Creative Healthcare Marketing Ideas
Finding creative ways to market your healthcare business doesn’t demand you reinvent the wheel.
There are plenty of ways you can tap into people and events to create more visibility and engagement between your brand and your community.
And no, you don’t need a billboard for this campaign.
Simply put, it’s about creating opportunities for people to enter into a conversation or experience.
These types of marketing tactics lie at the top of the funnel — to create awareness and build trust.
Initiatives like these will pave the way for your patient acquisition efforts deeper within the funnel. Don’t skimp on creative ways to bring high-quality traffic into your funnel.
Wellness Challenge
A wellness challenge may seem like a worn-out pair of running shoes at this point. But especially in today’s climate, people need activities and distractions. And for the audience you speak to, your challenge will need to tap into their key drivers, be it preventing a negative outcome based on a current challenge or seeking to create positive outcomes as preventative maintenance. Most audience segments in healthcare fall into the solving and prevention of problems. So a wellness challenge that appeals to a segment like this could start by creating awareness around an issue — say raising money for cancer research or funding a new wing at your hospital. Indirectly, you’re addressing a current or future pain point for the audience.
Next, it’s key to incentivize.
WIIFM or “What’s in it for me?” is going to be top of mind for anyone considering participating in a challenge. So in the case of wellness, maybe it’s a giveaway for a cool gadget like a smartwatch, a piece of fitness equipment, or even a membership to a healthy meal kit delivery service.
Whatever the incentive, it should be congruent with the solving of the pain point.
And so another thing to consider is how you go about actually solving the pain point — outside of the challenge.
Once users opt in to the challenge, you have their permission to send email. This is the place where you can now further educate them and prompt calls to action — whether this is for a free health screening or to book an appointment.
Mobilize Staff
You’ve invested in staff, so why not task them with sharing your marketing messages?
Sure, it’s not easy to get your staff to promote your content on their social media channels, but again with the incentives.
An internal company challenge can provide you with external leverage in the form of wider visibility in the community. And that’s doubly important for healthcare businesses that are location-dependent for the delivery of care or products.
So consider your paid advertising budget. Surely you could afford to divert a bit of that toward some prizes for an internal staff mobilization campaign.
And at the end of the day, these staff could easily become patients themselves, so promoting a healthy lifestyle through a challenge that offers up the same kind of rewards I mentioned above? It’s a win-win.
Community Activation
This is something I’ve discussed in other posts with tactics like sponsoring wellness events, but in a broader sense, this kind of marketing requires that you build and nurture community relationships so that “activation” can occur. This isn’t something you can walk out and purchase from a shelf. One way to consider making these kinds of inroads would be to connect with a local outreach nonprofit and help them serve an underserved population with a health fair offering free screenings or a similar magnet to amplify your brand reach.
Develop Strategic Partnerships
Strategic partners can be born from community activation or they can be corporate partners who want to support a worthy cause. Brands in the wild often partner with healthcare organizations to wage awareness campaigns for issues like cancer, heart disease and degenerative illnesses like Alzheimer’s.
Blogger Relations Campaign
Much akin to influencer marketing, blogger relations campaigns aim to tap into existing audiences through aggregating your reach and the reach of bloggers who serve and the audience with whom you need to connect. This is another way to leverage the idea we mentioned about a sponsored event. Getting bloggers on board can generate the offsite SEO signals you need to get traction behind a campaign.
Creative Content Marketing Ideas for Healthcare
Informative content generates leads. So when it comes to content marketing, the question is not WHETHER you should leverage it. The question is HOW you leverage it. In one sense, content marketing is a misnomer. It implies the Field of Dreams fallacy: “if you build it, they will come.” And that’s simply incomplete.
If you build it, they will have SOMEWHERE to come ONCE they hear about you. But good content marketing requires amplification through strategies like paid social and SEO. These are the traffic tactics you need to feed your funnel with users to interact with your content marketing assets.
And content marketing is only growing.
Image Source: emarketer.com
All of the creative tactics we’ve discussed here are great ideas for promoting a hospital through marketing. In addition, there is still more that you can do on a practical level. These ideas include:
- Being transparent about price
- Making it easy to book appointments
- Creating a waiting room experience that is more like trip to the spa than a trip to the DMV.
