Marketing a healthcare business certainly has a unique set of challenges. The FDA’s heavy regulation on medical marketing messages combines with HIPAA compliance regulations that restrict how patient information is used and stored. It’s not only difficult to find new and effective ways to market to potential patients, it can also be intimidating.
How can you take advantage of new marketing techniques in such a heavily regulated industry?
It’s no longer argued whether digital marketing is effective in reaching potential patients and customers. It is. Even though regulations makes it hard for many type of medical businesses to adapt quickly to new technology, medical patients still lead the way in adopting new digital behaviors. As a result, people expect medical and healthcare businesses, including dentists, pharmacies, dermatologists and aesthetic healthcare specialists, to be tech-savvy.
According to recent studies, 84% of patients used both online and offline sources for things like hospital research. And according to the same Google research, 44% of patients who researched hospitals on mobile devices also went on to schedule an appointment.
So which digital tools should consider to help you do a better job of marketing your business to tech-savvy patients and customers?
Start with Search Engine Optimization
More and more patients and customers are going online to find and research health issues and health providers. That’s why it’s so important that your business has a clear search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. You need to make sure that when customers and patients in your business area are looking for expert care, your business is found quickly.
Maybe you’ve looked into buying keywords before, and found that there is a lot of competition for your keywords. Don’t get discouraged. There are cost-effective strategies that will help you show up in searches. FMDi starts by researching keywords to find the ones used most often for a business like yours. We often combine those search words with terms that only businesses in your area would use. For example, we might recommend a dentist use combinations of keywords like “Cavities,” “Central Avenue,” and “Wilmington,” instead relying on broad terms like “Dentist.” These long combinations of words are called long tail keywords.
We then help businesses populate website pages, website programming, landing pages, and social media with these long tail keywords. We also do periodic updates to optimize keywords and search terms. After all, large search engines like Google and Bing are always updating their algorithms.
Importantly, FMDi is a Google Partner which gives us an edge on search engine marketing. In fact, we often get notified directly by Google of upcoming changes, so we can be proactive for our clients.
Create Interest and Awareness with Digital Display Ads
Getting people to your site isn’t easy. Even with a strong SEO program, you may need to reach out to find the people who will be most likely to be your future patients or customers. Digital ads may help. There are many types of digital display ads, including banner ads, rich media and more. Unlike the text-based ads you see on many search engines, digital display advertising allows you to get creative with images, animation, audio and video. FMDi can help you create and place ads that are dynamic enough to get attention, without being so complicated they’re slow to load.
Digital display ads can be placed on hundreds of thousands of sites, and can be formatted to be shown on desktop, tablets or a variety of mobile devices. You can limit your ads by geography and by type of site or content on site, so your ad is always shown in the places that make sense for your business and your patients and customers.
Reach More Patients and Customers with Retargeting
Even if you use SEO and digital display ads to get people to your site, you may still need help in converting them from lookers to customers. After all, no matter how great your website is, people tend to jump on and off sites pretty quickly. So how can you keep such distracted prospects engaged? With such quick visits, your potential patients and customers will probably need to revisit your site a few times before absorbing enough information to take action.
To keep patients and customers coming back to your site, consider retargeting them with ads. FMDi can help you create ads that capture attention, and send them only to the people who have visited your site. We can even retarget based on which pages they viewed. We can exclude current patients and customers to enable you to send super-targeted messages to the right people at the right time. We’ll help you keep your products and services top-of-mind until your prospective patients or customers are ready to start using your services.
Every business is different, and not every solution we list here is right for everyone. If you want to amplify your medical or healthcare business, contact us now, and we’ll create custom-built recommendations to meet your unique marketing needs.
