According to the ministry of health and family welfare, there are 468,898 government hospitals in India, as of 2018. If we add the private sector hospitals to the list, it will be an even more massive number. 

It’s unlikely that leads are generated equally. Not that people should fall sick and become leads, but the ones that are already in pain, have some ailment or suffering should be directed to the best hospitals. So, if you’re competing against a lot of hospitals in a city and want to generate more leads, you need healthcare digital marketing. 

Digital Marketing provides a multitude of benefits for all kinds of business sectors and healthcare is no exception. Marketing in the healthcare industry is no different from digital marketing in other industries. 

Medical marketing strategies have been known to be quite effective in generating hospital leads and engaging the audience with organisations or hospitals. So, a healthcare marketing strategy must be a part of any hospital, clinic or a medical centre’s development projects. Consult a digital marketing agency in Bangalore if you need digital marketing services. 

Here’s how to generate leads for hospitals through healthcare digital marketing – 

• Optimise your website for local SEO

First thing first, get your hospital or clinic or a health centre listed under Google My Business. Most people will simply Google for emergency hospitals near me or clinics near me to find a medical centre or need a medical appointment. And if you register your medical centre’s NAP, which is Name, Address & Phone and working hours. Local SEO must be a crucial part of hospital marketing strategies. 

Get your medical centre verified and use relevant keywords, particularly long-tail keywords with a locality name. Your business should comply with the local SEO rules. Specifying what kind of medical centre will help your centre appear on relevant search results. This will also increase the probability of getting high-quality leads. 

• Provide quality content

Leveraging content marketing can be one of the best ways to generate quality leads. Content helps bring people closer to your website, to your organisation and engages them with it. With consistent effort, it can bring quality leads to your site. 

You don’t have to limit creating content with blogs. You should also include useful website content, videos, podcasts, informational social media posts, etc. Videos get better engagement and since video marketing is on rising, providing quality video content can help reach your target better. 

Your website is the number one place your leads will go to, to find about your organisation, services, facilities, location, and other such information. So it’s crucial to have a well-structured website that is responsive, mobile-friendly, SEO-friendly, and easy to navigate. 

Content marketing with blogs – Providing high-quality blogs with useful information related to health, nutrition, lifestyle, latest updates on cures and medicines can attract people to your site. You should optimise blogs for SEO and market them on multiple online channels. 

Webinars and podcasts – You can collaborate with leading doctors, nutritionists, and health professionals to conduct informational or educational webinars and make podcasts. Talk about what concerns people regarding health and wellness, ailments and related topics. They will be engaging and can connect your audience with you. It also gives a boost to brand awareness. Podcasts are one of the best ways to promote healthcare in the digital age. 

You can choose YouTube, Spotify, and other popular platforms for webinars and podcasts. Even the website can be an excellent platform and help generate more relevant quality traffic. 

Social Media – Social media plays an important role in digital marketing in the healthcare sector as it is a powerful tool to reach out to people, educate them, engage them, spread brand awareness and establish a meaningful connection between your audience and your medical centre. However, before creating your social media profile and launching campaigns, research where your target audience is. 

Take Apollo hospitals’ Facebook profile, for example. They provide useful content that spreads awareness and also implement lead generation strategies in their social media. 

If you’re a gynaecology centre or a women’s health clinic, your target audience is most likely to be present on Facebook. There are many groups that discuss women’s health and you can share your content, promote your services on these groups. Engage with these communities to get the most out of social media. 

When people find that you are reaching out to them and providing useful content, it generates interest and they may reach out to you when they need your services, thus generating leads. 

Launching social media ad campaigns can also help generate high-quality leads by presenting your organisations to people who need your services.

Press Releases – Press releases can exponentially boost SEO, brand awareness and lead generation as it can reach a wider audience. Online press releases can reach your audience on their phones and have a direct impact on your business. More people come to know about your organisation. 

• Use PPC tactics

Ad campaigns, otherwise known as Pay Per Click (PPC) can be used for online lead generation. You can use Google, Bing, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram for all your PPC campaigns. Test these platforms to find out which one works best for your organisation. Also test different types of ads – images, offerings, etc. Running ad campaigns alongside organic content can improve your rankings as well. 

