Your medical practice is still a business, and competition can be fierce. You need to distinguish your practice by demonstrating your expertise and building rapport before they even make an appointment – that’s what medical marketing and healthcare content marketing can do.
What Do Healthcare Marketers Do?
Healthcare marketing involves strategic communication to target and attract the right prospects for your practice, put a spotlight on your medical practice and its specialties, answer questions, and position you as the only logical answer to the care and services they are seeking.
At the same time, healthcare marketing must be professional, engaging, authoritative, and still friendly. It may involve a variety of marketing aspects, such as content marketing, social media marketing, local SEO/search marketing, lead generation, and more… combined into a cohesive strategy in which each part contributes to the greater goal.
How Is Healthcare Marketing Different from Other Industries?
Healthcare marketing requires special expertise and finesse to stay compliant with privacy law. Healthcare content marketing requires a professional yet friendly tone, clear explanations, and impeccable research.
Specifically, healthcare marketing requires special consideration of consumer privacy. The 1996 Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requires that anyone with access to personally identifying information in regard to medical care take certain steps to safeguard that information. The law applies to marketing of healthcare and medical services so even providing one’s email address or name and phone number to learn more information or book an appointment qualifies, whether that’s through a form on the doctor’s website or as a result of a marketing campaign.
Healthcare content marketing can be just as sensitive if the call to action at the end of a blog leads to a form that collects personal information, like a name and phone number or email. The article or blog must also rely upon medical sources that are credible and authoritative for the information being conveyed.
Healthcare marketing materials should also follow these same principles and regulations.
How Does Content Marketing Work in the Healthcare Industry?
Content marketing in general works by providing useful information the prospect is seeking, thereby establishing the business as a trusted, authoritative source of information. Whether the blog is for an interior decorator, plumber, accountant, or florist, it should answer relevant questions that prospects want to know about as well as provide insight for emerging concerns and trends.
Medical content writing and healthcare content marketing do all of that and more. It needs the most reliable and trustworthy sources to establish credibility. By doing so, it helps to establish the medical practice as one that the prospect can trust.
For example, think about parents-to-be. As they’re setting up a nursery and buying items the baby will need, they may have questions about what – if anything – should be added to a family’s first aid kit to address a baby’s needs. Or they might be looking up the best kind of thermometer for taking a baby’s temperature and end up researching when a fever may be normal versus a fever that requires immediate medical attention. A pediatrician’s website that addresses questions like these would be building trust and rapport before the parents even start officially looking for a pediatrician, and guess who would be front of mind when they do?
It’s even more important for certain types of medical marketing. For elective procedures, especially cosmetic ones like hair restoration, a prospect will spend time researching options and procedures long before they contact a hair restoration doctor. The marketing rule of seven states that to cut through the noise of information and make an impression a prospect needs to have at least seven contacts, touches, or interactions with your brand. Healthcare content marketing can provide that.
How Can Digital Marketing Promote a Hospital?
Digital marketing can promote a hospital by using the same principles above. A good content marketing plan will highlight the hospital’s specialties, features, and doctors while also answering common health questions consumers often research.
The overall marketing strategy and implementation must be HIPAA compliant. A social media campaign might showcase the hospital’s charitable and community outreach program, building trust and warm feelings for the hospital. Good local SEO will ensure that the hospital ranks well in search.
Add a Blog That Will Build Your Practice. Efferent Media Are the Experts
A well-written, SEO-optimized blog can attract new patients while building rapport and trust which boosts your website traffic, lead generation, and social media performance. Efferent Media specializes in medical marketing (especially content marketing), so let us do the work for you to create blogs that accurately represent your practice and your expertise. If you need blog writing services or general SEO services, call Efferent Media’s marketing experts at (631) 867-0900 to get started.