A Healthcare Digital Marketing Agency for All Types of Medical Businesses

Digital marketing is as crucial for healthcare businesses today as for any other business, if not more. And working with a digital marketing agency is the sensible choice if you want to grow your business faster while continuing to focus on what you do best—providing healthcare. 

Regardless of the type of healthcare business you’re in, Josh Meah & Company can help you keep the phones ringing, products moving, and the appointment books. In this article, we outline a roadmap of the digital marketing journey of a medical business and provide an overview of all the services that a healthcare digital marketing agency should provide. Let’s start!

Why Healthcare Businesses Need Digital Marketing

A few facts:

• Healthcare related searches account for 7% of all searches made on Google daily.
• Around 75,000 healthcare searches are performed every minute.
• 77% of patients search on Google before booking an appointment with a healthcare provider.
• 67% of doctors who use social media use it for professional reasons.
• In 2021, healthcare spending on digital advertising is forecast to overtake spending on TV advertising for the first time in history.

Today’s consumers are digitally grounded. They depend on the internet and other digital media as a source of everything—entertainment, information, socializing, education, shopping, and seeking healthcare. 

To stay relevant and survive in this digital age, a healthcare business must have a solid -- if not impressive -- digital media presence. It’s not about selling, but being accessible to those who need your services. Of course, you do get to sell more services and grow your business in the bargain.

The Role of a Healthcare Digital Marketing Agency

As we enter 2020, marketers have access to a wide range of digital marketing tools. This access allows your clinic to be finger tap away from patients once you have set up your digital marketing properly. You can reach your customers faster, with greater accuracy, and in more ways than ever before if you know how to use the right tools. 

If you’re not taking full advantage of digital marketing, your business may not be as thriving as it could be. You should consult and work with a healthcare digital marketing agency to strengthen your digital muscles. Think of a digital marketing agency as a hospital where professionals with different specialties offer their skills and services as a team. The specialties include web design and development, SEO, PPC advertising, social media, email marketing, and more.

Getting Started with Healthcare Digital Marketing

Healthcare practices and businesses can’t afford to look too commercial from their marketing. There may be legal restrictions and ethical considerations which must be considered. At Josh Meah & Co, we have a specialized medical marketing team that works with you to understand your business and its environment before creating and executing a digital marketing strategy. Here’s the broad roadmap we recommend for healthcare businesses.

Learn More about Your Patients and Market

You know them as patients, but you want to know them as real people. Find out what drives your patients and customers. What are their favorite digital media channels? What other alternatives do they have for your products and services? What are their demographics, psychographics, and interests? Answers to these questions are necessary before you start spending money on digital marketing. Here are a few tips for conducting healthcare customer research:

• Conduct customer interviews groups to get deeper insights into their preferences and choices when seeking treatment at a facility like yours
• Implement online data gathering tools such as Survey Monkey or Google Forms to create, distribute and collect surveys and questionnaires via email and social media
• Use voice of customer (VOC) insight tools such as Qualaroo or Hotjar to learn what your customers are thinking about your website and product experience

• Remember that research is an ongoing process because customer needs and wants may change with the advent of new trends, treatments and products

Build a Native Website

Your website is the center of all your digital marketing activities. Medical websites often have more than normal quantity of content, but the content needs to be medically and ethically appropriate.  . The healthcare sector is heavily regulated, leading marketing agencies to be careful with the content. Despite these limitations, there are plenty of great healthcare websites out there that you can use for gaining some inspiration. Here are a few useful tips and examples.

• Create a clean web design with easy navigation
• Make the search function and action buttons prominent
• Use simple and readable fonts and make it easy for visitors to find the information they need

Mayo Clinic makes most of the information available upfront by displaying the search function, drop-down menus, and action buttons.

• Use plenty of white space between different elements or your site will look cluttered
• Use soft colors and add a bit of lighthearted graphics to make a serious subject more fun

Rest Assured App uses a minimalistic and comic web design.

• Use interactive features such as appointment booking, symptoms checking, and information searching
• Include testimonials, reviews and patient success stories

Create Customer Engagement On Social Media 

Social media gives healthcare providers interactive platforms and tools for sharing information, discussing healthcare policies and practices, promoting healthy behaviors, and interacting with patients and caregivers. While on those platforms, of course, healthcare providers must safeguard patients’ privacy and confidentiality. Here are some best practices that a healthcare digital marketing agency or provider should follow.

• Create a complete profile by including your company’s introduction, services, contact information, company logo and by filling out all relevant fields
• Share news and information about safety and preventive healthcare

Penn Medicine’s way to advise people on Facebook to ‘mask up’ during COVID-19

• Showcase your brand in all of your social media posts.
• Highlight the accomplishments and working of your company and healthcare professionals.

Quest Diagnostics features its accomplishments on social media.

• Share customer stories while protecting patient privacy. Ask your patient’s permission before sharing their stories.
• Use the best social media networks for healthcare marketing, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Quest Diagnostics has a robust presence on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Optimize Your Website for Google Searches

Your website looks terrific, but it’s not getting any traffic. That suggests you haven’t optimized it for search engines. Search engine optimization (SEO) is the science and art of improving the numbers and quality of visitors that come to your website after they search for a particular search term on Google or other search engines. Here are the steps that a professional healthcare digital marketing agency would implement. 

• Conduct keyword research using Google Keyword Planner and other keyword tools such as AHREFS or Wordstream.

AHREFS tell you the keyword difficulty score so you don’t waste your efforts after keywords that are super hard to rank for.

