7 Healthcare Marketing Trends Making an Impact in 2022
While the concept of providing healthcare is relatively straightforward, running a healthcare business is anything but. Like any business, your success relies on the economy, consumer trends, and, of most of all, marketing.
But what are the best healthcare marketing techniques? How can you communicate your message to potential patients? Is there a way to market your business while expressing genuine care in the well-being of your patients while also pushing to drive business upward?
Keep reading as we dive into the top healthcare marketing trends of 2022.
1. Perfect Your Website
There’s no denying it at this point, we are fully immersed in the digital era. An astonishing 81 percent of Americans own a smartphone. We literally have access to infinite knowledge at our fingertips 24 hours a day.
Why is this important to your healthcare business?
The vast majority of consumers research products and services online long before they invest their time or money. This includes researching healthcare facilities, symptoms, diagnoses, treatments, and cures. If you don’t have a strong online presence, these internet users (almost everyone) will never even know you exist.
As the virtual face of your company, your website must be user-friendly. This means having quick loading times, an appealing design and layout, intuitive navigation, and multiple forms of media. If users don’t find your website appealing or easy to use, they’ll bounce off of it and find a different healthcare facility.
2. Lock Down Your SEO
Even the best-designed websites are useless without SEO. Search engine optimization is what directs users to your website when they search for information pertaining to the healthcare services you provide using search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.).
Your SEO rating will determine how quickly your website comes up on SERPs (search engine results pages). This is key to organic online healthcare marketing, as most online users won’t continue their research after the first page of results.
Improve your SEO rating by including a blog on your website. It needs to be loaded with articles that use keywords, multiple forms of media embedded with metadata, internal and external links, snippets, and more.
3. Focus Your Efforts in Social Media
To put the icing on the cake of your online presence, you need to have at least one thriving social media account. We recommend starting with Facebook, where nearly 70 percent of US adults are active. Here, you can use both organic and paid advertising in a powerful way.
Start building up your following by posting engaging and informative content. Try to get the community and your follows to interact by hosting contests, raffles, and promotional content and more. The more people you have sharing, liking, commenting on, and following your posts, the more your healthcare marketing efforts will prosper.
You can also use paid advertising through social media. Through Facebook’s Ad Center, you can direct your ads towards certain demographics of people in the community based on age, gender, location, and more.
Finally, Facebook tracks and analyzes every ad you post, giving you insights into how it performed (views, link clicks, shares, comments, likes). You can use this information to tweak your ads to make them more appealing to your targeted audience.
4. Use Email Lists
Next, using your website, landing page ads, and social media, start building an email list. You can gain email subscribers by offering valuable content for those who join. This can be anything from free content, exclusive offers, prizes, and more.
You should have an email campaign pre-designed and automated to send out when someone subscribes. The first email should thank the subscriber for joining and include the promised prize, content, etc. Several more emails should go out during the course of the month, gently reminding the subscriber that you’re there and providing valuable content, such as articles, discounts, promotions, and more.
5. Optimize Your Zero-Click Marketing
Zero-click research is becoming more and more popular. Internet users are typically looking for the fastest results, access, and information. Zero-click research provides them with that.
When you ask Google a question, a zero-click result comes up either on the top of the page or on the sidebar to answer your question. The answer can be found in webpage snippets or through the Google Knowledge Graph.
The important part is that people no longer need to click on a website to get the information they need. However, zero-click research marketing is important for healthcare marketing because it’s always a subject people want to dive deeper into. Most often, because they’re research symptoms and looking for remedies.
When they dig deeper into the subject, they’re going to choose the website that’s already given them at least one answer. Optimize your snippets on your webpages to answer potential questions and invest in a Google Knowledge Graph panel.
6. Get Involved in the Community
As a local healthcare provider looking to gain more clients, you need to get involved with the community. The locals need to know you exist, see that you care, and get familiar with your name.
Connect with a local non-profit or charity and host a fund-raising/awareness event. You can plan a concert featuring local artists, plan a 5K race, or host a silent auction with participating local businesses.
Start inviting other businesses to take part. It will grant them more exposure to the community, allow them to set up a booth, and provide you with more resources for the event. Begin advertising for the event as soon as possible to start building hype and maximize attendance.
7. Build Up Your Review Marketing
Finally, encourage your clients to leave reviews on your website, social media page, Google reviews, etc. Review marketing is one of the most effective healthcare marketing techniques.
When someone is sick, injured, or otherwise seeking healthcare assistance, they want to know they’re placing their health in the right hands. Any company can profess to be amazing, but people want to know what past clients have to say.
What was their experience? Were they treated well? Were their needs met with respect and compassion?
Looking for More Healthcare Marketing Advice?
If you’re looking to improve your healthcare marketing strategy this year, we can help. You run an important business, and your success is our priority. Contact us today to see what we can do and be sure to check out more of our articles before you leave.