
Content marketing in the healthcare industry is the perfect excuse to offer free answers to the most searched health questions. Try to become everyone’s favorite source of reliable health information online. Create some infographics or ebooks that your target audience can download. Just make sure any content you produce has high value for the consumer.
6. Improve Your User Experience
Cut the heavy technical data, and always market yourself in terms the layperson can understand. You need to be able to relate to your audience.
Customers today expect a chic and seamless user experience, on par with Amazon and Uber. Make sure your patient portals and online forms are designed with your customers in mind.
7. Don’t Forget Email Marketing
Social media is more dominant than ever as the go-to online marketing strategy, but good old email marketing hasn’t slowed down at all.
Maintaining an email list is still one of the most cost-effective ways to engage directly with your consumers. With the technology available in email software today, email marketing doesn’t need to take up a lot of your time either,
8. Go Mobile
Google algorithms now reward businesses that cater to mobile users. Having a fast, mobile-friendly site is a great way to improve your business’s SEO ranking.
Make sure potential customers can still easily find you and contact you, even when they’re on the go. Provide clickable maps and phone numbers to make it easy for them.
Marketing In the Healthcare Industry Ain’t Brain Surgery
Marketing for healthcare services gets a bad rap as one of the most challenging marketing fields. Although the healthcare field is complicated, marketing your healthcare services doesn’t have to be.
Contact us today to see if outsourcing your marketing is the right move for your business!
