Proven Medical Marketing Strategies Webinar Replay

Today, Jeffrey Miller, the Chief Digital Officer at Hyport Digital, a product of the N2 Company joined BodySite to discuss medical marketing strategies and digital marketing tools that can be implemented specifically in the healthcare industry.

With a profound understanding of the intricate interplay between technology and business, Jeffrey has become a driving force in leveraging digital strategies to achieve unprecedented results for business owners. His strategic acumen has earned him a reputation as a pioneer in the ever-evolving digital landscape.

At Hyport Digital, Jeffrey leads a team of talented professionals who pride themselves in discovering groundbreaking innovations that disrupt traditional methods and push the boundaries of what’s possible. Jeff’s innate ability to navigate complex challenges, coupled with a keen eye for emerging trends, positions him at the forefront of digital revolution.

If you missed the webinar or just want to re-watch it, the entire recording is available below:

If you’re interested in learning more, you can schedule a call with Jeffrey at this link. If you’d like access to his slides, you can access those at this link.

Marketing Struggles in the Healthcare Industry

Strict Regulatory Compliance: Healthcare marketing is subject to numerous regulations and compliance requirements, such as HIPAA. These regulations govern patient privacy and data protection, making it essential for healthcare marketers to navigate complex legal frameworks and ensure compliance in all marketing efforts. And these regulations are continually evolving. For example, in New York State news legislation was passed and took effect 2 weeks ago. Geo-fences must be set-up with a minimum radius of .38 miles, regardless of content. Additionally, using addressable geofencing or addressable audience curation to target specific medical facilities is prohibited. This can be tough to navigate as medical facilities are often located in buildings or centers or business parks that are predominantly non-medical.

Trust and Credibility: Building trust and credibility is crucial in healthcare as an industry, and that extends to your marketing efforts as well. Patients expect transparent, reliable information coming from all channels related to their physician and physician’s office. Establishing credibility and fostering patient trust can be challenging and makes authentic healthcare marketing uniquely difficult to perfect. One area where this is extremely critical is in online reviews. Providing frictionless processes to allow patients to post about their experience will result in a robust and healthy review presence. This can often be the final step in either acquiring a new patient, or losing a new patient opportunity, thus wasting marketing dollars.

Patient Education: Healthcare is complex, and patients often have limited knowledge and understanding of medical procedures, conditions, and treatments. Developing patient-friendly educational content that simplifies medical information is essential to effective marketing in the healthcare industry, but this content can be difficult to conceptualize and create. Healthcare marketers have to view everything through the eyes of the patient. If your content is too technical, you will lose a potential patient within just a few seconds. Rule of thumb: website content should be written at a 5th grade reading level.

Emotional Sensitivity: Healthcare marketing often deals with sensitive topics that may be difficult to talk about or appropriately represent in marketing efforts. Ultimately, successful healthcare marketing finds the sweet spot of communicating with empathy, understanding, and trust while meeting the necessary standards of professionalism and expertise that the healthcare industry requires. Finding this sweet spot can take lots of time, energy, and resources that present challenges to healthcare marketers.

What is the first step in healthcare marketing?

Identifying your TAM (total addressable market): Learn how to identify your TAM based on practice size, competitive landscape, and new patient acquisition goals/metrics and strategies to maximize advertising ROI by marketing to your TAM and eliminating wasteful spend. There are several mistakes that healthcare marketers often make when building a marketing plan.

Trying to market to an audience that is too broad, either demographically or geographically.
A failure to understand where your patients come from.
Thinking as a medical professional and not a consumer of medical services.

