Digital marketing is no longer an option for health service providers, whether doctors who own clinics or hospitals, but rather it has become the basis for the success of any medical institution in reaching its marketing goals. The international company Google conducted detailed research on the patient’s journey in searching for service providers and published the research entitled: “The Digital Journey to Achieve Better Health ,” and concluded that there are three main ways for how your clinic can become the patient’s first choice/hospital/medical center: Patients use one, two, or three different methods.
- The first method is online search and its users range from 52% to 77% depending on the tool
- The second method is to inquire from others, and its users range from 34% to 49%.
- The third method is being influenced by other marketing media, and those influenced by it range from 18% to 32%.
Before you think about how your clinic will become the patient’s first choice, before the patient chooses your clinic or medical center, there are several different factors that affect his decision-making, and searching online is one of the most important of these factors.
How does your clinic become the patient’s first choice?
Different methods: One patient uses more than one method to reach the final decision. To know how your clinic can become the patient’s first choice, you must follow the steps in this article.
So we realize that your presence in front of the patient and his decision to choose your clinic is closely linked to your digital presence. How can you improve your digital presence in terms of efficiency and effectiveness? How does your clinic become the patient’s first choice? We’ll identify several key factors and then explain how to use them all within an integrated marketing plan
First: the website
Based on a large number of user opinions, mayoclinic.org ranked among the best hospital websites in the world, and we can learn from it how to create an effective medical website. And know how your clinic becomes the patient’s first choice
The most important features of this site:
- The ability to move easily and quickly between its sections
- Easy access to what the patient is looking for
- Simplified provision of hospital services
- Simple and professional user interface
- Introducing the work crew in a professional manner
- Clarifying the locations and branches of the clinic and how to contact them
- Direct booking service
- A distinguished medical blog to learn about new treatments, research, and health information
Second: Compatibility with search engines
Compatibility with search engines is one of the most important steps to know how your clinic becomes the patient’s first choice, and your medical institution can appear to all types of researchers in general at all stages of their research, by having your own digital website for the institution in addition to what is known as SEO – Search Engine Optimization . This means adjusting your website using the appropriate keywords so that search engines can show you in the first results.
Third: Medical content
Creating medical content that is easy to understand and interesting for patients and those searching for health information is an integral part of how patients find your medical institution and how your clinic becomes the patient’s first choice. It also greatly helps in supporting your site’s compatibility with search engines, and increasing your appearances in Research, and enhances trust between you and your current and potential patients. When creating medical content, you must pay attention to some points, the most important of which are:
Providing information to your target audience: If you specialize in treating a disease, disseminate useful information to your patients without generalizing or disseminating unhelpful information. This is one of the most important steps to know how your clinic becomes the patient’s first choice.
- Provide them with solutions: Your content should not be of the type: “Visit our clinic to get rid of your problems,” for example. Rather, your topics should be useful, valuable, and related to patients so that they do not feel that they are visiting a commercial site.
- Good choice of topic titles: It helps you solve how your clinic can become the patient’s first choice, as choosing the topic title is the most difficult thing about it. If the patient does not care about the title, he will often leave your site. Choose titles that express the solution to patients’ problems in addition to motivating them to take care of their health.
- Alleviate their suffering: If you are going to talk about a disease, speak in a positive and motivational way to encourage patients to be interested in pursuing treatment and to strive for a better and healthier life. There is no benefit to the patient when you tell him that he has a fatal disease!
- Talk about them and their experiences: It helps you solve how your clinic can become the patient’s first choice. It is of course useful for the doctor to explain his experiences to patients, but if his publications only contain his personal achievements, this will only increase patients’ flight! Talk about patients from their point of view, and publish their positive experiences in fighting diseases and continuing on the treatment journey.
Fourth: Enhance your presence on social media platforms
It is one of the most important stations visited by millions of Internet users in Egypt and the world. It helps to know how your clinic becomes the patient’s first choice, as visitors follow their friends, interact with them, and share with them everything they have done or discovered in general, and others follow pages related to their favorite topics, and of course, including medical topics.
When present on social media platforms, you must take some points into consideration to know how your clinic can become the patient’s first choice:
- These sites are for interaction, and are not a market for buying and selling
- You can use it to publish your medical topics directed to your patients
- Publish interactive topics; Those that enable your audience to interact with you directly through questions and answers
- Use images in your different topics
- Boost your presence with visual content Video gets audience attention seven times more than any other medium
Fifth: Advertising investment
After strengthening your digital presence on search engines and social media platforms, the presence must be stimulated with sufficient, targeted and appropriate advertising investment. It will help you complete how your clinic becomes the patient’s first choice, as the natural reach rate (without Facebook ads) is very close to zero, so advertising investment is a must.
How do you organize your advertising investment on Facebook to achieve the best return?
The secret is: precise targeting of the audience . If you target your audience accurately, the cost of your ads will decrease and the revenues from these ads will increase. The audience on Facebook can be targeted by age, interests, job, gender, location, and other factors. After analyzing your target audience and extracting its Audience characters, precise targeting of the correct category will lead to exceptional results.
Sixth: Continuous measurement of results
What cannot be measured cannot be improved. You can use some simple tools to measure the impact and growth of your digital marketing activities. For Facebook, you can use Facebook Insights, for your appearance rates on Google, you can use Google Trends, and for conversion rates from your website and tracking the flow and movement of visitors, you can use Google Analytics. There are advanced measurement tools for professionals.
We analyse, plan, build, evaluate, report and continually improve performance for effective digital marketing for medical service providers.
