Google Maps listing is relevant and interactive and is considered one of the crucial marketing strategies for businesses. Google Maps can help you stay ahead of your competitors, get discovered by new customers, and generate more business. If Google Maps is used effectively in healthcare digital marketing, doctors can find an increase in the number of patients visiting, improve their overall practice, and build trust. However, these benefits can be achieved only if your listings are ranked high in Google Searches. Let’s check out some top strategies that could help you enjoy a high rank in Google Maps Listing.
Quality content like an effective blog post requires a lot of research and effort. A blog should be able to communicate your message or idea quickly and powerfully, get the reader’s attention, and hold it. Just like in any other business, healthcare digital marketing involves creating blog posts to provide health-related and medical information and related topics. Informative content will help capture the user’s attention, and build trust and authority in the target audience. Creating and posting good blogs on a consistent basis will improve the healthcare facility’s credibility and online visibility.
Infographics are powerful visual tools to present data in an easily understandable format. Infographics can play a vital role in digital marketing for healthcare by helping providers present data, especially complex medical information, in an easy-to-understand and visually appealing format.
An infographic combines the best of text images and design to represent complex data, and makes it easy for your target audience to understand and digest what the data is about. An expert provider of medical website design services can design eye-catching, well-organized and informative infographics for your digital marketing campaign.
Are you looking to boost your online presence and engage your audience with compelling visuals?
Here are five ways in which infographics can benefit healthcare marketing:
Patient education: Infographics can be used to educate patients about their health conditions, treatment options, and preventive measures. For example, an infographic on how to improve wellness can highlight the importance of getting vaccinated, regular exercise, a healthy diet, cleanliness and handwashing to reduce risk of bacteria, and so forth. This can lead to more informed patients, and drive better patient engagement and improved health outcomes.
Brand awareness: Infographics can be used to establish a brand’s expertise and authority in a particular area of healthcare, leading to greater brand recognition and patient trust.
Improved communication: Infographics can help improve the relationship between the patient and practitioner. They can help healthcare providers communicate important medical information to patients, caregivers, and other stakeholders in a clear and concise manner, leading to better care coordination and improved patient outcomes. Improving people’s ability to grasp health information can enhance their medical decision-making capabilities.
Increased shareability: Infographics are highly shareable on social media platforms, allowing healthcare providers to reach a wider audience and potentially go viral, leading to greater brand exposure and patient engagement.
Research communication: Infographics can be used to communicate research findings and medical breakthroughs to a wider audience, leading to greater public awareness and support for scientific research.
Digital marketing experts can turn an informative article or blog post into a bold and eye-catching infographic. They can create graphical representations of the content that includes clear, concise, and accurate information and visually appealing design and layout, making it an effective tool for communicating complex ideas and data.
Different Types of Infographs for Healthcare
There are different types of infographics to choose from based on your objectives and the information type you are presenting:
Statistical: This is the best infographic that you can use to back up an argument with relevant data, or to present survey results, or data from more than one source. A statistical infographic focuses on your data and its layout, and features visuals to help to tell you tell story behind that particular data. This type of infographic can include:
The above demographics report includes pie charts, pictograms, map, and a bar graph. This mixture of graphs and charts is suitable when you want to present various facts and figures so that the information is best communicated to your audience.
Timeline: Timeline infographic templates are used to visualize the history of a trend, company, or product to highlight important dates or to give an overview of events. It helps to increase audience engagement with your brand and also produce leads. It can be designed in a vertical, horizontal, or winding format according to the space available and the type of information that you will display. This infographic helps create a clearer picture of a timeframe and is easy for the customers to follow each event and its corresponding date through it.
Informational: This infographic contains more text than other infographic types. It is used to explain concepts or topics with the help of visuals. It builds credibility as it lets you show your expertise and also educate audience. An informational infographic is separated into different sections with descriptive headings. When you number each section, it helps in the flow of infographic design. Moreover, it is found that people like infographics with numbers in the title. So, with descriptive headings and illustrative icons you can make communication easier.
Comparison: This infographic type is used to compare two products, ideas, people, events, places, and things. Apart from that, you can use it to visually compare and contrast seemingly opposing things to show the differences, similarities, and relative advantage. You should choose this infographic if you want to help your audience choose a service between two options, or to show the benefits of one over the other. It can help speed up the decision-making process and lead to more conversions.
Process: Easy-to-understand process infographic templates can be used to provide a summary or overview of the steps in a process. It simplifies and clarifies each step to make it easy to understand. It follows a straightforward left-to-right or top-to-bottom flow.