The cost of marketing to potential patients can be prohibitive for a lot of medical practices if they are trying to do too much, with too little. I’ve worked with several hundred medical practices over the course of my career and my guidance is always the same in helping them identify their addressable market and marketing budgets. The most common mistake is right here on this slide. Medical practices often try to market to their Total Addressable Market right out of the gate. I suggest the following:

Identify a REALISTIC geographic area to market to. This will vary based on your practice area, market competition, traffic patterns, and potential per patient ROI. For example::
1. Chiropractors and Dentists for example typically should not market beyond a 3-5 mile radius from their office. Absent a personal referral, patients will not likely drive past several other chiropractic or dental offices to get to you.
2. Plastic surgeons should consider the cost of each procedure they are marketing and the potential ROI. For example, if aesthetics are part of your practice you would market within a tighter geographic area than you would for surgeries which is a destination procedure and can draw from a much larger geographic area.
3. Practices that require continual visits should consider patient fatigue over time when considering their addressable market. While a patient might be willing to drive 20 miles in traffic for their first visit, they might not be as anxious for future visits.
Identify your ideal demographic profile. I see practices over reach time and again and spread marketing dollars too thin. If your ideal patient is female, between the ages of 18-35, don’t spend money marketing to all females. You will suffer in both impression share, and new patient acquisition costs.

A great place to start in determine who and where to market is already in your files. Use existing patient information to determine your ideal addressable market and ideal demographic profile. A good rule of thumb is to market geographically in an area where 75% of your current patients come from. Build a demographic profile that mirrors 75% of your current patients.

Finally, when it comes to your addressable market, remember, you can always expand. Let ROI from your existing marketing campaigns fund your future marketing expansion.

Healthcare Marketing Pitfalls

Avoiding content marketing: Consumers usually do a decent amount of research before purchasing a healthcare product or service, and content marketing can help you and your business become established as an expert in the eyes of your current and potential patients/clients. Become a thought leader in your space and educate your ideal audience on things like the risks and benefits and estimated costs or downtime from particular procedures. This will go a long way in building not only patients’ confidence and trust in you and your business, but also patient engagement, patient retention and loyalty, and your overall reputation in your community. There are many best practices for content marketing, but the key here is to think about what your potential patients would want to know in relation to the services and expertise you provide. As I mentioned before, think like a patient, not a doctor, when creating content.
Guaranteeing results: A sure fire way to lose credibility is to guarantee results or use terms like “the best” or “most effective”. While you know the value of your services, healthcare is a complicated field that can involve unforeseen complications or less than ideal results in some cases. Making guarantees or promises that you are not 100% able to keep is an easy way to create distrust in your patients and potentially cause more harm than good. When marketing for your services, you want to find a balance of communicating potential benefits of your care while also ensuring you don’t make false promises or exaggerate your ability to change a patient’s life.
Not tracking what your competitors are doing: To stand out you have to be different. This means you need to be keeping a close eye on what your competitors are doing and how you can improve upon their strategies. If you’re doing all the same things your local competitors are doing, how will potential patients know why they should choose you?
Ignoring your search engine ranking: When people are looking for healthcare services, they’re looking for them immediately — they are in need of some type of care and are looking for it exactly when they need it. This is where the importance of your search engine ranking comes in. If people need care, they are not going to scroll forever to find what they need. In fact, potential patients are using immediate results from the internet now more than ever to find healthcare services. Research suggests that potential patients use searches twice as often as referrals to find a healthcare provider that works for them. And within those searches, the first five organic listings that pop up get 68% of the clicks from potential patients. Don’t miss out on acquiring these patients by not investing in how you can be found on the internet. Make sure to focus on geographical search terms as well as proximity search terms. As an example, Cosmetic surgeon Austin is just as important as cosmetic surgeon near me. Make sure you are focused on both. [1]

Proven Patient Acquisition Techniques

Google Ads:

While focusing on your organic search result performance is important, Google Ads, or your paid search performance, are a sure fire way to acquire new patients immediately – Get in front of the people searching for your services right now and be the first thing they see when the results of their search pop up. If you aren’t appearing at the top of Google, you are missing out on new business. Research suggests that 65% of consumers click on paid ads on Google when they’re looking to purchase a good or service, and they also generate twice as many site visitors as organic search results. [2]

They key is to choose keywords that will get you in front of the right patients when they are searching for your services. When selecting keywords, think like a patient. How would your audience phrase their google search? What exactly would they be looking for? This means thinking outside the box, considering how different types of people may word their searches but ultimately be looking for what your business does.

