healthcare marketers

Market Your Hospital to Stand Out

Market Your Healthcare Facility to Standout from the Rest

Are you taking advantage of new opportunities for generating exposure?

When potential patients do not have a recommendation from family or friends on what healthcare professional or facility to use, they typically turn to conducting their own research online. This could entail using anything from search engines to social media – as long as the information they find is trustworthy and extensive.

Ensuring your healthcare facility is listed everywhere that potential patients are searching online is key to driving more traffic to your hospital website and therefore, more foot traffic.

Create content that educates

 Creating content that educates is beneficial for SEO, driving long-term traffic from search engines to your website. More importantly, quality content in the form of blog posts, articles and social media helps give value to readers and build trust between your patients and your facility.

Put yourself in the patient’s shoes when you write your material and then ask the following questions:

  • Can I easily interpret the information?
  • Are these health terms and definitions understandable, even if I was only 12 years old?
  • Is the content accurate and informative without being overwhelming?
  • Is the explanation sufficient?
  • Are all my questions answered?

Fun with Facts

Consumers like facts, especially in healthcare. Weave facts and statistics into appropriate content to complement the information.

The true beauty, however, is the simplicity. Health facts are short and to the point. They are easy to digest, easy to generate, easy to verify.

Video Marketing is Important

 Last, but certainly not least, spend time on video marketing to really stand out. Offer testimonials from your patients. Ensure they are genuinely interested in speaking on your behalf for more authenticity and effectiveness.  Create videos to introduce doctors and put a human touch to the faces patients will be seeing.

Utilize YouTube as a hub for your video marketing efforts online. Embed those videos throughout your website. YouTube is a search engine owned by Google, making your uploaded video content discoverable in search results and wherever the video is embedded (like your website.)

Again, just like the written content being produced for your web properties, your video content must educate your audience on your expertise in the healthcare industry.

Marketing for the healthcare industry doesn’t have to be difficult. We just need to think about who the target audience is, understand what information they want and of course how best to reach them. Let us do the thinking for you. Contact TotalCom today to learn more about our healthcare marketing options.

ABOUT JIMMY WARREN
Early to bed, early to rise, work like crazy and advertise! Jimmy Warren is president of TotalCom Marketing Communications with over 30 years experience helping many kinds of businesses build a strong brand. A large portion of that experience is in the healthcare industry.  He loves the ‘weird’, interesting and extremely talented people he gets to work with every day – that includes co-workers and clients. Outside of work he enjoys his grand kids, traveling and any kind of good ole fashion Alabama sports. Roll Tide!

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Tackle Healthcare Pay-Per-Click Conversions through Digital Marketing

Beat the Healthcare PPC Wormhole

Digital marketing in the healthcare industry is crucial in a time where 1 out of every 20 google searches are health related, but running a successful pay-per-click (PPC) campaign is challenging. Without advanced techniques, health care companies will waste their money on ad space by failing to get seen.

Digital marketing for hospitals is specifically challenging. Below we have outlined exactly why your hospital may be struggling in the PPC department, and listed a number of tactics to help you beat the PPC healthcare wormhole.

(Are your hospital’s digital ads being blocked? Get around ad blocking.)

Digital Marketing For Hospitals: Challenges

There are a number of reasons why digital marketing for hospitals using PPC poses challenges:

  1. Medical information is sensitive: You have to be careful with your ad word choices with strict HIPAA privacy laws in place.
  2. Retargeting: a recent adjustment of Google’s policies prohibits health care facilities from remarketing themselves.
  3. Competition: Because of the above retargeting restrictions, staying visible on search engine result pages (SERPs) is incredibly important, but keywords are highly competitive (and expensive).
  4. Knowledge Graphs: In an effort to provide more correct medical information, and panicked patients, google has implemented knowledge graphs (certified medical information) that takes over the right hand side of SERPs.

All of that considered, there must be a way to effectively use digital marketing for hospitals with PPC.

Contact Information

Is your contact information readily available for other businesses and patients to view? Check, check, and check again! This is critical for your PPC plan. A patient searching for hospital care digitally is most likely in need of services sooner than later. Having your contact information positioned clearly can set you apart from competitors. Be sure to set up call extensions, location extensions and sitelink extensions to your ad. This makes for a larger ad, and is known to contribute to higher rankings on SERPs.

