The current healthcare market is consumer-driven, which leaves your organization needing to leverage ways of looking at patient marketing in Joplin, Missouri. Approaching healthcare marketing more like a retailer and proactively engaging consumers throughout their journey could do a lot for your organization and the patient, including providing them with more valuable content, improving satisfaction and retention, and even secure more high-margin procedures while building your reputation to become a community health leader. In today’s post, we’ll take a look at some of the ways you can leverage marketing to improve healthcare patient engagement.
Share Educational Content
Marketing isn’t limited to display ads or search engine marketing. It also includes another important asset: content marketing. Content will help establish your organization as knowledgeable and trustworthy, especially if it provides extra value to the patient. For healthcare companies, that value is found in education and other resources. Healthcare tips are great content to be shared on the radio, specifically during health awareness months. 72% of internet users will search for health information online, so pair a digital strategy for educational content with your radio strategy. The more original content you can provide (e.g., fresh content from experts on your staff or from partner organizations), the better, but depending on the size of your organization, that may not be possible. Curating content from reliable sources that aren’t competitors provides just as much value without absorbing all your time. However, the most important thing to remember is that your audience is made of patients looking for help on a particular topic; talking about topics that interest you or only appeal to other professionals may not be the best way to address patient interests. Keep educational content in mind when you view the next few tips involving advertising channels.
Use Video
Bear in mind that four times as many consumers would prefer to watch a video about a product or service than read about it, and online shoppers that viewed a video demo were 1.81 times more likely to purchase the product than non-viewers. Why is that? Video is inherently powerful because of the way it engages both visual and auditory senses, which makes it easier to understand complex topics. Video feels more authentic, as well, and achieves a strong emotional resonance with viewers. That makes it a prime format for sharing educational content as well as a key way of connecting with them as people instead of simply as a faceless company.
Write a Blog
Blogs are another key way to share educational content, and provide an excellent place to share other related types of content with value. For instance, a dermatologist’s office could share tips about the best skin creams to treat winter-chapped skin or suntan lotions to use during summer. Blogs aren’t limited strictly to text, but it does comprise the majority of blog content. Video may be more powerful, but written content is more affordable and easier to create. However, there’s another visual element that can help here: infographics. High-quality infographics are actually 30 times more likely to be read than plain text, and that makes them 40 times more likely to be re-shared on social networks.
Stay in Touch Via Email
Email offers a direct connection between you and your patients, and that has a profound impact on the way they relate to you. By applying marketing tactics like automation and segmentation, you can create highly personalized emails that funnel the most relevant content right to the patient’s inbox. That may include content from your blog, links to the latest pertinent video, or other more exclusive content only provided in newsletters. It’s also a key way to follow up with patients, even if it’s to encourage them to make a phone call to discuss something that can’t go in an email. Most consumers in the U.S. (91%) read email daily, and 55% of emails are read from mobile devices. That means you can reach them every day of the week, no matter where they are.
Leverage Social Media for Transparency and Availability
Social media and healthcare can be a difficult subject. There’s a lot of rules to navigate, and that can obscure the value that social media has for healthcare companies. It helps to keep in mind the fact that 40% of consumers look for healthcare information specifically on social media — that’s more than half of all the consumers using the internet to find health information. That doesn’t mean you should use social as a sales pitch though. Instead, make this yet another avenue to share your educational content and use it to prove the authenticity and humanity of your company. When you care about your patients, you should be able to see it in the way your organization conducts itself online.
Consistency Is Key
Just as patient care needs to be consistent to be effective, so too does your marketing strategy. As simple as it may sound, your organization’s branding and messaging needs to be consistent, specifically in the competitive healthcare industry, so your business is top of mind when a need for your services arises. Consumers like to know where to find their brands and what they’ll find when they get there. Most importantly, you need to share your content regularly; it makes your organization look that much more dependable and trustworthy. It also helps build upon the frequency necessary to raise brand awareness and keep your organization top-of-mind. Ensure a consistent strategy is carried across all marketing channels from your radio advertising to your social media.
Utilize Online Referrals
Referrals are nothing new to the healthcare industry, whether it’s between doctors to provide better care or someone referring a new patient to a healthcare provider. But you have to remember that word-of-mouth in the 21st Century is digital, and its name is social media. That’s right: 41% of people would choose a healthcare provider based on their social media reputation. In terms of marketing, that means you’ll need to learn about social influencers and encourage patients to share their experiences online, and you can utilize those in your other marketing channel’s promotions like in your radio ads.
Use Digital Promotions
The difficulty with promotions is, of course, healthcare restrictions and other ethical standards. However, promotions like loyalty programs and discounts can be shared digitally as long as they follow those guidelines. For instance, you can use your social media channels and blog to advertise the fact that your family practice provides a discount to new patients or that your dental practice loyalty program offers points and prizes for making regular appointments for teeth cleaning. Also, utilizing online quizzes in your digital promotions like “How to Detect Heart Problems” or “How Can You Avoid The Flu This Season?” can be an effective strategy. Be sure you stay up to date with the guidelines for your state and practice.
In Joplin, advertising to patients should include efforts that help your healthcare marketing reach them at every point of their decision journey. The tactics may have been born from retail, but healthcare patient engagement has a powerful impact that your organization shouldn’t ignore. The tips we’ve listed above will help you to start developing a solid patient engagement strategy.
