As the healthcare industry continues to evolve in the digital landscape, more Life Science and Healthcare (LSH) companies are focusing on engaging with healthcare professionals and patients online instead of using traditional offline methods.
Do you know that healthcare professionals are digitally available on the majority of social media platforms, where LinkedIn and Twitter are prominent places to engage with them? They use these platforms to stay updated with news and trends related to their profession. Which also allows marketers to engage with them through these social platforms. From a patient’s perspective, do you know that 66% of internet users look online for information about a specific disease or medical problem? Connecting with patients at the right time and providing them with the information they need is a good way to support patients’ care journeys.
With the right marketing strategy, your business can effectively communicate with HCPs and patients and achieve organisational goals. These goals could be introducing new products to the HCPs and educating them about their benefits, or empowering patients with the knowledge they need to support their healthcare journey.
In this blog, we will explore healthcare marketing strategies, discuss their benefits, address common challenges, and highlight vital tools to improve your healthcare marketing efforts.
What is Healthcare Marketing
Healthcare marketing involves a systematic approach of targeted promotion and effective communication to attract healthcare professionals and patients. A well-crafted healthcare marketing strategy assists HCPs and patients throughout their journey and encourages ongoing involvement with Life Science & Healthcare companies. Achieving your marketing goals in the healthcare industry involves a well-integrated approach. This includes multiple tools and integrated marketing channel approaches, like search engines, social media platforms, PPC, Geo-fencing, and more.
Benefits of Healthcare Marketing in the Healthcare Industry
A well-integrated marketing strategy will provide a smooth customer journey to your target audience at each phase. Depends if your target audience is at the awareness stage, consideration, purchase, retention, or advocacy. To be more specific, we have listed a few important benefits that you can’t miss out on.
Increase Accessibility
Digital marketing enables a healthcare business to provide relevant and engaging content to healthcare professionals and patients. You can choose the inbound marketing approach to provide the relevant content at the right time when they are looking for it. With this approach, healthcare professionals and patients can easily access information regarding diseases, disorders, new devices, or medication when they are actively searching for it.
Brand Awareness
A well-integrated strategy of social media, content marketing, PPC, and search engine optimisation can help raise brand awareness. This includes for example sharing relevant content such as medical discoveries, new products, or new diseases that resonates with healthcare professionals and patients.
Not only it can improve the awareness of your healthcare brand, but it can also enhance the overall perceived credibility of your brand in the minds of healthcare professionals and patients.
Tailored Content
A key advantage of digital marketing is its capacity to provide customised content that precisely aligns with the preferences of your target audience. This tailored approach takes into account the factors like age, gender, health conditions, and other behavioural patterns, resulting in a highly personalised experience for both healthcare professionals and patients. By adopting this strategy, digital marketing elevates overall engagement and credibility to a deeper level.
Data-Driven Insights
Digital marketing enables healthcare marketers to collect and analyse data, providing valuable insights into healthcare professionals’ and patients’ digital engagement. This empowers marketers to fine-tune their marketing strategy in a highly effective manner.
Through data analysis, they can better understand how healthcare professionals and patients engage with their brand, including specific channels and content. By obtaining insights into their overall behaviours, preferences, and market trends, marketers can make well-informed marketing decisions.
Cost-Effective Outreach
Compared to traditional offline marketing methods, digital marketing can be a more cost-effective way to reach a large audience. LSH companies can use low-cost digital technology to share messages with precious targeting to their audience like Geo-fence targeting. Plus, digital marketing efforts like SEO and social media campaigns can also result in long-term visibility benefits.
Top Digital Marketing Strategies for Healthcare Industry
There are different digital marketing strategies that Life Science & Healthcare businesses can use to effectively target healthcare professionals and patients. Below, we have outlined some of it which are effective in the healthcare industry.
Geo-Fencing
Geo-fencing is a great healthcare digital marketing strategy. It allows you to effectively target healthcare professionals and patients based on a particular location. Basically, geo-fencing involves creating a virtual boundary around a specific location. A good way to think about geo-fencing is to imagine that you set up a “virtual fence” around a building. Inside this virtual fence is where targeted audiences will receive push programmatic ads.
