A healthcare marketing strategy is essential for all healthcare facilities and professionals who want to keep up with the digital transformation that has hit the medical field. In a world where people increasingly use the internet to make choices about their health, the presence on the web is becoming more and more important.
In this article, we offer some tips to set up a web marketing health strategy aimed at improving your digital strategy.
1. Create an effective website
Users visit websites with the aim of finding the information they are looking for as quickly as possible. The website is often the support base for every web marketing strategy: it must be clear, simple and intuitive, it must arouse interest and inspire confidence in the user and guide them in the choice they must make.
In the case of a health care website, in fact, the user experience is much more important, for example, than the graphic layout. Also important is the SEO, or the positioning of the site in search engines, which is essential to make the website appear among the first search results in Google.
2. Use a blog
The blog can be used in many different ways: for example, it can be used to report on health problems or treatment paths that other people have already experienced in the past. In this way, those who find themselves – or find themselves in the future – in the same situation, will have more knowledge and awareness of the problem, also finding a sort of support between the lines.
An excellent example of a blog is that of the Harvard Medical School, rich in content on the most varied health problems, divided into categories by type of disease.
3. Email marketing
The use of newsletters and DEM allows you to offer people content without them having to look for them. Therefore, sending newsletters to users’ inboxes at least once a month can encourage them to stay up to date and informed about recommendations applicable to them.
For an effective email marketing strategy, it is important to personalize the messages and the segmentation of the target: in this way, they will send emails targeted to an audience interested in the subject matter.
4. Make educational videos
Video production responds to the growing interest of users of interesting and stimulating visual content. According to Wordstream, users dedicate at least one-third of their activity on the internet to watch videos: it is, therefore, important to create visual content, arousing interest and giving greater legitimacy to the source of information.
A good example is Cleveland Clinic which makes videos in which doctors discuss health problems related to their area of expertise and suggest therapeutic pathways. The video also serves to give the patient a greater sense of reality and concreteness, rather than how to read articles.
5. Pay attention to SEO
The optimization of the website for search engines (SEO) allows the pool of users who come into contact with the published contents to expand and therefore increase their business. The SEO activity must focus on the use of specific keywords to stand out among the competitors, identifiable through tools such as SEMrush or HubSpot.
You need to use these tools to find the keywords that are right for you, taking into account the difficulty score (the lower it is, the better) and the search volume, which must be high. The main keyword will then be included in the content, in the title, in the meta description, in the URL and placed several times (moderately) within the article so as to optimize the page around the keyword.
6. Also use social media
With the advent of web 2.0, the ways in which users learn their information and use the internet have changed. In addition to reading blogs, in fact, much of people’s activity is focused on social media.
According to Infographics Archive, 60% of users trust more than one post on social media (relating to the activity of doctors) rather than readings from other sources. It is, therefore, necessary that the posts are of the quality to better inform their audience; the strategy also in this case could be to schedule the publication of posts that include the right quantity and an important variety.
For example Cedars-Sinai Medical Center uses social media publishing the most varied contents, even less technical and more stimulating and friendly, giving importance to events.
Another suggestion is to link the website to social pages in order to refer users to the site, increasing visits and allowing a deeper knowledge of the organization.
To conclude, therefore, a solid health care web marketing strategy is efficient when different elements are linked to reach more users and to increase the flow of these around their activities. The fronts on which to focus their efforts are many: for this reason, the advice could be to connect the elements through a content management platform, such as HubSpot, to monitor their progress and results.