Map infographic: Map infographics can be a powerful tool for healthcare providers to visualize and analyze data, track disease outbreaks, identify disparities, and plan interventions. For instance, in the event of infectious diseases like influenza and COVID-19, maps can be useful track the spread of diseases, allowing healthcare providers to monitor the situation in real-time and respond quickly.
Hierarchical: Hierarchical infographics organize information according to certain levels like the importance level, income level, difficulty level, etc. Most commonly, you can see it in pyramid shape or in the organizational chart form. This type of infographic compares different levels and shows how they are related to each other.
How-to: It explains how to achieve a specific outcome and demonstrates the steps to do so. If your purpose is to teach your audience to act or about using a product, using this will be a good option. When people find something easy to understand, especially if it helps them learn something helpful, it is very likely to be shared. So, a how-to infographic will most probably reach a larger audience.
Anatomical: This infographic breaks down information about a particular topic, or tells the audience how a service or tool works. The example shown below given in visme.co, is the anatomical infographic type that uses visual metaphors like the human body to show information. The infographic shown below displays the anatomy of a person who works as an information designer.
Interactive: This type of infographic lets the audience decide how they can explore each section of the content. They can do it by dragging elements or clicking it, zooming in, and choosing answers to questions. You can use an interactive infographic if your aim is to increase the time your target audience spends with your content. Interactive infographics are captivating and inspire the audience to stay longer, encouraging them to explore and understand the details presented.
Infographics may contain multiple data visualizations such as charts, graphs, maps, and diagrams, to help communicate complex information in a clear and visually appealing way. Healthcare digital marketing experts can provide attractive infographics that combine color, graphics, and data and ensure clear communication of the medical information. They can provide visualizations that are easy to read and understand and complement your blog post. They can also optimize your infographics for SEO by incorporating relevant keywords and backlinks, leading to improved search engine rankings and greater visibility for your healthcare practice.
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Over the past few years, the healthcare industry has undergone drastic changes. With significant advancements in the field of technology, patients now have access to more information than ever before. Physicians are slowly adopting new digital marketing strategies to increase new patient visits and retain the existing patients as well. Social media platforms have become a growing necessity for all small businesses, including medical practices. As a healthcare professional, the question of how to increase patient volume is a major consideration. Reports suggest that on an average people spend about 144 minutes on social media platforms every day. With 2 billion active monthly users, social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram are crucial to reach a wider group of patients. However, as a physician how do you make yourself stand out from thousands of other physicians or medical practices that are advertising and striving hard to gather the attention and maximum “Likes” and “Views” of targeted users? Whether you are a medical practitioner or physician who is looking for efficient ways to improve the visibility of your clinic, it is vital to incorporate a solid healthcare digital marketing strategy to widen your clientele.
Significance of Digital Marketing for Physicians
Digital marketing and SEO for doctors can be challenging. This is particularly because medical professionals need to go that extra mile to build a sense of trust and assurance with potential patients in the online space. Apart from marketing aspects, social media platforms can be effectively utilized by doctors as a tool for networking, educating patients and also as a customer service tool to answer non-urgent patient queries for funneling appointments. If done rightly, social media marketing can provide huge benefits and opportunities such as –
An opportunity to reach more people than just the patients in your practice
Ability to communicate with current patients (including sharing product recalls, new updates on health trends, and medical breakthroughs)
A platform to find new patients
Improve brand awareness
Experience a visible increase in leads
Boost digital profile and improve healthcare website’s SEO
Social Media Marketing Tips for Physicians
Posting to social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook won’t bring magical results or a flood of new patients to your door. Like any other digital marketing medium, social media also takes time, testing and patience, and to succeed, your efforts need to be guided by a well-considered strategy.
So, how can physicians use social media platforms to improve their deductive skills, market their medical practice, educate existing patients and move new patients into the marketing funnel?
Here are some top digital marketing tips that could help physicians navigate the wonderful world of social media and stay relevant and patient-centric –
Develop a Clear Strategy – Before you get started, ensure that you have a clear, definite social media strategy in place. Incorporating a more strategic approach will ensure your marketing efforts don’t go in vain. This is the stage where research is done. Take note of what other physicians or competitors are doing on social media and devise strategies on how you can do it better. The strategy will include – the specific social media goals, which specific channels you will use, how you will use them, what postings may be done as well as whether paid social media channels will be used.
