Digital medical marketing is a great opportunity for hospitals, clinics, and physicians to reach the target audience. As the Internet is the first place where people search for medical information, nearby hospitals, or other patient’s opinions about the hospital and its services, and other matters that concern them.
Hospital’s digital marketing has unexpectedly taken a different turn, with a study showing that 85% of patients choose the hospital or medical institution they found in their research online.
In this article on the field of medical marketing in the Arab Gulf states, we will discuss its, and how you can create hospital marketing campaigns effectively.
What Is the Difference Between Old And New Hospital Medical Marketing Methods?
Traditional Medical Marketing
There have been some hospitals that use hotel-like amenities to attract and pamper patients and depend on those features in their medical marketing strategy, but these luxuries do not reduce a patient’s concerns about high healthcare costs.
These methods have been ineffective in raising awareness of the hospital, and it is difficult or impossible to quantify its success.
Modern Medical Marketing
There are new methods and advanced technologies in digital marketing that are being used in hospital marketing strategies, which helped institutions reach a larger number of patients and build awareness of their hospital as a brand.
Where medical marketing includes marketing strategies that integrate various campaigns and tactics, which are specifically designed to communicate with patients, engage with them, and gain their loyalty.
Why Do Hospitals Need Digital Medical Marketing?
The purpose of marketing for healthcare institutions – especially hospitals – is to know and understand the needs and desires of potential patients and meet their expectations converting them into patients.
To attract the largest number of patients to your hospital and provide them with the best services, you need to consistently appear in front of them and actively answer their inquiries and interact with them. Digital marketing is the first step to achieve this goal.
There are many social media platforms where you can be present and appear to your target audience. These channels vary between:
- Social media
- Search engines
- Other websites, etc.
As our world has become more digital, people turned to social media platforms to find the services they need, including hospitals and other healthcare services.
Digital medical marketing, unlike other traditional methods, is characterized by the following:
- Patient targeting.
- The ability to measure patient satisfaction with the services provided.
- Remarketing that is considered the basis for obtaining a better return on investment.
How Do You Use Digital Marketing for Hospitals in the Gulf?
For hospitals, these are the most important areas to focus on in digital marketing:
- Social Media Marketing
- Search Engine Optimization
- Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
- Content Marketing
- Email Marketing
To achieve the greatest success in digital medical marketing, you must choose the appropriate methods and platforms to publish your content, and develop guaranteed marketing strategies.
How Do You Create A Digital Marketing Strategy for Hospitals?
Before you begin any step in medical marketing, you must have a strategy that all your digital marketing activities follow.
Hospital marketing strategy should include the following:
- Determining the purpose of the content: The content you provide to the public must have a specific and clear goal. For every piece of content you use for digital marketing, your goal is to either raise awareness of the brand, promote specific services, or interact with your current audience.
- Target audience: Clearly and in detail, you should determine the audience that you provide your medical services and thus you will direct your marketing message to. Know the socio-economic class of the audience, and their race, gender, age, and other demographics.
- The appropriate methods for displaying the content as well as the appropriate platforms: One of the most important information that the hospital marketing strategy must provide is the determination of the appropriate marketing platforms. By understanding the audience, budget, and goal, as well as the nature of each platform, you can choose the right platforms that link to each marketing objective.
- Content publishing schedule: is it daily or weekly? And in what hours of the day? Do we have a schedule for publishing on exceptionally designated days because they are national holidays, health days, or events of interest to our target audience? Is the publishing plan dynamic that changes according to seasons and year events? These are questions that your marketing strategy should answer.
- Measuring Content Results: What you cannot measure, you cannot improve. Define measurables in your strategy, how you will use them, and what outputs you need from the analysis tools to improve the results.
How Does Social Media Support the Medical Marketing of Hospitals?
Social Media platforms became an effective method of communication as it can promote certain behaviors and thus influence patients’ decision-making process.
Social Media is a medium that connects people, and is considered influential in the development of medical institutions and makes them permanently connected with current or potential patients.
It can be used in medical marketing to advertise doctors working in the hospital and highlight their expertise and professional history, and to announce the medical specialties of the hospital, the medical services they provide, and other modern medical devices and features. Also, publish information about the offers and benefits they provide to loyal clients.
A recent study on the impact of medical marketing on social media has proven that social media has succeeded in attracting a large number of patients who have not received any treatment before in this hospital.
What Are the Important Social Networking Sites in Hospital Marketing?
After creating a medical marketing plan and strategy, let’s move on to important social media platforms that can help your healthcare organization grow at a steady pace.
Social media marketing is a great step for all institutions, whether medical or commercial, it helps to consolidate your relationship with the public, interact regularly, and build mutual trust.