• Develop an effective SEO strategy

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a digital marketing technique that helps improve a company’s ranking on the SERPs. It’s important to rank on top of the SERPs because most people don’t scroll past the first page on Google. So if you’re not anywhere on the first page, then chances of people discovering you are minimal. 

You may have a great-looking website, but if it is not optimised for SEO, then there’s no use. 

So SEO should be a top priority in your healthcare digital strategy. Develop an effective SEO strategy based on your business objectives and use various platforms to execute them. Look into the best SEO practices for the healthcare industry and use them carefully. 

Make a list of rich keywords, particularly long-tail keywords, and include them in your website sufficiently. Hire an SEO agency in Bangalore to do the work for you and improve your rankings on the SERPs in no time. 

• Email Marketing 

Create useful email newsletters with valuable content so that your audience doesn’t have to search for information. They will receive it in their inbox itself. By mailing out a well-drafted newsletter once a month, you are keeping your audience educated and updated about the healthcare industry, health & wellness, lifestyle, etc. Using email database marketing in healthcare can make it easy to reach the target audience and generate qualified leads. 

Create personalised emails and segment them according to people’s interest and needs. You can mail blog posts, videos, or industry-related news. Adding emails to your healthcare marketing strategies can reap fruitful results over long-run. 

• Question forums

Engage in Q&A platforms like Quora and drugs.com and answer questions related to health, medicines, ailments, etc. There are plenty of general questions asked out of curiosity, and you can take the opportunity to answer them too. This way, you are making your organisation known on forum platforms. 

Online healthcare marketing is all about making a presence first and then roping in prospective customers to your organisation. Creating interest in the first step in lead generation and question forums is a good way to start. 

• Customer Relationship Management tools 

Once you get a steady income of qualified leads, you will need tools to manage them. This is where customer relationship management (CRM) comes in. Try using hospital CRMs like Leadsquared, Bitrix24, Nimble, and Intelligent Medical Software. 

The main goal of healthcare CRM is to retain existing patients and also attract new ones. It uses data on patients’ demographics and interaction with the organisation’s website to create relevant profiles. CRM can also help manage appointments and billing processes. 

Healthcare digital marketing trends in 2021

Healthcare marketing is a tricky business. If you’re looking for new ways to amp up your marketing strategies, then you’ve come to the right place. Webi7 provides the best digital marketing services in Bangalore, India. Here are some of the trends that will change the marketing strategies in the healthcare industry in 2021. 

Video marketing

As we said before, video marketing is on the rise and it will continue to surge in 2021. Hence, leveraging video marketing can increase reach and sales to your organisation. It’s no surprise that 77%of  people resort to search engines to find medical-related information (Source – pewresearch.org). And YouTube is the second largest search engine, using it to market video content can help you reach your target audience and establish a brand reputation. 

According to a 2019 report by Wyzowl, 63% of businesses saw a good Return On Investment (ROI) after investing in video content.

Voice Search

According to Thrive Analytics, 71% of all mobile users between the ages of 18 and 29 use voice assistants. So it’s important to optimise your website for voice search. It is crucial for your site’s SEO as well.  

Source – blue corona

Content marketing

This year, content marketing will see a rise in podcasts and videos, webinars, etc. Content helps to build a strong relationship with the patients and also attract a highly-defined audience. 

Now blogs can be converted to audio where people can listen to it instead of reading it. You can use Play. ht to convert your blog to an audio version of it. It can also transcribe your podcasts automatically. 

Conclusion

The healthcare industry needs digital marketing. Generating leads through traditional marketing can be quite costly and not as effective. Healthcare digital marketing can cut marketing costs by 5 times and deliver better results. Through combining traditional marketing methods with that of digital can be even more effective, in times of situations like the pandemic can render traditional marketing redundant.

People are resorting to online search for medical-related content, organisations and services more day by day, so it would be wise to invest in healthcare digital marketing to generate hospital leads. If your organisation needs digital marketing services, then we are the best digital marketing company in Bangalore.