Digital Marketing Is Becoming The New Wave of Healthcare Marketing

What Does Digital Healthcare Marketing Mean?

Does it mean that your dentist is posting before and after snapshots in an online Smile Gallery on Facebook? In addition, will your orthopedic surgeon share videos of patients that have made a miraculous recovery from a partial knee replacement?

Take a look at the history of healthcare advertising techniques. These have been evolving and

reinventing in the 21st century.

The Past — A Brief History of Healthcare Marketing

Around 200 AD, woodblock printing was invented. This heralded an era for physicians, apothecaries, pharmacies, and healers. They could alert the public using “outdoor advertising.” Simply, a rudimentary sign on the side of their wagon.

When doctors established an office, they would hang a shingle to let passersby know that they were open for business. Local townsfolk could be healed from whatever ailed them. The most advanced medical services of the day were primitive.

The Introduction of the TypewriterJohannes Gutenberg invented a movable type machine in 1440. And printing presses throughout Europe increased in sophistication with illustrated posters, handbills, and more.

By the 1500s and 1600s, printed flyers, news sheets, periodicals, and newspapers took healthcare marketing to the next level.

In America, the New-England Courant became one of the first newspapers in the new world. Benjamin Franklin’s younger brother, James, published it in 1721.

The Importance of Automobiles in Healthcare AdvertisingFor the next 200 years, the use of the advertising media continued to expand and evolve. Furthermore when automobiles became popular in the early 20th century, it launched the creation of outdoor board companies. First with signs on buildings in town and on barns in rural communities. And later, 30-sheet outdoor boards along America’s highways. Do you remember the “Burma Shave” ads? Those ads were outdoor advertising at its best – as an early healthcare advertising message for a medicated shaving cream.

The Importance of Radio BroadcastingPittsburgh’s KDKA introduced broadcasting to the world and became the world’s first radio station in the late 1920s. With it, physicians, doctors and a wide range of healthcare products such as Lysol, Listerine, Carter’s Little Liver Pills, hand soap and shampoo finally had the opportunity to reach tens of thousands of listeners simultaneously with a 60-second jingle or live announcer read.

Throughout the 20th century, more sophisticated radio ads followed. Enterprising local physicians who wanted to reach the masses through commercial airtime.

Television Changes The Healthcare Advertising Landscape ForeverNext, television set the world on its ear in the 1950s. Finally, the audience could hear and see the broadcast. Healthcare marketing by physicians and products like pain relievers would never be the same.

And let’s not forget the Yellow Pages. Since 1883, the Yellow Pages was a trusted resource by doctors and hospitals to advertise their services. Few people refer to the printed Yellow Pages today. Most doctor listings are available online, as well as everything else.

The Present - Healthcare Marketing Has EvolvedDuring the mid-1990s, the Internet became mainstream and forever changed the landscape of digital healthcare marketing. Hospitals led the way in creating simple websites because they had the resources to invest. Sites used a combination of original content, graphic design, hard-coded webmasters, and original photography. The goal was to let the public know about the healthcare services that their doctors, physicians and pharma companies offered.

Over the years, websites have become increasingly more complex and sophisticated, as healthcare advertising has continued to evolve. At first, customers had to search through a website in order to find the phone number. Early websites were often built for aesthetics instead of best practices for direct response techniques.

Today, a local private physician practice can compete with well-established hospitals. Their healthcare marketing begins with their websites as a hub for all advertising activities. There are a variety of ways to capture a potential patient’s key information on a website, including:

Contact forms –– These typically short, simple web forms ask you to complete a few required fields, such as your name, email

address and phone number. The shorter the form, the higher the response rate for key patient data.

Updates with mobile/responsive design –– All websites should now feature responsive design to enable a potential patient with

an optimal viewing and interaction experience across a range of mobile devices, from your desktop computer to your tablet to

your smartphone. In fact, if your website is not now mobile responsive compliant, Google may not rank your website at all.

(More on this later.)

Clear calls to action –– Most well-designed digital healthcare marketing websites now feature an easy-to-find phone number at

the top and the bottom of each page, as well as an easy-to-find address in the footer, and on the Contact Us page. You have

to make it easy for potential patients to respond.

HIPAA-compliant websites –– The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a law governing websites. It

requires that a website ensures that all protected health information is transport encrypted. In addition, the data is backed up,

only accessible by authorized personnel, is not tampered with or altered, utilizes storage encryption, can be permanently

disposed of when no longer needed, and is located on secure web servers.

The Importance of Organic SearchThe first and most dominant way for a potential patient to find your practice’s particular services online through healthcare marketing is through organic search. This places specific keywords and keyword phrases on your website with a formulaic density. According to Business Insider report from Custora, organic search totaled 22% of e-commerce orders during Q1 2016, which was higher than any other online medium. While this statistic was for online orders, it’s relevant for organic search for any service. If you’ve hired an expert in SEO keywords and Google Analytics reporting, most savvy physicians can be found online with organic search. Don’t try writing a website yourself. Your website can be ignored by major search engines if you have the wrong keyword density using certain phrases too often.

The Importance of Paid SearchGoogle created the PPC (Pay-Per-Click) ad industry and made billions and billions of dollars, pennies at a time, with paid search. PPC ads appear as the short, three-line ads you see at the top and on the right side of most web search pages with a green “Ad” logo. In the same report mentioned above, paid search ads accounted for 20% of e-commerce orders compared to 17% in Q1 2015. To be successful in reaching more potential patients –– and to better compete with hospitals –– the upper echelon of savvy, successful doctors deploy annual digital healthcare marketing campaigns with budgets for paid search ranging from several thousand to $10,000 or more per month. Paid search is flexible, highly effective and can target men and women of certain age groups. It can be turned on and off at a moment’s notice. As with organic search, PPC is best left to the experts who have proven track records and understand the nuances of PPC ads.

The Importance of Landing PagesWhen a doctor or medical practice promotes a specific service or product, they may have their marketing agency create a website landing page. Since this page is where potential patients “land” so visitors can read a recap of the offer they may have seen in an email, an online newsletter, a print ad, radio or TV commercial. A landing page has minimal copy and focused on a single offer for easy visitor response. Your website healthcare marketing visitor can respond without other distractions such as links to other pages. Finally, your patient can fill in a few fields on the landing page with personal data then click “submit”.

The Importance of Social MediaFacebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Yelp, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, and many other social media platforms continue to grow in popularity and fan bases. In terms of popularity, Statista reports that as of April 2016:

Facebook had over 1.5 billion users worldwide.WhatsApp had over 1 billion users.Facebook Messenger had 900 million users.WeChat had 697 million users.Tumblr had 555 million users.Instagram recently topped 500 million monthly active

users.Twitter had 320 million users.Pinterest and LinkedIn each have 100 million users.

The Importance of Reputation ManagementNo one likes a negative review for fear of driving away potential patients. The reviews on Yelp can’t be deleted by the company. Facebook or Twitter enable a negative post, comment or tweet to be changed. So choose your social media carefully when considering a digital platform.

Read The Article on Healthcare Successhttp://www.healthcaresuccess.com/blog/advertising/digital-healthcare-marketing.html