Healthcare marketing is one of the hardest nuts to crack. But with the best guidance behind you and the right strategy in place, your organisation has a golden opportunity to grow in 2023.
Compared to general marketing strategies applied by other industries, healthcare marketing must adopt a specialist approach to engage patients and develop trust.
As a Birmingham-based healthcare marketing agency, we’ve helped numerous healthcare brands develop successful digital marketing strategies with our local market knowledge and future development insights.
With this in mind, we thought it was only fair to share our wisdom. Read on to discover the five best healthcare marketing tips for 2023 to help your business outdo the competition and reach new patients/consumers.
What is healthcare marketing?
Healthcare marketing is a process of promotion designed to attract and engage patients and healthcare consumers. Although its ultimate goal is similar to traditional marketing, there are some distinct differences involving:
- Broader demographics
- Specific needs
- Moral and ethical issues
The most effective healthcare marketing plans integrate a multi-channel approach and are highly targeted to meet the growing online demands in patient care. To achieve this, make sure you apply the following tips in 2023.
Healthcare marketing tips
- Get to know your patients/consumers
Outbound and inbound marketing contain multiple avenues, so the first thing to decide is your patient demographic.
Your healthcare products and services may appeal to a versatile array of clients. In this case, you can undertake a general marketing strategy that incorporates various demographics within a broad principle of appeal.
But if you offer a niche product or service, you may attract a specific demographic. Targeting this ideal demographic is achievable with certain marketing targeting techniques.
Apply healthcare consumer insights
Utilising healthcare consumer insights is easy with website analytics, social media research and patient records. As a healthcare brand, you should have a vast collection of data at your disposal. Use this data to gain insights and facilitate how you best target your ideal consumer.
Knowing preferences, social media platforms, and general online consumer behaviour will enable you to pinpoint your marketing in the right areas at the right time to engage your target audience. But this begins with consumer analysis and determining your patient personas with accuracy while remaining respectful.
- Harness the power of content marketing to build trust
Now with your target consumers in mind, it’s time to understand how you engage them digitally. With multiple platforms and approaches to implement, the number one healthcare marketing trend for 2023 begins with content marketing.
Content marketing is a broad section in the marketing world, focusing on inbound strategies over a longer period and consisting of multiple techniques.
Some examples of content marketing include:
- Blog posts
- Social media content
- Infographics
- E-books
- Podcasts
- Case studies
- Testimonials and reviews
But what unites all aspects of content marketing is how educational, informative, and valuable content builds trust with patients and attracts engagement to your healthcare brand.
With 5% of all search queries online being health-related, many of your prospective patients will conduct research before investing in any healthcare products or services.
Trust is a vital marketing feature applied to all sectors but has particular prevalence within the healthcare industry. After all, when we consider personal health and wellbeing, people want to invest in a brand they can trust.
Nurturing the trust of your consumer is crucial as a healthcare brand, and content marketing allows you to harness this quality through multiple forms of content.
- Local SEO vs Global SEO
Search engine optimisation (SEO) allows prospective consumers to find your business online via search engines. Marketers use keywords from consumer needs to help brands answer queries and offer solutions.
However, as a healthcare business, you must first recognise whether you should apply local or global SEO in your digital marketing campaigns.
Local SEO for healthcare marketing
As the name suggests, local SEO focuses on your location and its surrounding areas. For example, if a patient needs a new dentist in Birmingham, they won’t be interested in seeing practices in London. Like most people these days, they will use Google or another search engine to find what they need by searching “Dentist in Birmingham”, “Best dentist in Birmingham”, or “Dentist near me”.
Therefore, it’s in the interests of all Birmingham-based dentists to incorporate these keywords into their website content so they may appeal to these prospective clients. With 97% of users searching online for local businesses and 62% disregarding brands that they can’t find online, local SEO is crucial to digital marketing efforts for all localised healthcare brands.
Implementing SEO is achievable through website content, Google Business Account, blogs, and social media posts.
We distinguish this marketing strategy as “local SEO” as it applies directly to the local area where your business operates. All healthcare brands limited to operations within their local area must apply local SEO techniques to their marketing strategy or risk losing local custom to competitors.
Global SEO for healthcare marketing
On the flip side, if your business is unrestricted by location, then a global or national SEO approach can enable you to reach more potential customers. By selling a healthcare product that’s deliverable worldwide, you can effectively utilise global SEO techniques in your marketing strategy.
Finding specific subject points your brand can answer with valuable information is key to your business standing out on a worldwide search. For example, if your product has a niche USP unlike any other that people will find beneficial, answer their needs with SEO to stand out from the rest and rise in search engine rankings.
- PPC for healthcare marketing
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is another effective form of healthcare marketing. Instead of driving traffic to your website organically, with PPC, you appear at the top of search engines and pay every time a prospective patient clicks on your ad.
PPC can generate fast results and increase brand awareness while delivering a high return on investment. Healthcare brands will utilise a PPC campaign to gain instantaneous results. By optimising landing pages, you can direct consumers to the services and products you provide while acquiring personal information and target audience demographics for paid retargeting techniques.
As a proven outbound marketing tool, PPC is reported to generate a 200% ROI rate for businesses when applied successfully.
AI can also be applied in PPC as a marketing trend in 2023 with features such as autonomous bid adjustments, improved retargeting, predicted patient behaviour and pausing poor performance ads.
Plus, while PPC and SEO may differ, PPC can supply your SEO campaigns with keyword insights and an overall assessment of the online market.
- Paid and organic social media marketing
From improving patient relations to sharing vital healthcare information and community outreach, social media provides an excellent platform for healthcare brands to help others while increasing brand awareness.
Paid social media for healthcare
Paid social media can display your products and services within the feed of your ideal customers. It allows you to utilise personal information such as location, age, preferences, and online behaviours to target social media users.
Building from an online community of followers, your paid social can provide the route to more conversions and higher-quality leads.
Organic social media for healthcare
Organic social media can help diversify your healthcare brand within your online community. Rather than pushing for leads and conversions, you can take the content marketing approach to establish your brand identity and develop greater trust with your followers.
Beyond seeing your patients as consumers, organic social media marketing enables you to treat your patients as people – nurturing relationships with high-quality content and interpersonal messaging.
Choose a healthcare marketing agency to advance your brand in 2023
We hope you found these healthcare marketing tips for 2023 useful. If you need a hand with the strategy and implementation side of things, speak to us.
At Amay Digital, we specialise in healthcare marketing in the Birmingham area. Over the years, we’ve helped numerous local healthcare brands build a greater online presence, generate higher-quality leads, and increase conversion rates.
From SEO to PPC and social media management, we have the skills and experience to advance your healthcare brand.
To find out more details about how our healthcare marketing agency can help your business, get in touch today.
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