BUSINESSHEALTH

Digital Marketing Experts Look at Your Healthcare Business

Doctors face repeated challenges in the jungle of digital marketing. Their main goal is to help patients but to be successful they also need to keep up with market trends and new technologies. The following tips will help you anticipate how to market your practices with digital tools. These tips are a collection of advice gathered from a variety of digital medical advertising resources, including Prevention Digital’s healthcare marketing professionals.

Your Biggest Mistake – DIY

This may come as a surprise, but the biggest mistake observed in healthcare marketing is a do-it-yourself kind of marketing strategy. What does this mean? Well, if you want to compete with other healthcare providers, you’ll have to invest in an online presence that includes:

  • A website that provides useful information for visitors (not just brochures)
  • Email campaigns that provide valuable content and include a call to action
  • Social media accounts that share news about you and your services
  • Reliable phone and email services that can ease communication with your clients

Just the first one of these is a three-month job for trained professionals where you will need to include search engine optimisation, internal linking, silo structures, and more. Blog posts will need to be strategised and planned in advance at least for the first quarter as updating your website is a key element in being a successful business in the search results. 

Imagine doing all this yourself on top of your demanding healthcare practice and constant challenges provided in the health industry. Doing it yourself is a possibility if you are a single-person provider with a small practice, but for anything other than a 5-person-per-month plan, hiring digital marketing experts is a must.

The Big Question: How to Beat the Competition?

Beating the competition, when it comes to online marketing, means finding out what works best for your specific needs. This requires research on your part; however, there are some general rules to follow.

First, focus on providing value to your audience by making sure your content is informative and relevant to their interests. If you don’t know who your target audience is, then you won’t get very far. You should also know what problem or challenge your potential customers might face before deciding on which solution to recommend. For a dental practice, it may be tooth extraction or dental implants, but for a cosmetic surgeon, scarring or breast augmentation will be more relevant.

Second, find ways to personalise your content so that it resonates with each individual customer. Some of this can be done through direct interaction via social media channels such as Facebook or LinkedIn, while others require creative use of data mining techniques to understand the preferences of individual users. Professional healthcare marketers would perform multiple A/B tests, create focus groups and plan the ideal personas for your business to make sure the target audience is a prospective client and not just a bystander.

When it comes to running a healthcare business, one thing is certain: you have to stay current with the latest technology in order to succeed. In fact, many doctors now rely on eCommerce sites like Amazon to sell their services and products because it allows them to access a larger pool of potential patients. This is especially valid for those of you who publish studies as ebooks, have done teaching gigs, as well as the ones who sell products for patients such as ear aid, medical-grade steel tools for surgeons or heart-rate monitoring devices.

Another thing that will quickly boost your performance is creating and keeping updated a Google My Business profile page for your business. This is extremely important for actual brick-and-mortar practices or stores.

So Why Hire Experts Really?

Marketing is one of the biggest industries in the modern world. Both on- and offline marketing and advertisement are half the work on a new business, and a third of keeping your already proven practice up and running.

While it’s true that you can do some things yourself, you’ll need help from experts to reach your goals. Digital marketing experts are trained professionals who possess knowledge in every aspect of digital marketing. They’re skilled in SEO, PPC, email marketing, social media marketing, website design, conversion rate optimisation (CRO), analytics, and much more. Their expertise gives you an edge over competitors who lack these skills, which for them would be you if you keep doing it yourself.

Whether you want to hire a full-time expert or just someone for a few hours per week, the benefits of outsourcing your digital marketing efforts are obvious:

  • Up-to-date marketing strategies
  • A trained eye to oversee business presence
  • Client-centric communication
  • Tested and proven practices
  • Flexibility and maneuverability of the strategy

Digital marketing professionals know how to set up tracking methods and create automated processes to measure results. They also take advantage of analytics software to track user behaviour and gain insights into how your campaign is performing.

Hiring a professional expert means that you no longer have to worry about setting up campaigns manually; they will handle all aspects of the process for you. That way, you can concentrate on other things related to your business.

In addition, having a team to manage your advertising is beneficial because it ensures that your message gets seen by the right people. With a single point of contact, you can easily communicate with your clients and see where improvements can be made. Plus, you can avoid getting lost in translation when dealing with different agencies.

Last but not least – outsourcing your marketing tasks creates more options for your healthcare practice to evolve, because you will have more time to dedicate to your clients and patients instead of on algorithm updates and data validation.