Digital marketing for hospitals is quite a competitive field, with experienced SEO companies coming up with various strategies to overcome the competition for their clients. But understanding a few basic concepts could go a long way in giving you the edge. Remember, in all your outreach efforts as a healthcare practice you need to lend value to your content. A physician clinic, rehabilitation center or hospital is all about providing quality care to patients, and that is expected of all your online marketing efforts as well.
Targeting the Millennials
While marketing your practice, you need to focus on various groups of prospective customers. And one of them has to be the millennials. They are the go-getters who have a lot of goals to achieve. They don’t want ailments and health concerns to bring them down, and they need quality healthcare.
As much as millennials expect the best from other services, they expect the same from healthcare providers as well. They need personalized care that accommodates their needs and preferences. And with the intense competition in the healthcare sector, you need to get that part right – reaching out to them with personalized health information that resonates with their physical needs, lifestyle and happiness. So how can you get it done?
Having a Great and Well-Optimized Website
From the perspective of attracting millennials as well as attaining top SEO performance, you need a great website.
- The web pages need to be optimized for conversational and voice search terms, for which you need long-tail keywords. The content in your pages should be comprehensive enough in covering every possible aspect of the targeted keyword. Remember, people don’t always search “heart attack” except while typing on the searchbox. When it comes to voice search, where they just tell Google what they want to search via their mobile phones or smart speakers, people just don’t search this way. Rather they ask, “How to know if I’m having heart attack”, “symptoms of heart attack”, “what causes heart attack” or “first aid tips for heart attack”. These are long-tail keywords, and a keyword research using various tools such as SEMRush, Answer the Public, Soovle and Google search’s “related search” suggestions can help you find out the search phrases people usually search for. And, depending on the kind of healthcare services you offer, you can research health conditions millennials are most concerned about and focus more on conversational, long-tail keyword phrases involving those conditions.
- The information must be quickly available to the user through labels and icons, without the reader having to search through large blocks of text. Videos, infographics and descriptive images need to be incorporated.
Blogs That Build Engagement
You need to have a blog with posts that are useful, relevant to your target millennial audience, and engaging. That makes them share-worthy and helps build a strong follower base. The more users share your posts, the more popular they become and imbibe your brand in the minds of the audience.
Targeting Social Media Platforms
While your audience will share your blog posts on the social networks, you need an effective social media strategy yourself. Each social network has certain peculiarities. There are some networks preferred by your target audience more than the others. Millennials have preferences. 33% of them prefer Facebook, according to research by MarketingProfsin 2017. 22% find Instagram to be their favorite network. 16% of them prefer Snapchat.
Now you know the networks to target. Each of these networks prefers certain kinds of content. But one thing is common – videos really attract people in these posts. While longer videos and posts work great for Facebook, shorter but thought-provoking or informative videos are what users on Instagram and Snapchat need. You’ve got to engineer your content likewise.
Video Strategy
Apart from the informative videos, where you discuss vital health tips involving nutrition and lifestyle as well as a simplistic look into complex diseases, you also need videos that are more personal. By that, we mean videos involving physicians discussing their practice or the kind of care they give and patient testimonials where they describe what they’ve gone through and how the treatment you’ve provided has helped. Videos discussing medical or surgical procedures performed also generate interest among audiences. Encourage your readers to share such videos.
While we discussed some social networks above, you absolutely need to have a YouTube strategy. YouTube is considered the second largest search engine after Google. That shows the power of video. Rather than using Google, people like to search directly on YouTube particularly when it comes to product demonstrations and procedure explanations. It has 3 billion searches per month! So get your YouTube channel ready, popularize it through the social networks and upload informative, engaging and value generating videos.
Engage with Millennials
Your blogs, website and social network accounts must be the go-to destination for all kinds of health and related lifestyle resources for consumers. That’s what millennials are looking for. Experienced medical SEO companies can engineer the right digital marketing strategy for your practice. But remember, you also need to build relationships with your millennial patients during their visits to your practice. That engages them and provides them with a more memorable experience. Also, obtain feedback from patients and make them feel part of your practice. That ensures you directly learn what their expectations and requirements are, and can help you attract more millennials.
