Digital Marketing for Healthcare: A Simple 2024 Guide

What is Healthcare Digital Marketing

Healthcare digital marketing is a targeted approach where you use the internet to ensure that more prospects for your know about your healthcare services. 

It helps you get noticed, reach the right people, attract more potential patients through different methods, and convince them to choose your services over other healthcare organizations.

Why Do You Need Healthcare Digital Marketing Strategy

Without a proper healthcare digital marketing strategy, you might end up trying random things that won’t really help your business. 

On the contrary, a good strategy gives you a structured approach and helps you figure out what you want to achieve with your marketing, what’s working for you, and what’s falling flat, so you can allocate your time, marketing budget, and resources well and take a cost-effective marketing approach. 

A good digital marketing strategy will require you to:

• Set specific marketing goals that make sense for your healthcare business.
• Pick the right digital channels – social media, search engines, CRM, and websites – to reach your target audience.
• Establish measurable KPIs and metrics to track your marketing campaign success and ROI.
• Change your strategy based on what’s working and what’s not.
• Allocate the budget wisely so you can maximize your returns.

5 Top Digital Marketing Strategies for Healthcare

Here are the top five healthcare marketing strategies to practice in the healthcare industry.

Local SEO

Local SEO helps people in your area find you when they’re searching for healthcare providers nearby or a healthcare professional. It helps your clinic or healthcare practice appear in location-specific searches, for instance, eye doctor near me or dentist in [City].

One way to do this is by claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile. 

This makes it easier for people to discover you when they search on Google. Another important thing is to gather positive reviews from your patients. It helps you get more credibility and improve your visibility in the local market.

Plus, Google enables people to filter their results based on ratings and operating hours–including working days. 

Your prospective patients would definitely prefer a healthcare company with a good track record. So, having a good rating can maximize your chances of showing up in the SERPs providing an amazing user experience and the best patient care is the key. 

The second one is easier to get right, just update your operating days and hours while optimizing your GMB profile.

Organic Search Engine Optimization

Organic SEO helps people find your website when they search online for healthcare services or topics related to the healthcare services you provide.

But it’s not just about generating traffic; it’s about getting the right people to visit your website so that you can actually build more leads and eventually get new patients. So, your first step towards organic SEO strategy is conducting your keyword research.

It helps you figure out what words people use to find healthcare-related searches. You can use them to tailor the content of your webpages and improve your content marketing approach to match what they’re looking for.

You can do this by digging into keywords related to your field either manually or using SEO tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, or Ubersuggest.

Then, on-page SEO becomes your next focus. 

It means strategically placing these researched keywords throughout your website and using them in everything from your content to title tags, URLs, meta descriptions, and alt-image text.

Besides that, no matter what you’re doing, user experience is the key. You’d have noticed that most people use their mobile devices to search online, so create mobile-friendly content that they can easily navigate on their smartphones.

But it’s not just about what’s on your site. Getting other respected healthcare websites to link to your site, also known as link building, is an important step too.

By securing backlinks from authoritative sources within your industry, you can improve your site’s credibility and signal to search engines to improve your search engine ranking and prominence within the healthcare sphere.

Content Marketing

All of your marketing strategies – whether it’s social media marketing, email marketing, PPC ads, your blog, or optimizing your website for SEO – are a part of your content marketing strategy because you need to create content to run all of them.

So, you need a solid content marketing strategy that can determine how you’ll create and manage content for all the channels where you’ll distribute it. Having a content calendar – the document to plan, align, and execute your content – goes a long way.

Social Media Marketing

Social media is always a great strategy to build your online presence because the majority of your target audience spends at least some of their time (let’s be honest, they spend hours) scrolling through social media platforms.

You can focus on platforms like Instagram, YouTube, or LinkedIn and share helpful content, videos, and engaging posts to attract attention and patient engagement and drive traffic to your website. 

