Have you ever gone online to learn about a new mobile’s price, or to determine where your favorite movie is being showed or to book a room for your next vacation? Sure you did! The traditional buying and selling processes have been changed along with methods of data gathering!
The basic marketing concept is: “Identifying customer needs” and therefore, customers now have the power regarding the development of products and services, not the manufacturers; Customers can gain all the information they need about a specific product or service, review it and share his/her experience with other customers.
This change has affected major fields, among which is the healthcare fields; particularly hospitals. Patients and healthcare seekers can now search for services provided by every hospital, details of medical staff and can also ask others about their previous experience regarding any of the hospitals. Hospital ranking has been always dependent on the quality of its provided services and the expertise of its medical staff, but nowadays, patients’ satisfaction has become one of the most important success factors.
Read also: Digital Marketing for Hospitals – Episode 2 – Prepare your plan
Every hospital should now seek digital marketing for hospitals for multiple reasons that would include the increasing number of available hospital and healthcare centers as well as the increasing number of patients and healthcare seekers that are searching for health services online.
A lot of marketing companies have conducted market research regarding the use of online resources and platforms by audience to search for particular healthcare information or services and they have found that:
Figure 1 – Market Research Results
Read also: Branding your medical practice
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The following question to come is: “How can we establish online presence for our hospital in a professional way?” There are a lot of methods to digital market for hospitals online which would include:
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- Building your own website: Which is considered to be your online headquarters where you can be found by every healthcare seeker as well as displaying your services and features.
MD Connect – A marketing company – has conducted a survey about patients/healthcare seekers attitudes regarding searching for available treatment options and they found that:
Figure 2 – MD Connect Survey Results
- Establishing your social media accounts: Different social media platforms has been growing much that they do have huge number of participators that belong to different demo-graphical, cultural and interest segments who can share their opinions, experiences and engage actively with each other. This would help you much in building strong relationships with your customers fortified with trust.
Figure 3 – Baheya Hospital Facebook Page
- Appearing in top results on search engines: This can be achieved through the use of SEM (Search Engine Marketing) by paying directly to search engines, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and the use of right keywords in all of your content and posts all over the web.
Figure 4 – Showing sample results of searching a word on Google
- Investing in Online Advertising: Through the use of direct advertising methods available on different social media platforms as Facebook Ads or other advertising services like Google Adwords in which you can aware your audience about your brand, conduct your message directly to your target audience and position your services the right way.
- Showing your expertise: Through the creation of customized, high quality and attractive medical content that is related to your audience which can drive them to engage with your brand.
- Building your own video library: Where it was found that videos gain top online engagements among all other content types. You may include real case studies and patients testimonials that have had great experience dealing with your organization.
Figure 7 – Sample Medical Online Video
At Upper Medic, we are committed to spread medical and healthcare marketing knowledge to all healthcare providers so wait for our upcoming digital marketing for hospitals educational episodes about Hospitals Marketing topic.