- Having humans answer your incoming phone calls
- Making the insurance and billing aspect of the patient experience uncomplicated and less stressful
How do you attract patients to your practice?
When it comes to successfully acquiring new patients at an affordable cost, there are a few marketing strategy concerns that you’ll need to address. First, you need to establish your current average patient value and the average cost to acquire a patient through your current advertising channels or paid partnerships.
Figuring out these benchmarks will give you base numbers you’ll need to successfully wage patient acquisition marketing.
As for what marketing strategies will work best, that has to start with deeply understanding your audience—the key drivers of their behavior and where they spend their time online. Because there’s no cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all growth strategy that we can prescribe across the board.
Testing, measuring and iterating. These are the big three things to leverage as you market your business.
How can I make my clinic successful?
The success of your business goes beyond marketing well. It’s about operations. Customer service. Business strategy. Hiring well. So many of the things that go on behind the scenes. But when it comes to marketing, the biggest thing to keep in mind is that every dollar needs accountability. If you’re going to make an investment, you need to understand what job you’re giving that money as it goes out to buy media or hire an agency.
Social media post ideas for healthcare
When it comes to your social media posts, you should focus on two factors: quality and consistency. Plan your posting cadence and stick to it. Users will subtly pick up on the fact that you post on certain days and at certain times. Consistency helps to build trust.
Second, your posts need to be better than average—not just disposable snacks. Are you creating content that adds value?
It’s not enough to have engaging content. We can go a few steps further.
Using salient keywords and location keywords or tags isn’t just for old school website SEO — it works to improve relevance on social media as well.
Additionally, creating tracking URLs that attribute specific social media posts as the source for your landing page traffic is a great way to get better insights about what types of content drive more engagement through your social channels.
When it comes to successfully acquiring new patients at an affordable cost, there are a few marketing strategy concerns that you’ll need to address. First, you need to establish your current average patient value and the average cost to acquire a patient through your current advertising channels or paid partnerships.
Figuring out these benchmarks will give you base numbers you’ll need to successfully wage patient acquisition marketing.
Benefits of Marketing for Your Healthcare Brand
There are too many health care options available for patients to feel attached to whatever doctor, clinic, or floor they are in. Marketing your healthcare practice provides an open line of communication with your patient audience by building trust by taking interest in them. Healthcare creative marketing ideas allow you to strengthen and raise your connections with patients to train loyal patients for the long term. Successful patient marketing leads to successful patient engagement and successful patient engagement leads to a flourishing practice with maximizing your revenue.
Quality Care Creative marketing ideas
Healthcare marketing systems provide quality care to current and prospective patients in all aspects of their practice, including the website, social media pages, patient engagement representatives, and personal healthcare creative marketing ideas. The best way to imagine how healthcare marketing works is to consider the patient as a customer. Customers have an extreme list of picks – what is best in you so they can pick you up for services? The only answer to this question is “Your Marketing Strategies” is enough to attract them.
Convincing Strategies – Healthcare Creative Marketing
If you have poor marketing or no marketing, your brand will suffer. Yes, their medical practice works like any other brand in any other industry. Patients complete today’s healthcare industry, so convincing Creative marketing ideas let the patient (client) know about your practice stands out from the rest.
Alteration in Healthcare Marketing Tactics
The health sector is altering rapidly. The industry that depended on the volume around the doctor is now an industry based on quality around the patient. There is probably more than one medical office in a particular area that offers the same or similar services. Marketing to prospective patients not only shows that your practice is different from the competition, but that it is a much better option overall.
Conclusion
As for what marketing strategies will work best, that has to start with deeply understanding your audience—the key drivers of their behavior and where they spend their time online. Because there’s no cookie-cutter, one-size-fits-all growth strategy that we can prescribe across the board.
Testing, measuring, and iterating. These are the big three things to leverage as you market your business.
Coming up with strategies to creatively grow your business isn’t always simple or easy. If it were, there would be far fewer hospitals going out of business. If you need some help to figure out what next step is right for you in your business, I’d be happy to work with you. Drop me a line or check out my consulting options to get started.