10 Reasons Why Digital Presence Is Important In The Healthcare Sector

If you are a healthcare provider, you need to understand that your patients are going digital. If you want to retain your patients and expand your clientele, you need to be part of the digital universe.  The same thing happened in the construction industry where contractors had to realize that their construction leads were all digital.”

Digital marketing in the healthcare domain requires healthcare marketing professionals. These professionals will help you create the right digital marketing strategy for generating more business. There is a surge in healthcare marketing jobs for this reason.

10 Reasons For Digital Presence

Like any other industry, the healthcare sector needs to invest in target marketing through the digital medium. The reasons for this are mentioned below:

Cost Per Patient Acquisition

Most hospitals, which are using conventional channels like print and television, are having a difficult time lowering their cost per patient acquisition or CPA. If you are in the healthcare sector, you can cut these costs by 50% by using digital channels.

Your marketing expenditure will come down with a resultant increase in ROI. Patients are researching their medical conditions online, and you need to have a digital presence to attract them.

Focus on Specific Patients

You can bring traffic to your website by keyword planning using Google Ads. You can focus on certain patients based on their demography, gender, age, or zip code. Using Search Engine Marketing, you can connect to patients with certain specific ailments and looking for a treatment that your hospital offers.

Highly targeted keywords are used by Search Engine Marketing or SEM to attract the desired customer profile. These are also known as long-tail keywords that are product or service-specific. The customer searches for solutions using these keywords and can connect to your hospital.

Real-time optimization is possible using highly targeted keywords resulting in cost-saving for you.

Keeping Up With the Patients

Your decision to adopt a digital presence should not be influenced by what other hospitals are doing, but by the changing tastes and preferences of your target audience or the patients. It’s important you fully understand your patients, perhaps by using a patient survey like https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/patient-experience/, in order to have a relationship with them.

There is an increasing trend towards patients preferring healthcare services on a digital platform. Customers or patients are increasingly using mobile apps for healthcare services, and you need to add this to your digital marketing strategy as well.

Data-Driven Decisions

To find out whether the marketing channel is yielding results or not, you need to check the data generated by it. This is not possible with traditional marketing strategies. You cannot measure the effectiveness of a particular channel.

With digital marketing, you can start a low-cost strategy for different media and find out which media gives you the best ROI or return on investments. Once you find the digital channel giving you the maximum ROI, you can use a more targeted approach and scale up your campaign to get the required visibility and impact.

Search Engine Results

When patients search for health-related issues on the internet, search engines like Google provide search results according to their keyword ranking. Keyword ranking depends on your Search Engine Optimization or SEO strategy.

If you have a higher keyword ranking, then your hospital’s website will appear on the first page. This is what most patients will look at and make a decision. Paid advertising campaigns also have an impact on keyword ranking.

You need both the right SEO strategy and paid advertising will get you the highest keyword ranking and highest clicks.

Getting More Personal

Contrary to what most people feel, digital marketing does help you get personal with the target audience. Customer calls mostly come from the CTC or click-to-call, a part of digital marketing strategies. If you don’t have the CTC facility, you are losing out on your target audience.

CTC leads to higher conversion rates compared to conventional digital marketing, and the costs are also lower. CTC also helps you analyze the ROI of your digital marketing campaign.

Greater Patient Retention

Digitally savvy patients are looking for ease of access and convenience when it comes to online healthcare services. To engage the customer, you need to ensure that your website can be found easily, a patient portal can be accessed at all times, and contact information or practice-related information is regularly updated.

Your presence on social media will also influence the decision of the customer when it comes to choosing a service provider or hospital. You need to use target marketing when it comes to the social media platform you choose.

When patients are satisfied, they will not miss their appointments, make payments on time, and lower readmissions. All this translates to higher profits for you.

Higher Patient Referrals

When the client finds you are easy to access on a digital platform and are providing quality service, they are likely to pass on more referrals to you. Your referral costs also go down.

With the right keywords, patients can find you faster on their mobile devices. When your existing patient posts positive reviews about your service, you will attract more customers.

You have a longer lifetime value with referred customers as they make higher repeat purchases. The order value and average spend are higher compared to non-repeat customers. Your customer turnover is also lower.

Improved Patient Experience

You can engage your customers better with digital marketing. A proper video marketing strategy as part of digital marketing will provide a much better patient experience because they get both the audio and visual impact. Target marketing also delivers better ROI with video marketing.

You stay connected to the patient through reminders about appointments and refilling essential medicines. Patients can find solutions to their specific problems by reading your blogs. You can send them regular surveys to get feedback and modify your marketing campaign accordingly.

Personalized Messages

With traditional marketing, sending personalized messages to the target audience was not possible. With the feedback that you receive from customers through different social media platforms, it is possible to send a specific message like ’38-year-old diabetic patients in Knoxville, TN.’

For millennials, mobile marketing works best since they spend most of their time downloading information on their mobile devices. Timing is important when it comes to sending personalized messages to millennials.

Go Digital To Be a Successful Healthcare Provider

To be a successful healthcare provider, a digital presence is essential. You need to know your target audience and the social media platforms they use. With target marketing, you can connect with your patients and also get referrals.

Go digital and watch your profit grow!