3 Marketing Strategies for Healthcare Organizations

Organizing your marketing efforts into a strategy can help you focus on your healthcare organization’s most important problems.

Not every organization has the same priorities, however. Some have a lot of patients but issues with maintaining a sterling reputation. Others have services that aren’t as well known as their other services. That’s why it’s important to find a healthcare marketing agency with experience in healthcare.

The following strategies are based on meeting the many different goals that matter to healthcare organizations. These three strategies each speak to a different need. For each one, you’ll learn why they matter, what staff you’ll need, and how to put them into practice.

  • Reach new clients by creating a reassuring social media presence
  • Improve your reputation by encouraging reviews
  • Overcome competitors who are winning search by applying SEO principles

Reach new clients by creating a reassuring social media presence

If your goal is to reach a new set of clients, a social media presence can help.

Why does it matter?

Social media matters because it’s one of the best ways to reach a large number of people at once. If you can develop an interesting page, it can be used to draw in new clients all year long.

When they’re developed, you can also use social media pages to handle important messaging such as:

  • Announcing promotions
  • Announcing new services/treatments
  • Rebranding

What staff are required?

This strategy can be done very cheaply with minimal staff. If you have the budget, you can hire a professional media manager who can help you launch your strategy quickly.

However, extra staff isn’t necessary as long as you have a good head for doing the work yourself. Managing a social media page only takes a few minutes a day if you’re simply writing posts or sharing relevant posts.

How do I put it into practice?

Creating a social media presence is as easy as creating an account on the biggest social media sites that encourage business participation. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter are all major players that people use to find services.

Once you’ve created an account, you’ll still need to make your page interesting enough to attract followers in your customer area. You can do that by:

  • Posting regularly (every day while you’re building a following)
  • Finding interesting posts to share, such as news about your industry
  • Having a sense of humor

Improve your reputation by encouraging reviews

If you’re concerned about your reputation, you should make sure that you’re encouraging people to leave as many positive reviews as possible.

Why does it matter?

The importance of public reviews can’t be understated. Many people check reviews before they sign up for any kind of service. Even one significantly bad review can make people choose another medical service provider.

When bad reviews are placed on services like Google, they are difficult to remove. The only way to overcome them is to make sure that a lot of other people post reviews so you can improve the overall average.

What staff are required?

You don’t need a dedicated staff to put this strategy into place. You just need some way to encourage all the patients who receive your services to feel good about it and leave reviews. There are many ways that you can do that.

How do I put it into practice?

You can convince patients to leave reviews by delivering excellent service and giving them some kind of incentive. Only you know where your services may be falling short, but there are some common strategies you can use to increase the reviews you get:

  • Offer a small discount to people who leave reviews
  • Remind people to leave reviews on invoices or follow-up thank you letters
  • Add a link to leave reviews on your site

Overcome competitors who are winning search by applying SEO principles

If you are losing a lot of business to competitors who are more visible in search engines, the best way to respond is by applying SEO (search engine optimization) principles.

Why does it matter?

Search engines are one of the major methods that people use to discover services. If your competitor’s results are all listed before yours, you are at a serious disadvantage.

What staff are required?

Hiring an SEO professional can make this strategy move a lot faster. Professionals will closely examine the niche, competitors, and status of your website so that they can apply specific fixes.

However, there are a lot of SEO solutions that you can apply that only require you to make basic changes to your website and content. Anyone who knows how to update your website can handle this work.

How do I put it into practice?

You can put SEO principles into practice by focusing on your keywords, content, and metadata.

Keywords are the terms that are used to find products or services on search engines. You need to make sure that keywords are used properly on your site because search engines use keywords to determine whether your content is relevant to searchers.

Add keywords appropriately throughout your website to make sure it’s easy to determine the

Content refers to the text that appears on your website. Your content needs to contain the right keywords for your services. It also needs to be plentiful enough that search engines can judge the overall relevance of your site.

Metadata refers to the information that you provide to add context to your pages. It’s invisible to users, but search engines can use it to determine what your pages are about. You should keep your meta titles and meta descriptions updated.

Meet Your Goals with Marketing Strategies

No matter what challenges your healthcare organization is facing, you can address them with the right strategy. Now, you know several strategies that you can use to reach new clients, improve your reputation, and overcome competitors.

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Devin McHatten, MBA

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