Looking for ways to increase your hospital’s revenue? You know how important it is to reach potential patients online to maintain competitiveness in the healthcare market. However, learning the details of digital marketing for hospitals can be challenging.
You must implement successful healthcare digital marketing strategies to improve your hospital’s earnings. Digital marketing consulting services can provide tailored strategies that align with your hospital’s goals, ensuring the best possible return on investment.
But how do you start? Understanding the right digital marketing strategies can help you transform your hospital financially.
In this article, we’ll examine how digital marketing for hospitals can boost your income and discuss the main healthcare marketing strategies that can help.
Table of Contents
Understanding Healthcare Marketing
The healthcare sector is worth $4 trillion, approximately 18% of the United States’s GDP. According to eMarketer, this industry is expected to grow to $12 trillion by 2024.
Moreover, Healthcare digital marketing is gaining popularity. It is expected to produce $80 billion over the next six years from its current $50 billion annual global revenue. This expansion will create a more competitive and complex market with higher marketing costs.
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Benefits of Digital Marketing for Hospitals
Digital marketing has emerged as a vital tool for hospitals. It enables them to connect with more people, build strong connections with patients, and eventually boost sales. Here are some key benefits of digital marketing for hospitals:
Increased Visibility and Brand Awareness: Digital marketing can help hospitals stand out in a crowded market. Hospitals can raise their profile and connect with people by creating engaging content, optimizing their websites and running advertising campaigns.
Improved Patient Engagement and Trust: Hospitals may gain patients’ confidence and credibility by using digital marketing services. They can build a positive reputation by providing helpful material and responding to inquiries on social media.
Increased Lead Generation and Conversions: Digital marketing techniques that target qualified leads to a hospital’s website include search engine marketing (SEM), social media advertising, and website optimization.
Stronger Relationships with Existing Patients: Hospitals can maintain patient relationships through digital marketing. Hospitals may cultivate repeat business and develop loyalty by providing convenient online appointment booking and wellness initiatives.
Cost-Effective Marketing Solutions: Digital marketing is a more affordable way to reach a larger audience. Hospitals can use it to target particular populations, monitor the effectiveness of their campaigns, and modify their budgets in response to their findings.
Measurable Results and Data-Driven Insights: Using useful data and analytics offered by digital marketing platforms, hospitals can make data-driven decisions by tracking website traffic, user engagement, lead generation, and conversions.
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Best Digital Marketing Strategies to Increase Revenue by 50%
Implementing the right digital marketing strategies can increase your hospital’s revenue. Let’s discuss some of the best healthcare marketing strategies to help you boost your revenue:
1. Brand Strategy for Hospitals
Creating branding involves reaching out to the target market and building brand awareness, which increases your company’s Google search volume.
Your primary focus should be your logo, color, and font. Your target audience should think of your brand first whenever they see your brand color.
From there, you can easily draw them while recalling your logo. Here are some inventive techniques that you can use to increase brand awareness greatly:
Free Consultation Campaigns: Offer free consultations to new clinics or hospitals to attract new patients.
Billboards: Place billboards near your hospital to target your audience.
Community Collaboration: Partner with local events, like marathons, to reach a large local audience and raise awareness about your services.
Educated Content on Social Media: Post informative reels on Instagram or TikTok to increase awareness. Viral content can reach millions within a month, requiring minimal investment.
Create an App and Engage Patients: A mobile app is valuable for engaging patients. Use gamification, such as diet or workout challenges, to keep patients active and involved.
Speaking at Medical Associations: Hospitals can promote their advanced treatments and technologies by speaking at medical associations. This can enhance brand reach and generate referrals from other physicians and consultants.
2. Pirate Funnel for Hospital Marketing
Creating a pirate funnel helps plan the acquisition and retention plan for each patient. Here is an example of a funnel you can use in digital marketing for the healthcare industry to attract and keep patients:
Awareness Stage: Use blogs, social media, viral video marketing, and meta brand awareness initiatives to build brand visibility and reach millions of target audience members. Right now, leads and appointments are not the main focus.
Activation Stage: The goal is to direct the intended audience to a landing page or website through various channels, including blogs, social media, email marketing, influencer marketing, and push-and-pull advertisements.
Acquisition Stage: The lead generation phase is commonly called the acquisition stage. If your website has a form or is running lead generation advertisements, you can obtain more leads (contact details, including name, email address, and mobile number).
Revenue Stage: You can turn a lead into an appointment using an awesome sales staff (telecallers or inside sales executives). Your marketing team should work on automation with educational content and offers, while your sales team should work on numerous follow-ups.
Retention Stage: During this phase, we advise using a clinic or hospital’s management software, such as Ficodo, to schedule follow-up appointments automatically. The number of follow-up visits from patients with the same issue increases the likelihood of increasing CLV (customer lifetime value).
Referrals Stage: Formulating a potent referral strategy is the last phase of customer acquisition. Both physician and patient referrals result in a rise in new patients. Strategic improvisation of the referral plans is required.
