The healthcare industry has to drastically change its operations and become digitally accessible due to the pandemic. Now, what has been considered a momentary change is the new normal.
Healthcare providers must adjust methods to satisfy their patients’ needs and survive. Here are some healthcare marketing trends clinics along with ideas you must to include your 2023 strategies to acquire new patients:
Patient experience is your first priority
The patient experience is a crucial part of patient acquisition and retention. Improving the patient experience dramatically affects your healthcare facility by:
- Improving your clinic’s revenue – Happy patients will likely regard your facility when they need services. They will refer their family and friends to your clinic. You can ensure a continuous flow of patients by enhancing your services.
- Boosting patient engagement- A better patient experience leads to dependable relationships between you and your patients. People are more likely to ask enquiries and recommendations when they’re confident in you. Focusing on an optimistic patient experience leads to better health results.
- Giving you a competitive edge- You know you did well when patients leave reviews about your facility on Google Maps, Facebook, Yelp, and other channels. Others can see you’re a trustworthy provider. This will put you on top of the search, and other possible clients can see you.
How do you achieve this? Make everything available online.
Let your patient book, reschedule, and cancel appointments. Online services must be available 24/7. You must have an automated appointment reminder for your patients to show them you care about them and provide timely support. All of these must be available for your patients.
Ensure you have a professional website that lets your patients schedule appointments without chatting or sending a message. Integrating a booking widget makes it easy for patients to see available dates. They can also easily track their schedule from your automated email reminder. This is a great way to show them that you care.
Finally, offer telemedicine services, especially for patients with the most challenging time traveling and coming to you. Suppose it’s possible to have the online facility have a regular check-up with you. In that case, you can eliminate the stress and the time for them to relay their inquiry.
Always offer innovative ways for patients to reach out to you. It makes you more approachable. Patient retention is also the key.
Aim for Patient referrals
Happy patients who bring their acquaintances and family to your clinic are priceless because they are your greatest promoters. If you can use patient rewards campaigns in your marketing strategy, starting one is a good idea.
Offering discounts or gift cards to your loyal patients to make them feel special. You can also use incentive programs for patients who recommend you to another patient.
To generate more referrals, you can
- Ask your current patients for referrals.
- Partner with other healthcare establishments (i.e., if you are an internist, you can partner with a local food nutritionist)
- Use email marketing in sending new promotions or newsletters.
- Blog about meaningful content related to your niche.
- Inspire more patients by encouraging testimonials.
Why Social Marketing is essential
Social marketing mitigates people’s fear and confusion and ensures they are ready to follow the rules. People are most likely to follow influential people and people with power. Using this gives you the edge over the paradigm of effective communication. Discoursing major public health problems suitable to your users can improve your credibility as a specialist and influence people’s health behaviors.
Content Creation
We all know it is common for people to search for a symptom, disease, or clinic through Google. Now, everyone tries to find ways to understand an underlying health concern through online searches. You might miss out on creating relevant content on various communications channels. You will also miss out on the chance to reach out to a potential client or future patient.
The trend in healthcare marketing is patients searching for a health-related topic online from Reddit threads. They are also engaging in short videos on social media platforms. Some resort to the written content from their professional website or Youtube Channels. Trending professionals include
- Dr. Pimple Popper (7.56M YouTube subscribers) – Dermatology
- Dr. Youn (4.1M YouTube subscribers) – Dermatology
- Dr. Mike (4.3M Instagram followers) – Family Medicine
- Dr. Leslie (almost 1M Tiktok subs) – Family Medicine
- Dr. Howard Luks – (8K+ Youtube subs) – Orthopedic Surgery
Great content must be relevant and easy to understand. You must have engaging content for the audience to keep coming back. Make sure that your content is also well-structured and contains valuable information. Optimize your content and create with a target in mind.
Health misinformation is rampant, and the public deserves high-quality and reliable information. Health care professionals should demonstrate themselves as leading sources of health information to help communicate accurate information and fight misinformation.
Patients look for informative content highlighting a health professional’s work, approaches, processes, methods, and patient results. Patients like to see you, your staff, and your approach instead of standard stock images that lack genuineness. Actual photos are essential, as forthcoming patients can connect to them.
As for content formats, we suggest you don’t confine yourself to blog posts. Videos, podcasts, and infographics are becoming extremely prevalent and are surpassing text-heavy content. Visualized facts are catchier and more unforgettable than non-visualized details. Providing profound and vital content via visualizations is a surefire way to catch your audience’s concentration.
Optimize your Search
Search engines are constantly developing and improving their algorithms to provide users with the most precise and appropriate results. People are satisfied with using voice assistants like Alexa, Siri, and Bixby to ask about various health-related topics.
Here are the top searches using voice-activated assistants:
- The medical information on a specific disorder or illness
- What are the symptoms of (a specific illness)
- When scheduling doctor’s appointments
- Searching for nutrition facts
- Breakdown of treatment options for a specific health concern.
- Finding a nearby doctor
- Locating a healthcare provider’s location
- Where to find a specific medication
- Obtaining a health coach
- Using a health tracker
- Insurance coverage for a particular illness.
Here’s how you can optimize your content
- Concentrate on local search results – declaring your listing or reworking the information about your clinic on Google My Business and Google Maps. Create content to supply solutions to location-based questions.
- Utilize long-tail keywords like “best surgeon in NCR” or “how to know if you have COVID” since people tend to ask complete questions when searching.
- Make sure your website has an FAQ section with responses – your site is easily searchable with an FAQ.
- Use schema markup – ensure that your website is discoverable by search engines. Schema markup gives a complete picture of what your site is about. It permits search engines to provide basic information from a page in a structured manner. The markup code produces an extended snippet that attracts users’ engagement.
Trends are ever-changing and ever-growing. If you provide diverse solutions to clients and possible patients, you are also helping improve your clinic’s visibility. Structuring your services and allowing users to find you makes it easy to support the needs of the people. Patients need to receive information that is reliable and trustworthy.
Try to be open to your marketing strategy and find the latest marketing trends as engaging and encouraging as possible. Health information may seem tedious, but by allowing your clinic to understand the trend, you can also find success with patients in a new light. More information like this? Send me a message, and let’s chat.