For example, if the goal of LSH company is to maximise healthcare professionals’ appointments at their booth while attending an event. Geofence targeting can be enabled by creating a virtual fence around that event. From the moment the healthcare provider enters the event, programmatic ads can be sent to their mobile device & tablets to boost awareness about your booth. This will result in more healthcare professionals visiting your booth than your competitors.
This works similarly for patients, for instance, if you are trying to market a new medicine and would like more patients to be aware of this new drug discovery. A virtual boundary can be set up around a pharmacy. If a patient crosses that virtual boundary, they will receive ads on their mobile devices with the appropriate message.
Geofencing is a powerful tool when it comes to healthcare digital marketing strategy. The reason is that geofencing has the capacity to captivate the attention of highly motivated healthcare professionals and patients with relevant advertisements. Furthermore, geofencing offers great customisation flexibility and advertisement efficiency at a reduced cost.
Search Engine Optimisation
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is important to enhance online visibility and achieve higher rankings in search engine results. HCPs and patients increasingly rely on online resources as their first reference point more than ever before. As a result, having a high-ranking website is essential for capturing attention. This will result in leading a web visitor into a customer.
By using targeted keywords, creating high-quality content, and optimising the website technically, healthcare marketers can improve their website’s chances of ranking higher in search engine results and attracting HCPs and patients. The fundamental principles of an SEO strategy revolve around four key pillars that apply to both patients & HCPs. These pillars are Relevance, Crawlability, Engagement, and Authority.
Here’s how you can enhance your website’s ranking by incorporating these four key elements into your SEO strategy, ensuring that healthcare professionals and patients discover your site first.
Relevance
- Use relevant primary and secondary keywords to target your desired audience.
- Create high-quality content that aligns with your target audience.
- keep your content up-to-date.
Crawlability
- Make sure that your website is correctly indexed.
- Use descriptive file names, and incorporate keywords in the title, meta description, and content.
- Ensure that your website Google Business Profile is complete with accurate information, and your content is mobile-friendly.
Engagement
- Make sure that your website has an optimal speed, and the page loads in under two seconds.
- Include rich media like images, videos, and interactive content like Q&A.
- Continuously encourage online reviews and have people refer to your site through credible and top-ranked websites.
Authority
- Generating links from trustworthy and credible websites will show Google that your website is of high credibility.
- Backlinks will have a positive impact on your SEO ranking and attract more healthcare professionals and patients.
Pay-Per-Click Advertising ( PPC)
Another important healthcare marketing strategy is Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, or PPC marketing. It is an effective form of online advertising that enables healthcare marketers to display ads on search engines, third-party websites and social media platforms. With PPC advertising, marketers only pay when users click on their ad.
PPC advertising has the ability to drive traffic to your landing page and generate quality leads for your target audience. It has opened up numerous opportunities for the healthcare industry, given the rapid increase in engagement of healthcare professionals and patients online.
Depending on your target audience, different steps may need to be considered. We will outline some PPC tactics for healthcare professionals and patients separately.
Pay-per-click for Healthcare Professionals ( Hcps)
Healthcare practitioners strive to stay updated on the latest medical advancements, including new drug discoveries, research on treatment solutions, conferences, and events that can enhance their ability to treat patients.
To run a successful PPC campaign and effectively target healthcare practitioners, it is essential to deeply understand their search intent. In addition, the tone of voice used in the PPC campaign is essential, as most healthcare providers use a technical and expert tone when searching for relevant information. Consistency with this tone is essential. Creating personas and customer journeys will help you identify the tone of voice, keywords, and channels to use. This will enable you to adjust the PPC campaign to reach relevant healthcare providers successfully.
Pay-Per-Click for Patients
Patients often use the internet to gather information about specific diseases and symptoms. When creating PPC campaigns to reach patients, several factors are important to consider to ensure success. Key elements include being more patient-centric and putting yourself in their shoes, such as understanding how they convey their symptoms and discuss their diseases.
To do so we strongly suggest you identify and create specific personas so that you can personalise different PPC campaigns for different patients depending on their geographic, demographics and behavior traits.