The goal is also to choose keywords with a high search volume and low competition. You want to invest in keywords that have a lot of people searching for them, but you don’t want the highest searched keyword to eat up all of your budget because of how competitive it is. Find a balance to reach the most people possible for the lowest acquisition cost possible.

Search budgets are based on 3 variables. Actual search volume in your chosen geographic area for keywords that are relevant to your practice. Average cost per click for your practice area. Average click thru rate for your practice area. These averages vary not only by practice area, but also by industry. Your budget should be based on 2 estimated results:

Impression share. – this is the percentage of time your ad will appear for search terms relevant to your practice. Your goal should be to have a minimum impression share of 20% and a maximum impression share of 70%-80%. Anything less is not sufficient to generate a reasonable ROI. Anything more and you will be overspending to chase the last bit of impression share which will have a significant impact on your overall ROI.
Top of page placement – this is the percentage of time your ad appears at the top of the search engine results. Your target should be in the area of 80%. Keep in mind that Google no longer reports on actual position. If the page is full, there will be 4 ads on the top of the page (it not always full). TOP placement doesn’t mean that you will always be position 1, but you will often be position 1.

It is important that you adjust your targeting to fall within those ranges. If your budget would result in a 10% impression share, adjust your geographic targeting to get above 20%. You can always increase your budget later to pick up the additional geography.

A well designed and user friendly website:

There are 3 top tips for your website, outlined by Jeffrey:

A clear call to action button
“3 click rule”
Use landing pages

A well designed website is the single most important marketing tool for your practice. 75% of consumers admit that a company’s website is a primary way that they judge the credibility of the company — and for healthcare, this credibility is essential. Most customers will make their decision to utilize your services or not based on your website and your perceived credibility. If your website is out of date or poorly designed, you are going to lose credibility quickly. Make sure you focus not only on your web site but also on your mobile site — 57% of internet users report that they will not recommend a company if their website is poorly designed or perceived to lack credibility. [3]

Make sure your site has a clear call to action button. 61% of people will click off a website if they don’t find what they’re looking for within five seconds, so you want to make your CTA clear and consistent throughout your site. Try something like “book an appointment” or “schedule a free consultation.” [3]

Follow the 3 click rule – Most of your audience will not search for information longer than 3 clicks. Keep important information one or two clicks away. Make sure you land traffic from digital campaigns on the most relevant section of your site. A common mistake is to send everyone to the main page and make them find the information they are looking for. They won’t. Land them right where the content is most relevant to their search, and your conversion rates will go up.

Finally don’t be afraid to use landing pages for digital campaigns in lieu of your website. While there are no restriction for content for organic rankings, there are many restrictions for paid traffic. Google monitors not only the content on the page where the potential patient lands, but all pages they have access to from that page. If you have content on your website that is restricted, use landing pages for specific marketing initiatives.

Social Media:

A compelling visual in a social media ad is vital for grabbing the audience’s attention, conveying information quickly, eliciting emotions, fostering brand recognition, and encouraging engagement. By prioritizing high-quality visuals that align with your organization’s values and messaging, you can create ads that effectively acquire new patients and support your marketing objectives.

Social media is HIGHLY visual. Videos are especially effective on social media and offer the highest ROI of any social media advertising strategy. [4] Start with high quality images that will stand out among a social media feed. In the fast-paced world of social media, users are constantly scrolling through their feeds, bombarded with a ton of content. A visually appealing ad stands out and captures the audience’s attention more effectively than plain text. It only takes a fraction of a second for users to decide whether they’ll stop scrolling and engage with an ad or keep moving.

In a single glance, users should be able to get an idea of what the ad is about and what value it offers. Visuals are processed by the brain much more quickly than text, making them an efficient way to communicate key messages and benefits of your services.

That being said, be mindful of how much text you are placing on the image. When social media users see a lot of text they immediately register the image as an ad and will scroll by. Only place the most essential text on the photo. Again, social media is a visual-centric platform, and storytelling through images and videos is more compelling than lengthy text. Using the visual element to complement your message helps create an emotional connection with the audience and can lead to higher engagement.