3. Plan and Execute Content Strategy
Content marketing is one of the most powerful digital marketing services for hospitals to attract and engage patients. Hospitals may increase trust, demonstrate expertise, and encourage conversions by producing useful, educational, and interesting material.
According to Demand Metric, content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates three times as many leads, making it a cost-effective strategy for hospitals. To execute an effective content strategy, hospitals should:
- Determine their target market and know their pain points and needs
- Create a content calendar to plan and release a steady stream of relevant material, including blog articles, videos, infographics, and social media updates
- Improve content for search engines to increase exposure and generate natural traffic
- Promote content via email newsletters, social media, and the hospital’s website, among other means
- Analyze the effectiveness of the content and modify the plan based on data-driven insights
4. Optimize Landing Pages for Higher Conversions
If you want high-quality leads in the healthcare industry, send your sponsored advertisements to the landing page. But why the landing page?
- Easy to build and set up all the tracking tools
- Create a message/content that can convert visitors
- No distractions on the web page
- Our landing page will target users to reach your hospital
After establishing the landing page, use heatmap technologies like Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar to analyze user activity and begin the ads.
Further, realign the landing page to generate the most leads possible based on the soft data that these heatmap technologies have collected.
Also Read: Digital Transformation In Healthcare
5. Lead Generation Campaigns
Marketing firms such as ours spend great effort developing profitable programs that bring in hot, cold, and prospective leads. Here are a few ways marketers assist clients in creating leads:
- Marketers set up forms and other converting lead magnets on the website to drive leads from organic traffic
- Organic leads from the website are the first preference, but SEO takes at least six to twelve months (for a solid brand value and good domain age website)
- Meta and Google Ads are the best digital marketing methods for obtaining leads
- Using social media and digital advertising for hospitals to generate leads and raise brand awareness
6. Strong Sales Team
As part of your digital healthcare marketing strategy, you should have a strong sales team with the resources and know-how to turn leads from your digital marketing campaigns into paying clients. Here’s how they can contribute to improving revenue:
- Increase revenue through cross-selling and upselling
- Convert digital marketing leads into paying customers
- Develop trust and loyalty with patients
- Address concerns and exceed expectations
- Implement email marketing for hopsitals
- Offer insights to improve digital marketing strategies
- Establish a strong funnel for patient acquisition and growth
7. Setup Automation Process with CRM
Digital marketing strategies are extremely effective since they continue to run when you sleep. On the other hand, automation has the added advantage of allowing a repetitious manual task to be completed with only one effort.
If the automation process is started from a CRM—where all of the leads are kept—it will go smoothly. You can start automated marketing for different lead tags, such as visited, scheduled appointment, no reply, call later, not interested, etc.
Use Clinic or Hospital Management Software
Your digital marketing is lacking if your clinic or hospital does not have cloud-based CMS (clinic management software) or HMS (hospital management software).
The CMS/HMS software helps you:
- Talk to your patients
- Make the appointment
- Digitize medical records and prescriptions
- One center with patient management, lab, and pharmacy services
- Maintaining EMR
Digitizing your clinic’s operations can increase patient retention, as patients can access their medical records with just one click.
Retention of customers is more crucial than acquiring new ones. It also helps to streamline operations as every procedure in your clinic or hospital is automated. Moreover, it can also help reduce costs as most operations are automated.
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Top B2B Companies Increased Revenue in Healthcare
Here are some examples of B2B companies using the Inbound Methodology to boost healthcare revenue:
1. Bell Performance
Bell Performance is a well-known producer of fuel and oil additives and did not have an internet presence to provide leads.
To increase brand recognition, they collaborated with an inbound marketing firm to create a polished website catering to their ideal customers, increasing organic traffic by 700% in just a year.
Additionally, the agency developed landing sites to collect visitor data, which it then marketed via email and social media. In just two years, this raised lead generation by 1400%. Bell Performance closed 600 new online sales as a consequence in the first year, and the following year saw an 80% rise in online sales.
2. HUI Marketing
HUI Manufacturing, which makes sheet metal products for industrial and medical carts, wanted to increase organic traffic instead of depending on PPC advertising to generate leads.
They created a 6-month editorial strategy with pertinent blog entries, long-form material like cheat sheets, eBooks, and manuals that required contact information for downloads, and they launched the Medical Carts blog in collaboration with an inbound firm.
Within the first eleven months, this strategy—promoted through specific LinkedIn groups—produced several million dollars in additional income with a 68% increase in organic traffic, a 115% increase in LinkedIn traffic, and a 150% increase in website lead conversions.
The Bottom Line
With the healthcare sector projected to grow significantly, embracing digital strategies for healthcare has become crucial. These strategies can help attract new patients, build trust, and increase revenue.
You can gain popularity by building a strong online reputation and even providing valuable healthtech information in digital marketing to educate potential patients.
We hope with the help of this blog, you have understood the involvement of digital marketing to make it work for your hospital. If you want further guidance on healthcare digital marketing services, connect with us to grow your patient base.