Lastly, conducting a thorough competitor analysis can give you an edge by allowing you to understand which content is most relevant to your target audience and how the format and design of content can be leveraged. A SWOT analysis can also help to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to adjust your strategy, stand out from competitors, and increase patient acquisition.
Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing is proven over time as an influential technique in healthcare marketing, allowing LSH companies to engage directly with patients and HCPs on platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and Linkedin. Here are the two most important key benefits of leveraging social media: Brand Awareness and Lead Generation & Nurturing.
Brand Awareness
Healthcare marketers can effectively leverage social media marketing to enhance brand awareness and build a positive reputation in the healthcare industry. This can be accomplished by sharing reviews of customers, educational blog posts, share new treatment possibilities, and case studies across various social media platforms.
For example, healthcare practitioners may benefit from learning about innovative treatment advancements, while patients can access educational content related to specific health concerns, and success stories concerning medical treatments, or receive clarification on any treatment-related concerns they may have.
By sharing helpful content, social media empowers you to engage meaningfully with your target audience, encourage feedback, and showcase expertise. Resulting in elevating brand awareness and a favorable reputation.
HCP Lead Generation & Nurturing
Life science companies can use social media for lead generation and nurturing by sharing informative and educational content related to their field, which attracts healthcare professionals. By providing insights into the latest research, products, or innovations, you help solve their pain points and can establish yourself as a thought leader. This will ultimately result in generating leads.
Social media advertising, especially on platforms like LinkedIn & Twitter can target specific professional groups. Once these leads are secured, continuous engagement is important for nurturing them. Regular updates on new research findings, industry news, webinars, or live Q&As can help nurture these relationships, enabling trust and encouraging further collaboration or conversion.
Healthcare Marketing Challenges
We understand that healthcare marketing offers various benefits. From patient empowerment to HCP lead generation and nurturing to boost your business growth, healthcare marketing is very important. These benefits also come with particular challenges that can’t be overlooked. Here are some vital challenges that marketers in the healthcare sector must focus on while strategising their marketing efforts.
Complex Regulatory Environment
Life science companies must navigate a highly regulated landscape, especially when marketing to healthcare professionals. There are strict laws and regulations in many countries that restrict the kinds of claims companies can make about their products. Any missteps can result in substantial penalties. Furthermore, privacy laws such as HIPAA in the United States or the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union (EU) also limit the types of patient information that can be used in marketing. These rules and regulations can significantly limit the strategies available to Life Science & Healthcare companies and require them to be very careful in their marketing efforts.
Rapid Technological Advances and Increasing Digital Expectations
As technology continues to advance, healthcare professionals and patients alike have growing expectations for digital engagement. They want personalised, on-demand information and services.
Life science companies must not only keep up with these technological changes but also ensure that their digital engagement strategies meet the unique needs and preferences of their target audiences. This can be a challenge, especially for companies that traditionally relied on more traditional forms of marketing.
Healthcare Marketing Tools
As you may know, the healthcare industry is ever-evolving and healthcare systems need to adapt to new marketing strategies to effectively reach out to their target audience. To stay competitive, it is important to be aware of effective tools that can leverage your marketing efforts while keeping your marketing budget in mind.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System
CRM systems enable healthcare organisations to manage HCPs & patient data, track interactions, and personalise communication. These tools facilitate targeted marketing campaigns, enhance user relationships, and improve the overall customer journey experience.
Email Marketing Platforms
Email marketing remains a valuable tool for healthcare systems to engage with healthcare consumers. Platforms like Mailchimp or HubSpot offer features such as automated email campaigns, audience segmentation, and performance tracking.
Marketing Automation Software
Marketing automation software simplifies repetitive marketing tasks, such as scheduling social media posts, sending reminders, and personalising content. By automating these processes, healthcare systems can save time, increase efficiency, and maintain consistency across multiple channels.
Analytics and Data Tools
Analytics tools provide valuable insights into the effectiveness of marketing efforts., allowing organisations to track metrics, monitor campaign performance, and make informed decisions backed up by data. Tools like Google Analytics, Looker Data Studio, Tableau, and Google Tag Manager can help measure engagement, conversions, and ROI. When you want to track relationships within different channels, it is best to create automated marketing KPI dashboard to overview data of different channels in one screen.