For hospitals, social media marketing is very important, because social media platforms help attract new patients and also communicate with current clients.
There are 4 social media platforms that hospitals must be present on. They are Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and also a strong presence in search engine results such as Google.
Snapchat:
Snapchat allows users to download pictures and short videos after watching them, which makes them able to download videos of:
- The diseases they are looking for
- Hospital specialties
- The address and working hours of the doctors in the hospital
- Advice or educational content that you can use or share later
There are some important statistics that you should know about Snapchat and its importance in digital medical marketing:
- 78% of 18-24-year-olds use Snapchat to access everything they need.
- 63% of Snapchat users check it out every day to keep up with what’s new.
Source: Pew Research Center
Instagram:
Instagram is a great platform to build an audience if you have pictures if you create unique and attractive content that captures the audiences’ attention. This is a wonderful way to represent the visual content that you create.
Twitter:
Although it is less attractive compared to Instagram, it has a large user base that you can target with paid ads, and it is ensured that having a hospital Twitter account will contribute to the content virality and reach more patients.
Facebook:
You must have a Facebook page for your hospital, it should also include your professional CV and an attractive cover photo.
The services and specializations provided by the hospital must also be listed, so always try to make the Facebook page rich with the information that patients need
To ensure a successful marketing strategic plan, you should always post to your Facebook page useful, attractive content that is useful to the audience.
If you are seeking to increase your audience, try to post daily on your Facebook page.
To reach the widest possible audience and share the content you have posted, it is better to create paid ads on Facebook.
Here is a list of activities you can do on different social media platforms:
What Are the Benefits of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in Hospital Marketing?
SEO is the best way to get first place in organic -unpaid- search results. Some practices need to be done to improve a hospital’s website, but it takes time to see the results. SEO starts with finding and targeting keywords based on location, specialties, treatments offered, etc.
You can improve your search engines by creating high-quality content that is compatible with your services and enriches the videos, articles, and images that support your organization. Other than keywords, there are a lot of SEO practices that can be obtained through marketing companies specializing in medical sector marketing.
What Are the Benefits of Content Marketing for Hospitals in Dubai?
Hospital content marketing is a very effective strategy that helps you build and care for your target audience and later transform them into clients.
Content marketing involves continuously creating and publishing valuable content to the public.
The following is a medical content marketing plan that you can follow while marketing to hospitals:
1. Define your target audience
Who is your audience, and what are they searching for online? for example, if your audience is obese, they will read a lot about obesity treatment and options such as laparoscopic bariatric surgery.
You also need to define the main search terms (keywords) that patients use on a search engine such as Google, as this is the basic step before working on your content.
2. Determine the content type
Content can be in different forms including articles, photos, and videos, but for hospitals, the coordination of articles and videos will help greatly to improve the hospital’s visibility in search results.
3. Start creating content
You can now create valuable content and the audience should be able to find a solution to their problems from it.
If you can provide reliable information through your content to patients, they tend to trust you and turn into a part of your audience.
4. Create more paid ads
If you can attract a large audience with your content, your content marketing efforts are going in the right direction.
Using paid advertisements greatly contributes to the reach of your content, by targeting a specific audience interested in your services, and integrating some methods of SEO to appear first in organic search results.
Apart from this, you should promote the content through other channels such as social media and emails.
The benefit of medical marketing with content is centered around its immense ability to transform patients from just targeted patients into existing clients and build trust with them.
What Are the Advantages of Digital Marketing for hospitals?
One of the biggest advantages of digital medical marketing is the ability to target the largest audience. Now, marketing managers in medical institutions use it as a way to advertise their services and succeeded in reaching the largest number of patients in addition to greater success for institutions through the development of marketing strategies.
Mistakes to be avoided during hospital marketing
- The target audience is not specified
Defining the target audience is the first step in any digital marketing strategy, and marketing to medical institutions is no exception.
Hospital marketing campaigns may only bring people together, but if the target audience is not identified, you’re at risk of wasting your budget and failing because your ads are not reaching the right audience.
- Failure to set the right budget
Here is where you need help from healthcare marketing experts, as companies specializing in medical marketing can determine that budget effectively and reach the right results.
A common mistake in a healthcare marketing budget is either spending too much or spending too little without understanding the right time and budget for each ad.
But if you choose marketing companies that specialize in medical marketing, you will find a very large return on investment from the budget that you pay on campaigns, and you can avoid spending large amounts on campaigns that do not lead anywhere.
- Lack of setting goals in medical marketing campaigns
Hospital marketing campaigns must be aligned with the goals you want to reach to achieve the desired results.
Thus, the failure to set goals makes you lose a large part of the audience and waste a lot of time and money.
