Top 4 Ways to Attract Healthcare Marketing Audience

Healthcare marketing is changing. With the introduction and rise of mobile health technology, healthcare brands have to switch from traditional forms of marketing to mobile, social media and email. The main reason for this switch? Greater reach, higher engagement and a much higher return on investment than traditional forms of medical marketing.

One of the key ingredients for an online marketing strategy is to produce content that is not only engaging but also relevant to the recipient. There are multiple types of healthcare user journeys and each one is unique based on ailment. With this in mind, it is a good idea to build out different user personas to direct your healthcare marketing towards. This will make targeting the right people, with the right content, in the right moment much easier. This article looks into some of the top ways you can attract your healthcare audience online.

Segmentation

Once you have finalized the select users you would like to target with information via a marketing effort, you can start to segment your email sign ups for each of these groups into lists. These lists can then be used for different types of email marketing campaigns, and can also be used in a larger paid marketing campaign such as Customer Match on Google Adwords. By dividing up your audience in this way, you can ensure that you are targeting your users with information that is relevant to their previous experiences on the site. For example, if you know that an email subscriber has opened a diabetes blog link from their email and downloaded a guide from your website, you can target them with relevant diabetes information moving forward. You can also break up your email lists based on geography or interest levels. Either way, customizing your content for your audience will help them to not only engage higher with your brand but also develop more trust. The proof is also in the pudding: your segmented email is more likely to have a 14% higher open rate than a non-segmented campaign according to Mailchimp. To find out more read our article about The Importance of Customer Segmentation in a Healthcare Email Marketing Plan (LINK).

Content Strategy

All successful online healthcare brands know that content is of paramount importance to a successful online marketing strategy. With withering attention spans, content needs to be short but add value, as well as be shareable.There are many ways to make your content easy to digest. You can add headers, sub-headers, bold & italic text, images or wrap everything up into an attractive infographic. Making content shareable is another concept altogether and, because people love to share good quotes, pulling out the good quotes and making them shareable on Twitter and other social platforms enables readers to share easily.Content also needs to be engaging and, with the increase in the amount of tools to make content visual online, it is clear that visual and interactive content increases engagement. In healthcare, engaging content is usually the video that tells the story of a patient's journey or the infographic displaying stats about dementia in a creative and interesting way.

Think Mobile First

Now that the number of global mobile users has exceeded desktop users, every business should be considering a mobile first approach to their marketing strategy. You must have a responsive website with content that is easily readable, clickable and can be shared easily on social media.All advertisements you develop in Adwords or other [marketing channels] need to be mobile-friendly so that they display correctly on every device.You may also consider building apps to satisfy certain user needs. One example could be a hospital app to guide visitors around each department or an appointment builder app that send users notifications of their appointment time and location.

Social Media

Including social media in your healthcare institution's marketing strategy is important but it is also a space that requires some rules to avoid any liability. It is a good idea to develop a social media policy to display on your website to give general guidelines and expectations to your employees and patients.

Once the legalities are taken care of, developing a solid social media strategy can be a challenge. Take a look at our Top 5 Creative Ways Healthcare Brands have Used Social Media (LINK) article to get some inspiration.

The most important thing to do with any digital marketing campaign is measure success so you can optimize and develop your strategy and understand what is working as a part of your plan.

What healthcare digital marketing tactics have you witnessed online that really engaged? Share them with us over on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. For a more detailed strategy, consult with Prototype a digital marketing agency, Dubai and Miami-based.