The healthcare industry, just like most industries today, is rapidly evolving. Triggered by industry innovation, policy changes, and the evolution of information and technology – all due to the swelling momentum of the millennials, ushering a new era of healthcare.
Every single year, marketing trends keep changing and developing. What your healthcare consumers will respond to this year is not what they respond to next year. Medical marketers need to be up to date with the latest medical marketing trends to maximize results.
What is Medical Marketing
Medical marketing refers to a set of marketing strategies used by healthcare providers, advocacy groups, suppliers, insurers, and to attract new patients and increase brand awareness of their medical business.
Medical Marketing Trends
Medical marketing is tricky. But if it were easy, everybody would be doing it. If you are in the medical industry and are looking for medical marketing trends, then you are in luck.
Fine-tune your medical product marketing strategy
It doesn’t matter if you run a solo practice or a clinic with less than 80 employees; your medical services are the product that you are trying to sell to potential patients. Using word of mouth will only take your business so far, and you will eventually come to a standstill.
To ensure that you have a constant flow of new patients in your business, you need to implement a medical marketing strategy. You can start by conducting an audit of all your products and services. Apart from knowing your business, you will need to get a better sense of the patients you target “patient persona”. This strategy needs to be one of the focal points of your marketing efforts.
Content Creation
There are very few methods you can offer value, reaching a wider audience than creating content. According to recent marketing surveys, 20 percent of marketers believe content marketing is the most impactful medical marketing strategy moving forward. There are several ways you can use content in medical marketing for doctors, including videos, podcasts, blogs, and infographics. The main idea is to generate as much useful content as possible to keep your audience engaged.
Testimonials and Reviews
Social proof is vital for any business. For an industry as serious as healthcare, its importance is amplified. Displaying reviews and testimonials of your service will give potential patients an insight into what they can expect when they sign up for your services. For instance, when collecting testimonials for sensitive areas such as plastic surgery marketing, first reach out to current or previous patients with a simple questionnaire. If you plan on using their answers, ask for permission to make sure they do not mind. Their feedback adds up as important information on the medical business website.
Mobile Responsive Website
If your medical website is not responsive, you will not get a single organic hit on your medical business website. Search engines like Google are currently on a huge mobile-first kick. Google set out a new algorithm in the form of mobile-first indexing as of March 2018. This new kick means Google will only show results based on the websites’ mobile version versus the web version. Therefore, if your medical business website is not mobile-friendly, it will rank poorly on the search engine results page.
Implement a Powerful Social Media Healthcare Marketing Plan
It won’t cost you a lot to have one of your staff spend a couple of hours in a week managing your business on social media. They could promote your business services, reply to queries, and share content you feel will engage your business audience. While this might be a great place to start, it's not enough to keep your audience engaged.
To be able to generate a few dozen likes and shares, you need to implement an effective social media medical marketing plan. It involves following a consistent posting schedule, replying to reviews, sharing original and visually appealing posts, getting feedback through live Q&A, as well as collaborating with Influences. While this sounds like a lot of work, this is where having the right resources and tools makes it invaluable. It is crucial to have a marketing report at the end of every week to check engagement with the content, like traffic and interactions on social media. But marketing tools will delve deeper into the results, and will show you certain demographics, such as the age or even the time of day you get certain traffic.
Medical marketing isn’t just a nice thing to have; it is integral to how you promote your business in the modern world.
