10 Effective Hospital Marketing Strategies You Need in 2024
Maintaining timely, interesting, and relevant patient outreach efforts is difficult. However, with the following hospital marketing strategies, you may lure new patients for your hospital.
Successful hospital marketing strategies initiate and maintain long-term connections in addition to reaching patients. Hospital marketers need to interact with patients at every stage of their online journey to increase conversions as they actively seek out healthcare options and use digital tools.
How can you make the most of your financial resources to boost patient acquisition and brand recognition in the highly dynamic hospital and medical sectors?
We have answered this question in this blog. So, let’s dive in:
10 Actionable Hospital Marketing Strategies to Adopt in 2024
The following hospital marketing strategies will help you improve patient acquisition or raise brand awareness:
1 Make Your Online Presence Strong
Following are some eye-opening facts that tell you how crucial online presence is in today’s marketing world:
- Search Engine Use: Approximately 7% of all Google searches are health-related, indicating a consistent trend in how individuals seek health information online.
- Health Searches Per Minute: There are about 70,000 health-related searches conducted every minute, showcasing the high volume of inquiries regarding health topics.
- Patient Research: Search engines drive three times more visitors to hospital websites compared to non-search methods, emphasizing the importance of online visibility for healthcare providers.
- Consumer Engagement: 59% of U.S. adults have used the internet to look for health or medical information, reflecting the growing reliance on digital platforms for health-related inquiries.
- Website Verification Before Online Booking Appointments: 60% of patients check a clinic’s website before booking an appointment, underlining the necessity for healthcare providers to maintain an informative online presence.
To make online appointment booking easy, there is an easy solution in the form of Gravity Booking. Bookings for Gravity Forms is a tremendous online booking form management plugin that makes patient scheduling easy.
Moreover, you need to have a strong presence on social media like Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok. Put your online videos and text content on these platforms and build a strong online presence there.
2 Put Relevant Google Ads
Ads that are contextually relevant outperform demographic targeting by 32%. Furthermore, according to a recent Lumen study, contextual advertising attracted 3.3 times more attention than other conventional ad formats. But it’s crucial to get your hospital brand’s message in front of a patient at the right moment and in the right context.
For example, a prospective patient reading a food blog might come across an advertisement for your hospital’s excellent Radiology department. If there’s no correlation between the ad they view and what they are doing on the web, they’ll probably ignore it.
Moreover, there’s no assurance that the person receiving treatment in this case will be prepared to make a healthcare decision at the time they see your ad.
However, by placing your advertisement alongside outstanding medical content and helpful medical search engine results, you may reach a patient base that is actively seeking care and prepared to enroll in a health system.
3 Offer a Seamless Mobile-friendly Experience
According to the study, health systems are increasingly prioritizing consumer needs, with 92% of surveyed executives noting that better consumer satisfaction and engagement are the primary goals of their digital marketing efforts.
Moreover, many health systems acknowledge that they are still in the early stages of digital transformation, with 60% of survey respondents indicating they are only halfway through their journey.
Consumers across all industries now expect mobile-friendly UI. Patients are increasingly prioritizing an omnichannel experience, thus healthcare journeys in particular are becoming multichannel.
Enhancing your hospital’s online presence to provide a seamless online patient experience can decrease conversion hurdles. Further, hospital sites with mobile-responsive interfaces are ranked higher in searches by Google’s mobile-first index.
Do you want to take your mobile-friendly practices a step further? Employ SMS messaging: 66% of patients would rather get reminders about appointments by text message than via other means. So, use text messaging services as an extra means of communication with your patients.
4 Employ Video Marketing
Though immersive and interactive videos are equally powerful at generating leads, high-quality content still reigns supreme.
According to a Wyzowl video agency survey, 88% of consumers can be persuaded to buy a product or service using videos, and 73% of viewers prefer viewing brief videos over reading articles. Incorporating engaging video content within your content repository can help you expand your hospital marketing strategies.
Try experimenting with physician insights, patient testimonials, and explainer videos to build your health system’s reputation and provide a window into your philosophy of care.
Patients were 50% more inclined to get in touch with a doctor’s practice after watching their video. However, exercise caution—videos longer than 60 seconds run the risk of losing viewers’ attention. Make your message crisp.
5 Combine Organic and Paid Advertisement
When compared to organic techniques alone, pay-per-click campaigns and Google adverts can bring in twice as many visits by placing your hospital’s ads front and center in a timely and efficient manner.