• Download a list of the keywords that relate to your business, have high volumes, and low keyword difficulty.
• For on-page SEO, put the relevant keywords in your page titles, headlines, content, meta descriptions, and image ALT tags.
• For off-page SEO, publish guest posts on high-authority domains and link them to your website.
• List your website in all relevant local and national online directories. There are hundreds of healthcare related directories available, so make sure you select the ones that are most closely relate to your practice or business.

Healthgrades is one of the best directories to find doctors in America

• Make sure your company’s name, address and phone numbers are identical in every directory where your site is listed.
• Gather genuine customer reviews and citations by providing excellent services and then reaching out to patients to write reviews. You can ask customers or review your practice on Google, Facebook, any third party review site, or your own website.

Convert More of Your Web Visitors into Buyers

All the traffic in the world is useless if most of your visitors just bounce away without taking the action that you’d like them to take. Enter conversion rate optimization. It is that critical part of digital marketing that deals with the bottom lines of all your marketing efforts. Here’s how we go about conversion optimization at Josh Meah & Company.

• We start by looking at the overall content structure of your website and aligning the navigation with the visitor workflow.
• Then, we create highly relevant and valuable pages for each of your keywords, making sure the information on that page relates to the customer’s intent behind the search.
• The next step is to align the content with your customer’s journey and make it easy for your visitors and patients to find the information they need.

The Visiting Angels website is well aligned with the keywords and customer intent.

• We increase the site speed and decrease the page loading time by optimizing images, reducing the number of HTTP requests, and cleaning up the code.
• We optimize calls to action, page layouts, headlines, and copywriting.
• We include patient and customer testimonials and reviews and other trust signals such as association memberships, awards, and achievements.

Trust is a conversion booster. Cleveland Clinic displays achievements and awards on its website. 

• Finally we conduct A/B split testing and continue to optimize based on the insights gathered from Google Analytics tracking and paid heat-mapping software

Go for Mobile Healthcare Marketing

Mobile apps offer tremendous benefits for healthcare providers and consumers. They improve communication between patients and professionals and between professionals and professionals, thus improving the quality of healthcare and reducing its cost. A professional healthcare digital marketing agency can get your business ahead of the curve on mobile marketing while still providing patient privacy.

• Integrate mobile apps into your practice or business to store and consult patient histories, collect patient feedback, track performance, recommend or alter medication, book appointments, and offer a great patient experience.
• Optimize your site for mobile searches by making it responsive and checking it for proper display on different mobile screens.
• Engage your patients on mobile by sending push notifications and reminders about their upcoming check up, medication, and general health.
• Optimize your website for voice searches.
• Make sure your location is featured on Google Maps when people search for your business.

If your clinic isn’t on Google Maps, it might as well not exist.

• Implement AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) to make your site load faster on mobile devices.
• List your practice with the best patient-facing apps in your area and specialty. Some of the best medical mobile apps include iTriage, Mayo Clinic, Pacificia, and WebMD.

WebMD Mobile App allows patients to check their symptoms, find doctors, make appointments, and save money on prescriptions.

Use Email Marketing to Nurture Relationships 

Email marketing is another area that a digital marketing agency manages on your company’s behalf. Email is a highly effective marketing channel with a Return on Investment as high as 4,400%. It can help you stay on top of your customer’s mind by sending them health information, special offers and other important messages. Here’s how a healthcare digital marketing agency will set up your email marketing.

• Implement lead capture pages on your website and social media pages to gather email opt-ins
• Set up the right email management tool such as MailChimp, ConstantContact or another software
• Plan and execute follow-up sequences, email blasts and drip campaigns to nurture the leads
• Write enticing email copy and select the best messages through A/B testing
• Integrate email marketing with your website, social media and mobile marketing

Go For PPC Advertising On Google and Facebook

Google and Facebook are the most widely used digital media channels. Millions of businesses compete for visibility on these platforms, so it’s almost obligatory to use paid advertising if you want to get noticed. Your digital marketing agency can help you maximize the return on your investment by improving the click-through rate and conversion rate of your ads.

For Google Ads

• Refine your keyword strategy by aligning keywords and pages with customer intent
• Set up or clean up your Google Ads account by removing low-performing keywords and creating focused and coherent ad groups.
• Implement Google Ads Extensions to display your important business information such as phone number or services as a part of your ads.
• Use a mix of display and search ads to get long-term brand exposure as well as short-term sales.
• Create and optimize landing pages for each ad.
• Implement Google Analytics and conversion tracking. 

For Facebook Ads

• Select the right ad campaign for your product or service. The type of campaign would depend upon your goals, e.g. creating brand awareness, generating video views, or making sales.

• Create ad sets for different consumer segments, e.g. you can create different ad sets for patients and caregivers.
• Select the audience by defining the age, location, language, demographics, interests, and behaviors.
• Create compelling versions of ads and conduct A/B testing to determine the best variants.

truBrain’s Facebook ad features the product and radiates a compelling image. 

How a Healthcare Digital Marketing Agency Can Help Your Business Thrive

Working with a digital marketing agency like Josh Meah & Co, you can benefit from the skills of experienced professionals in each field of digital marketing. You can establish a robust presence on the best digital media channels, drive free traffic from organic searches, and run high ROI advertising campaigns. You can start selling your services immediately and build your digital healthcare brand on a strong foundation. Start your journey today because without digital marketing, there will be no appointments, no patients, and no business.