Marketing is something that has become increasingly important within healthcare. It gives you the opportunity to build connections with potential new patients and nurture the relationships that you already have with your existing patient list.
Within this article, we explore some of the ways in which marketing your healthcare service can be beneficial to both your practice and your patients.
Marketing helps you to communicate with patients
There is no denying the power of marketing. It gives you the opportunity to inform, educate, advise and inspire your patients.
From advertorials and social media posts to blogs and videos, there are countless methods that you can use to communicate with new and existing patients. But, which ones are right for you and your patients? When determining how to be truly effective in your marketing communications, think about the following:
- Your goal – what do you want to communicate to patients?
- Your audience – how do they want to be communicated to?
- Your format – what do your patients most engage with?
- Your language – what will resonate most with your patients?
Sometimes, healthcare can be uncertain and complex for patients. Through clear and compelling marketing communications, you have the opportunity to stand out and gain their trust.
Marketing allows you to connect with patients
Marketing can help you to foster relationships with your patients online. There are many channels and dozens of mediums that you can use to connect with them. These include:
- Social media
- Websites
- Video sharing platforms
It is important to be where your patients are spending time online. And it’s important to provide them with value in these spaces. It can take time but as people start to get to know you on these channels, you will begin to establish new connections and strengthen those that you already have with your patients.
Marketing encourages patients to engage
Healthcare marketing can help to motivate patients to take action. Most likely, you will want patients to take steps towards getting in touch.
Call to actions (CTAs) are the most effective way of encouraging patients to take action and should be used throughout your marketing efforts. Common CTAs to use include:
- Book an appointment
- Read more articles
- Sign up to our newsletter
- Share on social media
Without the right CTA, your marketing efforts will be less effective, as patients will not know what their next steps should be, ultimately causing them to disengage.
When putting together your CTAs, make sure that they are well designed, highly visible and contain short, actionable text. People are easily distracted online – make it as simple and straightforward for them to stay engaged.
Marketing can help to build trust in patients
Research from marketing software firm HubSpot has revealed that 70% of people trust the reviews that they read online. So, we would always recommend that any successful marketing strategy in healthcare makes full use of patient feedback.
By encouraging patients to write reviews and publishing these reviews online – across social media, your websites and in newsletters – it enables new patients to easily recognise what they can expect from your practice. Through reading about the experiences others have had, they can see the standard of care that they are likely to receive when booking an appointment with you.
Doctify’s review platform has been purpose built to make it easy for those in healthcare to collect and publish online reviews. Each doctor on Doctify has their own profile containing patient reviews and peer recommendations, along with a list of their services as well as their contact details. These profiles rank highly in Google and the reviews collected with Doctify can be shared widely to help strengthen your online reputation.
To find out more about Doctify and how collecting and publishing patient reviews with us can support your healthcare marketing efforts, please visit our Provider Centre.
