Five key marketing strategies to stand out in online healthcare marketing
Regardless of your specification within healthcare, your practice needs a strong online presence and a constant focus on healthcare marketing. Whether you are a practicing physicians, dentist, pediatrician or optometrist, making your patients happy and standing out amongst the various competition in your field are two musts in this ever-changing industry.
In order to make your practice stand out, keep the following eight tips in mind when it comes to evaluating your practice’s online presence.
1. Maintain a strategic website
Be sure the website contains relevant contact information, as well as a few pages which describe your services and any testimonials the practice has gained over the years. Your website will act as a liaison between your clients and your practice, so it is of the upmost importance that all communication is efficient, accessible and effective.
2. Make SEO a priority
Even if your practice has a valuable website and quality content, no one will be able to see your marketing presence without SEO optimization. Make a budget for a team to look after the online marketing activity, to ensure that your practice is capitalizing on its audience to the best of its ability and is up-to-date on the latest industry changes. This team will be aware of search engine algorithms, local search marketing, keywords and social media communication.
3. Produce educational content
The key to building returning readership and visits to your online presence resides in your content. Producing quality, informative, interesting and useful content is the key to crafting a unique virtual voice as well as a reputation as a credible online source of healthcare information. Look to answer ongoing questions within your field, contribute to larger conversations within the discipline and be consistent in terms of how you tag or keyword posted articles.
4. Social Media access and promotion
Including social sharing in each page you post onto your site provides an easy and accessible way for your online followers to share your stories. By incorporating social share to your LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Blog and other social media sites you are immediately improving your chances at increased visibility and online conversations due to the accessible nature of this tool.
Additional applications can be included to add to your social share capabilities, including AddThis, Flare or Digg Digg.
5. Video marketing
Video is the wave of the future, regardless your practice’s target demographics. Whether it is a patient testimonial, physician news brief or an explanation of enrollment procedures, video is proven to be the chosen method of receiving information today. It is important to utilize YouTube’s webpage-friendly capabilities to embed videos into your site or upload custom videos to YouTube’s server. From here, you can include various videos from other respected professionals in your field, your own homemade videos or patient videos, with the simple click of a button.