A well-crafted Call-to-Action (CTA) is crucial for guiding potential patients towards taking the next step and converting interest into action. It provides clarity and direction, prompting users to engage with your organization by scheduling appointments, visiting your website, or contacting your practice. Without a compelling CTA, your social media ad may miss out on valuable opportunities to acquire new patients and achieve your marketing objectives.

Navigate Changes in Digital Marketing

Digital marketing will always be evolving. Three of the biggest areas to watch in 2023 are new social media platforms, privacy laws and AI.

New social media platforms: With the rollout of Threads last week and the growing popularity on platforms like tiktok, it’s hard to know where you should be spending your time. My best advice is to know your audience. If your audience is adults in their 60s, they probably aren’t racing to download every new social media platform, but if your audience are women in their early 20s, you may need to shift your strategy. Think about where your audience is spending their time and join them there. It’s about THEM – their wants, their needs, and their behaviors, not about YOU.
Privacy laws are a big topic of discussion in the digital marketing world, Apple and Google are constantly changing their policies. Website retargeting and look-a-like audiences are a simple way to ensure that you are not hindered by the changing privacy laws. Additionally, focus on building brand awareness through conversational marketing to encourage the collection of first-party data and a loyal customer base.
Adapting to AI: AI is quickly becoming an essential part of the business world, in fact most of this presentation was written with AI. Use platforms like ChatGPT to generate blog topics, help you pick SEM keywords and write social media captions. It is a great way to save time and give your business that competitive edge. As AI adoption becomes more prevalent, staying ahead of the curve can position your healthcare organization as an innovative and forward-thinking leader, attracting both patients and industry attention.

Marketing strategies you can’t ignore in 2023

In 2023, the digital landscape continues to evolve, demanding innovative marketing strategies that resonate with today’s consumers. To ensure your organization’s success, it’s essential to leverage the following marketing strategies, which are proven to drive patient acquisition and engagement

Positive reviews and testimonials are the most important thing for your practice. Reviews are crucial for any industry but they carry even more weight in the healthcare industry.
1. Harness the power of storytelling through video testimonials that showcase real patients sharing their positive experiences with your healthcare services.
2. Positive reviews, whether on your website or review platforms, build trust and credibility, influencing potential patients’ decisions.
3. Encourage patients to leave reviews and share their experiences, and utilize these testimonials in your marketing campaigns to humanize your brand and establish social proof.
Hyper local targeting – your most loyal customers are going to be the ones closest to you in proximity, about a 10 mile radius.
1. Focus your targeting on the neighborhoods and businesses closest to you. People prioritize convenience
2. Hyper-local targeting helps you stand out in your community and build a strong local presence – enabling walking advertisements across your community
Live Chat – Every website needs live chat. Customers have come to expect an immediate response to their questions and if your website does not accommodate that, then they will move on to your competitor.
1. Live chat provides instant support, addresses inquiries promptly, and fosters positive patient experiences, increasing the likelihood of conversions.
2. Accessible from any page on your site, live chat enhances customer service and helps potential patients make informed decisions
Social media.
1. Capitalize on organic and paid social media strategies to engage with your audience, share valuable content, and build brand awareness.
2. Utilize social media platforms to showcase your healthcare expertise, share educational content, and interact directly with potential patients.
3. Implement targeted social media ad campaigns to reach specific patient demographics, driving website visits and appointment bookings.

Video testimonials and positive reviews build trust, hyper-local targeting enhances your local presence, and live chat and social media elevate your communication and engagement efforts. By incorporating these strategies into your marketing approach, you’ll be better equipped to acquire new patients and cultivate lasting relationships with your existing patient base.

SOURCES:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2022/01/20/why-seo-for-medical-practices-is-important-for-getting-more-patients-consistently/?sh=175597ca3e75
https://thesocialshepherd.com/blog/google-ads-ppc-statistics#:~:text=When%20searching%20for%20a%20certain,click-through%20and%20the%20sale.
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/business/software/website-statistics/
https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-media-statistics/#social-video-statistics