Nonetheless, studies reveal that the typical click-through rate for Google Ads is about 6.11%, and sponsored advertisements can quickly become quite costly, often accounting for 85% of a hospital’s marketing expenditure.
However, because organic advertising mostly focuses on search engine optimization (SEO) and contextually relevant content, it is more likely to draw patients who are already looking for what your healthcare institution offers. However, it may take some time for organic SEO techniques to succeed but it will be sustainable for the long-term.
To cover every angle when it comes to hospital marketing strategies, it’s best to diversify your efforts.
6 Analyze and Respond Appropriately to Patient Reviews
Now, over half of consumers are more concerned about the quality of care they receive; over 1/3rd of them read doctor reviews with greater frequency, and an equal number of them look up quality in hospitals more often than they did previously.
Prospective patients are equally interested in how doctors handle feedback, both favorable and negative. It may be an indication that patients’ experiences aren’t being recognized if a physician ignores a review.
Make sure that your medical facility makes an effort to respond to evaluations by thanking clients who have expressed satisfaction with your care to those who have not. However, they should adhere to HIPAA regulations by encouraging offline communication and maintaining ambiguity in patient talks.
7 Seamless Web Development
The healthcare sector is expanding, and its clients are well-informed thanks to a multitude of online resources for information regarding health. The awareness is the biggest issue when it comes to medical or surgical management, whether it is about an epidemic, a genetic condition, or a recent technical innovation in the area.
The digital world is expanding quickly. Thus, you also need to build your online presence through the website. Your patients should be aware of every piece of information including:
- tie-ups,
- helpline numbers,
- online support availability,
- feedback,
- query resolution,
- testimonials,
- consultant availability,
The above key information should be posted on your hospital’s site and updated frequently. Follow web development best practices to keep your website up and running.
8 Humanize Your Customer Communication
Patients will find it easier to understand your hospital’s distinctive features if you stick to your brand’s messaging and overall touchpoints while devising digital marketing strategies.
Patients will see through this consistent messaging, which increases their faith in your medical staff and system. It’s easier said than done to look up information on certain diseases and locate a skilled doctor. On the other hand, it may be the difference between years of continuous health challenges and symptom relief.
To promote diversity and humanize communication, extend your marketing strategy to cover specialist subjects like Angina. Improved medical results can result from your marketing activities by strengthening doctor-patient relationships and challenging societal norms.
9 Humanize Your Hospital Brand
Patients will find it easier to understand your hospital’s essential principles and distinctive features if you stick to humanized brand messaging while devising digital marketing strategies.
Patients will see through this consistent messaging, which increases their faith in your medical staff and system. It’s easier said than done to look up information on a certain ailment and locate a skilled, caring physician. On the other hand, it may be the difference between years of continuous health challenges and symptom relief.
10 Audit Performance of Your Hospital Marketing Strategies
Knowing what works and what doesn’t in your hospital marketing strategies is the best method to maintain their efficacy. Click-through rates, visitor demographics, bounce rates, and content shares are examples of real-time metrics that can provide useful information regarding
- Your target audience
- How and where to reach your target audience
To further determine the success of your marketing campaigns, ask patients for their opinions. Keep an eye on your channels and consider your marketing plan’s return on investment. You can more effectively decide where to allocate or reallocate resources based on your campaign’s performance as you study it.
To get regular insight into the patient experience, head over to surveys of healthcare consumers to stay up to date with industry changes.
Automate Appointment Bookings With WordPress Appointment Booking Plugin
7 patients out of 10 canceled or rescheduled their online appointments during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Hospitals should assess the problems, needs, and difficulties these individuals have in receiving healthcare. To fix the patient-hospital relationship, providers must motivate them to get the right care.
The best way to do that is to install a reliable WordPress booking plugin like Gravity Booking. Platforms like Bookings for Gravity Forms for online scheduling are useful in the following ways:
– Finding the accurate patient data
– Assessing the particular requirements and worries
– Re-engage using the omnichannel they prefer.
– Assign them to the necessary telehealth facilities.
Final Thoughts
Healthcare marketing strategies include the best practices for interacting with patients and potential customers via several channels at different points in their journey. A strong healthcare marketing plan is an integrated approach that enhances patient engagement and boosts hospital system growth and revenue. Employ or use the above mentioned hospital marketing techniques and see your brand and revenue soar.