In this era, video marketing along with creating other quality content can improve your brand awareness in the industry, build relationships, and get more patients interested in what you offer.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising

What is better than showing up in the searches of people actively looking for a healthcare facility or those who need one right in that instant?

PPC advertising can help you do that.

But unlike traditional marketing, these digital marketing campaigns will require you to strategically place your ads targeted towards specific keywords because these internet users are primed to click on ads offering immediate solutions to their healthcare needs—for instance, a free consultation. 

No doubt that PPC can help you get instant leads, but the technicality involved in its process and the creativity required in writing these ads can be tricky. Plus, this strategy requires you to put in dollars right from the start. 

It’s smart to get help from experts or a digital marketing agency for this one as it can save you money and the trial time and get a better ROI.

HIPAA’s Impact on Healthcare Digital Marketing 

As per the Compliancy Group, it actually depends on the nature of your marketing tactics, the tools or apps you’re using, and whether you’ve obtained patient consent or not.

For instance, in direct marketing, especially targeting patients through remarketing or using patient data with marketing software, you’ll need to strictly adhere to HIPAA guidelines. But if you’re targeting healthcare consumers based on their demographic details such as age, gender, or location, you’re clear and outside HIPAA’s purview.

Plus, before you go with any marketing tool, you’ll have to confirm whether they’re HIPAA compliant or not–for instance, tools like Facebook Ads or Hubspot are not HIPAA compliant; so, you cannot enter your patient’s data into these platforms.

How to Ensure Compliant Healthcare Digital Marketing

Some of the basic things that you can consider to ensure HIPAA-compliant marketing is to never share any private information of your patients. Instead, keep things general to protect their privacy. One way to ensure that it always goes right is to have someone check your marketing material before posting to make sure that you’re not breaking any HIPAA rules.

Plus, before taking any social pictures or videos, double-check that there are no sensitive documents in the background. It’s also smart to talk to a lawyer before trying out any new marketing ideas to make sure they’re HIPAA compliant.

Another tip would be to never mention any patients’ names or the services they received while dealing with a negative online review during reputation management.

To ease your marketing effort while ensuring they’re HIPAA compliant, you can also use these options.

Implement a Customer Database Platform (CDP)

Integrate a HIPAA-compliant customer database platform that uses encryption to secure your patient’s data and access controls. You can ensure it through Business Associate Agreements. 

Also, ensure that the CDP you’re going to use protects PHI (Protected Health Information) data by anonymizing it within the system or has the option to disclose this information only with the explicit consent of the patients.  

Use Compliant Call Tracking

The market offers a lot of compliant call-tracking tools like Liine, CallRail, or CallTrackingMetrics, you just need to do a little research before you get one for your marketing efforts. 

Such platforms use AI to keep an eye on phone calls and form submissions while giving you information like where the leads are coming from, patients’ experience, and whether they’re high-quality leads or not.

This data is sufficient to understand which of your keywords are working best and when you need to follow up with prospects.

Leverage Privacy-Focused Analytics

It means you cannot rely on conventional tools like Google Analytics to get insights from your website.

Instead, you’ll have to spend some time exploring alternative solutions that prioritize privacy without compromising analytical depth.

Several tools like iFax, MixPanel, or Improvado offer HIPAA compliance, you can further confirm it through Business Associate Agreements (BAAs) with any analytical tool you go with.

Let us Create a Holistic Digital Marketing Strategy For You!

HIPAA compliance can limit your marketing options to a certain extent. If you want to take your medical practice to a whole other level, it’s smart to work with marketing experts. 

They understand privacy rules and marketing trends and can help you set your marketing tools in a way that you can use the right information without violating any rules or hurting your business in the process.

Because there are ways to leverage data more safely. 

One way to save your marketing funds and get a better ROI is a full-funnel marketing strategy. 

This approach concentrates on guiding your prospects through every stage of their buying journey from start to finish instead of going with a comprehensive approach, where you use multiple marketing channels in your strategy but due to compliance only target a general audience.

We can help you implement it for your medical practice. Contact us for a free audit today.