Choose a specific social media platform – With a plethora of social media platforms available, choosing the right channels is crucial to achieve your social media marketing goals. The strategy for social media will vary from one physician to another. For instance, Facebook (FB) is the obvious choice for most healthcare practices. In fact, this is the venue where maximum number of users may be present and hence highly competitive. However, there are definitely good opportunities on Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter as well. For example, if you want to be perceived as a thought leader or connect to the industry, it is best to engage with professionals and publications on Twitter or LinkedIn; on the other hand, if you are a medical practice looking to gain new patients, choose Facebook.
Source link – https://www.facebook.com/MedicalOfficesOfManhattan
Bring value to your community – One of the top ways to establish a good reputation for your medical practice on social media, is to bring value to your patients and give them a reason to follow you. This can be done by sharing information about current health topics, general tips on how to stay healthy, or updating about the medical practice like opening hours or staff changes. Tone of voice is another important factor in social media marketing. Make sure to avoid jargon and keep your posts concise.
Be more than just an information provider – Utilize social media as a platform to share relevant information on common health issues and diseases, preventative health tips and other public health issues in general. Share and communicate educational and health information and encourage behavioral and corrective changes. Connect with the audience and implement marketing strategies when applicable.
Understand the laws and regulations applicable: This is very important and these regulations may vary from one country to another. Do not post any content that could compromise the patient’s confidentiality. Give only advice that has been thoroughly researched and verified.
Make sure you use searchable keywords in the content you post and in your social media profiles: Given the importance of online search when it comes to boosting business, it is vital to include relevant keywords related to your medical specialty, the treatments/services you provide, and your location in your profiles and posted content.
Measure your results – What works for one physician may not work for another. Make sure to use content that actually works and has the most engagement. Adopt strategies to give patients the information they need. Use tools like Google Trends and see what people are searching for. When creating content, try to link current events or trends in order to gain traction in a relevant manner.
Track and Monitor – Utilize social listening tools such as HootSuite, SproutSocial etc. Correctly utilizing these tools for your healthcare brand will not only do you good, but also give you details on what the audiences are saying. Any campaign you operate will bring leads to your website and blog. Track the number of users contacting the physician in person and by clicking links on the campaign. Also, remember to use unique hash tag for each campaign.
Advertise your availability outside of regular office hours: If you are providing additional hours of service, such as special hours around holidays, you can spread word about that via social media. You can even let patients know in real time, about any last-minute call-in appointments that may be available via Twitter.
Strengthen relationships with your patients: Social media is a great venue for bolstering relationships. Make sure that you reply to questions, comments, and reviews. If required, give carefully considered feedback as well.
Effective digital marketing is critical to growing your physician practice and social media is a core part of this. Social media is growing every day and more doctors are embracing this powerful marketing tool. By choosing the right platforms and ensuring consistent and timely posting, you can boost your medical practice’s presence online through social media channels. Professional medical SEO companies offering healthcare digital marketing services can provide the best support and solutions, and help you improve patient – provider engagement.
Healthcare SEO is a highly competitive domain with hospitals, healthcare providers and other healthcare businesses looking out for novel and effective strategies to help build brand credibility and trust. With the increase in digitally connected patients, building a strong brand reputation and attracting client reviews have become crucial for the success of any healthcare business. A solid reputation and a steady flow of referrals are vital for physicians to build and sustain a successful medical practice. Online reviews are one of the most reliable and affective ways to drive potential patients to your healthcare practice. Generally, when people search for a new healthcare practice online, they mostly look for reviews made by other patients about a specific medical practice/provider. According to reports, a whopping 82 percent of people use online reviews to evaluate physicians. It is estimated that about 72 percent of patients use online reviews as their first step in locating a healthcare practice or physician. Just like any other type of consumer, patients now check online review sites such as Yelp, Google, and other social media platforms to see what their peers say about a practice before booking an appointment.
Leveraging Online Patient Reviews
It is important to understand the impact of positive reviews on your healthcare practice’s growth. It is equally essential to understand how leveraging these reviews can positively impact your reputation management efforts in the long run. Here discussed are some ways to leverage online reviews to your benefit –
Identify keywords related to your services – Track the most common keywords that are used to describe your services and implement those keywords into your brand positioning.
Improve brand exposure – Positive brand reviews not only reflect well on healthcare services, but also help improve search engine optimization (SEO) ranking of your medical practice by creating unique and fresh content on a regular basis.
Engage with patients – Make sure to build brand loyalty by replying to a patient’s review. By giving constructive feedback or responding to a review, you can establish a patient-doctor relationship that boosts your patients’ loyalty. On the other hand, if someone posts a negative review, you can connect with them to enquire about their experience and analyze how their problem can be fixed to restore their trust in your brand.
