Today’s rapidly digitizing world is giving way to several innovations in the healthcare industry, but the marketing strategies they rightfully require are lagging quite far behind other consumer-centric industries. The simple reason behind it is that the healthcare industry primarily focuses on patient care and not marketing strategies, thereby making it complicated for healthcare organizations to keep up with the marketing innovations brought about by other sectors.
Although this trend seems rightfully moral, studies fail to corroborate the healthcare industry’s inclination to enhance patient care alone. They show that about 77% of individuals perform online research about a healthcare facility before making an appointment. Similarly, the Pew Internet & American Life Project concluded that about 93 million Americans, which makes up about 80% of total Internet users, search for topics pertinent to healthcare online.
Such circumstances entail the extent to which patients and consumers use online resources both during initial and ongoing medical care and call for healthcare organizations to benefit from digital marketing and boost patient engagement. Not only that, but digital marketing can also play a significant role in enhancing healthcare outcomes.
This writing delves further into this topic and looks into healthcare digital marketing and its significance for the healthcare industry. Keep reading to find out more!
Table of Contents
What is Healthcare Digital Marketing?
Healthcare digital marketing is the upgraded version of the traditional marketing practices prevalent in the pre-Covid world and before. Healthcare marketing in the past focused majorly on orthodox attention-grabbing strategies such as TV, radio, print media, and direct mail. Such strategies worked in the air: marketers launched campaigns and just hoped for the best to unfold as they could not make real-time adjustments once a campaign was launched.
Marketing in the healthcare sector was majorly unheard of: with the low cost of healthcare procedures and a public less proactive about their health, healthcare providers did not face significant complications in acquiring patients. However, the healthcare industry paints considerably changed demographics now, where patients delay or wholly reject procedures based on their expense.
Thus, when the world entered the age of globalization, the marketing demands in healthcare metamorphosed into digital marketing strategies that not only help attain new customers but also retain present ones. Healthcare providers can use different digital marketing platforms to promote offerings via online media, where they can address the majority of today’s online population.
Furthermore, digital marketing also lends a helping hand in staying connected with patients, boosting patient and physician engagement, and enhancing in-network utilization.
Why is Digital Marketing so Important in Healthcare?
Modern patients of the present digitized world demand the three Cs:
- Choice
- Customization
- Convenience
Thus, all healthcare providers need to adopt digital marketing techniques that offer them the highly sought-after Cs in surplus amounts. Let us take a look at three primary reasons why digital marketing holds paramount importance in the healthcare industry:
Patient targeting through Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Digital marketing allows healthcare providers to track the results of their campaigns in real-time, thereby making the necessary changes. A well-developed SEO strategy can work wonders in optimizing digital marketing techniques by targeting your target audience on the search engine result pages.
In addition, SEO helps organize websites to allow easy access to all the information a patient may require. It also provides considerable insight into the kind of website content a healthcare organization should produce based on consumer demand.
Connecting with the right patients at the right time via PPC
Healthcare organizations that do not spend time looking for what patients generally require miss out on many potential clients. That is because different individuals interact with healthcare facilities due to different needs: some may be looking for prescription medicine side effects, disease effects, or an urgent healthcare facility.
Enhancing the patient acquisition efforts directly translates to providing streamlined communication across the most suitable channels, and Pay Per Click advertising helps in this regard. Organizations can effectively use PPC to target particular ads to specific channels or geographical locations, convincing patients to take a look at a specific healthcare facility.
Regulating patient experience
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services necessitates a high-quality patient experience, labeling it as a financial imperative in addition to an ethical concern. The HCAHPS survey is the first standardized survey in this regard that measures patient experience and is also designed to incentivize healthcare systems as a means of increasing their focus on engagement and experience.
HCAHPS results are directly associated with Medicare reimbursement and affect a hospital’s gain or loss in payments. Frequently, these experiences begin as a prospective patient interacts with a healthcare facility’s digital content.
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