Contact information is the number one way to gain conversions, so place it on every landing page. If it’s hard to find your phone number, and easy to find a competitors, you will most likely lose a potential patient.

Mobile Marketing

Going mobile is imperative. If contact information is a key factor for a PPC strategy, so is going mobile. Contact information involves communication, and if you need fast contact, you have to call. Using your phone to find and contact a hospital makes it simpler. If your hospital is mobile, a potential patient simply needs to click the number that pops up on the Google page to call you.

Be sure you are tracking your Adwords performance by specific devices. Pay close attention to what mobile campaigns are and are not working. Make your bid adjustments accordingly.

Know Yourself

Finally, understand your target audience. Determine what your patients are searching for the most. There are many types of patients to consider for a hospital. Are your patients generally looking for urgent, emergency care? Are they searching hospital options knowing they will be in for a long term stay? Do your patients even know what they are looking for at all?

Step into the patient’s shoes and consider what you would search for if you were them. Think of triggers that grab their attention that you can then incorporate into the text of your PPC ads. Knowing what sets you apart from your competitors helps you create a PPC campaign that stands out

Interested in learning more about using PPC for your hospital’s digital marketing strategies? We specialize in using dedicated PPC campaigns to boost results for hospitals looking to gain an edge in the paid digital space. Contact us today.

Healthcare Marketing: What is Your Color?

Color impacts what consumers think and how they respond to your brand.

What color is your hospitalThe science of color has always been fascinating to me.  How people respond to certain colors and how different colors make them feel.  Not only is it interesting, it can also affect how people feel about your brand and even how they respond to your brand.  Different colors evoke different emotions and feelings. And different colors get different levels of attention.

As healthcare marketers, it’s important to know the science of color.  What colors are associated with health and wellness?  What colors are more likely to affect the response we are tying to obtain?  Yeah I know, yet another thing healthcare marketers must know and understand.  But we need every edge or advantage we can get.  Understanding the psychology of the consumer’s mind is one thing healthcare marketers should study and understand as much as possible.  And the science of color is part of that psychology. 

Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer, wrote an article for Fast Company, Why Is Facebook Blue?  The Science Behind Colors In Marketing. It’s interesting, informative and entertaining.  The link to the article is below.  I think you will enjoy the read.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3009317/why-is-facebook-blue-the-science-behind-colors-in-marketing

Hospital Advertising: Advertising That’s As Big As All Outdoors

Outdoor advertising billboardOutdoor advertising has increased its usefulness to healthcare marketers. Traditional media is struggling to maintain revenues and effectiveness. Print, radio and television are all under extreme pressure in a down economy and because of changing consumer media habits. But in the face of all this concern, outdoor advertising is seeing resurgence – a renaissance of the medium. Outdoor advertising is expected to see strong growth in the coming years. Behind only online advertising, outdoor has been the most dynamic media over the past five years. It is capturing market share from the other traditional mediums. So why is this happening?

Two primary reasons are causing outdoor to buck the trend.

1.  The first is the introduction of new technology. The digital billboard provides more visual impact and more flexibility than outdoor has ever had. To have several messages rotate on the board expands outdoor’s usefulness. And the ability to remove and/or insert new copy and designs in a matter of minutes has brought outdoor from a slow, long lead-time medium to an instant one. This has great advantages for hospital advertising. Instead of being locked into one message for the long haul or having to pay for costly changes, now a hospital can advertise several services at the same time and can change any message within minutes. For hospitals, outdoor provides flexibility that only radio and the internet can provide.  

2.  The second reason outdoor is growing market share is it’s cost efficiency. The average cost per thousand for outdoor has always been lower than practically ever other of medium. And in an economy that forces hospitals to stretch every penny and get the most of every dollar spent, outdoor delivers.

True, outdoor has its limitations.

  • The message  is very limited.
  • Outdoor competes with highway clutter.
  • And some view billboards as an eyesore that contributes to highway clutter and a community’s unattractiveness.

But despite these liabilities, in a media landscape where traditional advertising is taking hits, outdoor is a shining star. It’s big. It’s flexible.  It’s outdoors.

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