We live in an era in which people pay a lot of attention to their health and the substances they take for treatment, but they are also increasingly wary of medical professionals, fearful that they will act more for convenience for the well-being of patients. The risk is that they find themselves doing online research and finding misleading and inaccurate information.
Blocking this dynamic is almost impossible and what social-health companies can do is ensuring that they inform the final patient through their own channels and establish a relationship of trust with them. Mobile searches are increasingly frequent, access to information increasingly free, how should medical companies behave?
Those who work in the health field know that their environment is changing mainly due to changes in patients’ buying habits . People consult approximately 12 information sources before making decisions about care, products and services concerning their health , which is equivalent to about 1 in 20 research started on a search engine.
People want to compare diagnoses, know all the possible treatments and make a considered decision. This is why, today, managing a medical company means meeting the needs of patients at all times, on each channel and providing them with all the information they seek. If a healthcare facility does not appear in the search results it is losing a unique opportunity to meet the needs of its target and to communicate with them. If this is your case, here are some useful tips for structuring a winning Healthcare Marketing Strategy:
- Take a mobile-first approach. According to Google, the majority of research in the health field is carried out by mobile, which means that your website, your content and your landing pages should be responsive;
- Give weight to your geographical area of origin. The expressions “in the vicinity” or “zone X” alongside the keyword used to start the search are taking on a role of increasing importance. Google is very attentive to the needs of its users and therefore tries to provide them with localized results whenever possible. For this reason, referring to the geographical area becomes essential to improve its positioning on search engines, especially in the case of medical facilities.
Health Communication starts from a good Inbound Marketing Strategy
According to Google, 77% of users leave a mobile website if they cannot find the information they are looking for easily. 40% prefer to contact a competitor if the website loading times are longer than 3 seconds .
For this reason, it is important:
- Enter simple and effective CTAs that intuitively indicate to the user how to get in touch with your healthcare facility or how to investigate a particular topic;
- Review your site map. Be sure to offer a good User Experience from both mobile and desktop is the basis for all those companies that decide to start a digital marketing strategy to generate long-term business results.
Adopting a customer centric approach means scrupulously organizing your Health Communication, providing value to your target before, during and after the sale, it means putting your needs in front of yours.
For this reason, it is important that:
- Communicate with patients when they need it;
- Answer their questions clearly and comprehensively;
- Go beyond what they expect at the customer service level and help them solve the problems they encounter;
- Take every opportunity to inform the final patient;
- Carefully monitor research trends so as to anticipate needs;
- Always use an empathic approach in every interaction.
By meeting your customers in the places where they develop conversations or in an ad hoc environment for them, you have the opportunity to nurture relationships and build a relationship of trust with your potential customers. By cultivating these relationships, you will be able to understand your target and needs more and develop a suitable Inbound Marketing Strategy to satisfy them.