Impact of SEO on Online Reviews
Online reviews play a prominent role in a medical practice’s success. The better the reviews, the better will the SEO ranking and higher will be the chance to attract patients. Positive reviews help in ensuring improved brand recognition, enhanced physician reputation management and an overall increase in revenue. Always make sure to take adequate time to respond to online reviews as this will create an impression that your practice is grateful for the review and also shows how committed you are to create a good experience for each patient.
Now, how to ask for a patient review online? Generally, most healthcare practices have a review strategy in place which may help identify what is the best and the most effective ways to generate reviews. Having a solid review strategy in place can help improve your healthcare practice in different ways. Here discussed are some important ways on how to improve physician online reviews –
Focus on What Patients Need – The healthcare field is witnessing drastic changes. Currently, patients no longer choose a physician or healthcare practice based on their location – they expect a visit to the healthcare practice to be more like a customer service experience. Each patient expects certain things from their local healthcare provider and they assume that the practice they choose will meet their specific requirements. Online physician reviews offer a deep insight into what requirements or areas patients prioritize the most. It is important to keep a list of things potential patients require the most, and start planning to audit processes and improve upon patient complaints. Never ever do the mistake of dismissing negative reviews as a one-off, instead start working towards a better patient experience.
Actively Respond to Reviews – The healthcare practice’s response rates to online reviews is an important factor in review strategy. Healthcare practices that respond to reviews more often witness higher conversion rates than those that don’t. Healthcare organizations with active customer review engagement witness improved rates of conversion for paid search. Not only do reviews influence the local rankings of medical practices, they also affect patient behavior by motivating them to sign up for your services, or discouraging them from it. And, responding to reviews gives patients the impression that you are serious about how patients feel about your services.
Build Patient – Physician Relationship through Positive Responses – Responding to patient reviews in a HIPAA-compliant way (without referencing any patient details online) can help strengthen the patient-physician relationship. While responding to patient reviews, consider factors like – express gratitude or thank the patients for their feedback, respond personally wherever possible, respond with a pre-approved message. When you give the right type of responses, people will appreciate that you took the effort and time to provide the response.
Source link – https://www.zocdoc.com/
Boost your Rankings in Search – Online reviews are one of the top local search engine factors that can literally make or break the ranking of your practice in local search results. Adding reviews can boost your presence in Google and other search engine results in the following ways –
Adding reviews can generate fresh content to your website
Reviews promote patient interaction with your site
People are more likely to click through to sites with high ratings
Create a Great First Impression – Studies suggest that 84 percent of patients trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends. It means patients are willing to believe the positive (or the negative) reviews on your site, and that they enter your practice with a set of expectations. When your website features more number of positive reviews, patients normally come into your practice with a positive attitude and outlook. This helps strengthen the patient-physician relationship before you even interact face-to-face.
Respond to Negative Reviews – Before responding to negative reviews, check the records to see whether the review is posted authentically by one of your patients or customers. Whatever be the negativity conveyed in the review, make sure your responses are all positive. Your responses must address the following specific points –
Thank the reviewer for his/her genuine opinion
Point out your specific concern
Apologize for the trouble caused
Be honest about the mistakes made by your practice
Provide a contact number to the concerned individual for the complaint to be fully redressed
Never Incentivize Online Reviews – Another important strategy is – never ever try to incentivize online reviews. Offering an incentive in exchange for a favorable and positive review may lead to a biased review that may not accurately convey the individual patient’s experience. Most healthcare practices may do anything that may help increase revenue. Choosing an online review management platform (that works best for the patients and the healthcare practice) is an excellent alternative to incentivizing reviews. Even though there are many platforms out there, choosing one that works for both your brand and your patients will give the expected results.
With so many patients turning to search engines and social networks to find healthcare practices, it has become very important to monitor your online presence. Physician online reputation management offers better control over how potential and existing patients look upon a medical practice. Patient reviews are only one component of a doctor’s online reputation management which helps build your brand. When it comes to healthcare digital marketing, obtaining positive reviews and reducing negative reviews can help increase patient volume and strengthen online reputation. One of the best ways to reach the right people at the right time for a positive review is to send out requests for reviews through an automated system. With an automated review system, patients first fill out a questionnaire in the office about their experience, which includes a scoring system with a scale of 1-10. Patients who rate your services between 7 and 10 receive a follow-up email requesting a review on your site (and encouraging reviews on sites like Yelp).
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