Healthcare marketing can be a tough code to crack but don’t let that intimidate you. Although the landscape is changing more now than ever, there are ways to keep your brand and practice relevant. Efficiently marketing your practice is just as important as the practice itself and should not be overlooked. This guide will help consider three different ways that can drastically improve your healthcare marketing strategy.
Due to the current climate of marketing, healthcare practice owners have a long road ahead. Your healthcare marketing plan can go in many different directions. Generating leads, patient coordination, designing a CRM system, and creating content are all important to this process. With medical practices undergoing fundamental changes to patient needs post-COVID-19, even considering where to invest can become a difficult task.
Despite the difficulties, try to focus on the following to help with your marketing endeavors:
- Video Content
- Multilingual Communication
- Personalized Care Plans
Why We Struggle With Healthcare Marketing Content
Attracting long-term patients starts by developing the right lead generation strategy. One of the most popular mediums to connect with an audience is, as you may have guessed, the internet. However, it’s a bit more complicated than straightforward content creation like within most other industries.
For healthcare content creation and medical social media platforms, brands often struggle to understand why patient engagement is low. They notice that no one likes or comments on social posts, and no one is clicking on content.
The type of content you are building and how you are building it matters. Typical graphics, long information paragraphs and branded text without valuable information tend to lead to low engagement. If what you are creating and putting online is not educational, easy to consume and enjoyable to engage with, you need to adopt a new strategy.
Video Content Is King
According to Google Health’s Vice President, David Feinberg M.D., 7% of Google’s daily searches are health-related. This means when people are going online they will reach for easy-to-consume content for their healthcare-related questions. Having your content populate in search results is just as important as the content itself. It is also a great way to reach new audiences, keep current audiences engaged, and attract new consumers.
Videos are another tool that can help your strategy as well. Videos are the number one source of information for 66% of people. This is extremely valuable for your content strategy, especially for a difficult-to-engage subject, such as healthcare.
Consider using Facebook videos, YouTube Shorts, Instagram reels and stories, and Tik-Tok posts. This helps to optimize your video content on social media platforms and extend the reach of the content you are creating. Facebook has over 2.89 billion monthly active users which you have to get exposure for your video content.
How To Create Video Content For Your Healthcare Marketing Plan
1. Create A Content Calendar
Plan out everything you intend on filming in advance, from storyboarding to exact dialogue. The more resources you have access to, the easier the process will be when you actually go to film. Design a schedule that will house all of your intended content for the month while also considering your target audience. Create a well-rounded script and shot list for each video, and make sure your content is relevant and eye-catching.
2. Design Your Film Space
Creating a video can take place on an iPhone or producing high-quality, extremely polished video content. Nonetheless, it’s important to keep your environment clean, organized, and aesthetic.
It’s important to make sure that what is happening in the background in your video is not distracting as it would take away from the content itself. The content is the focus of your video. Design the videos around the needs of the content instead of the other way around.
3. Vary Video Content
Video content has a vast range of options, but it’s important to vary your content and understand what type of video connects best to your audience. Live videos, such as interviews, tours, webinars, or lectures are a great way to provide educational content. Explainer videos, behind-the-scenes videos, or event videos, are also great ways to learn about what your audience connects with.
Multilingual Medical Practices
Oftentimes when people emigrate to the United States, they tend to settle into communities of people who value the same culture as their homeland. This is because it creates a feeling of connectedness to their roots.
For healthcare professionals, it is not uncommon to encounter someone who speaks a language other than English, whether that is Spanish, Mandarin, French, German, Hindi, or other non-English speaking languages. The difficulty arises when healthcare providers cannot communicate accurately with patients, and struggle to provide necessary treatment because they do not speak the same language as their patients.
The answer is clear: invest in multilingual/bilingual staff or focus on learning a second language to better support your community. For example, Spanish is the second largest growing language in the world. This makes it a worthwhile investment for healthcare. From nurses to patient care coordinators, to doctors themselves, being able to communicate with patients is the best way to develop a strong repertoire among clients over time.
Add Multilingual Practices to Your Healthcare Practice
1. Staff Your Practice With Bilingual Speakers
When non-English speaking patients walk through the doors of your practice, they will be greeted by staff that can communicate with them in their native tongue. This is ideal for healthcare practices that are located in an area that has a heavy influence on non-English speakers.
A community approach to language will help you better communicate with patients and family members that are local to your practice. As a result, there will be better communication between patient and provider, leading to stronger care and compliance.
2. Invest In Language Learning for Employees
Bilingual nurses help contribute to patient safety and are a great way to overcome language barriers in your practice. Enlisting employees in a language program is a worthwhile investment. The programs would be based on the language demographic of those in the area where your organization is located. It may sound like a tedious chore but can have everlasting effects on your brand.
3. Hire a Bilingual Healthcare Call Center
First impressions are important. Having a bilingual speaker can help your practice have the best first impression possible for those who don’t speak English. Bilingual speakers can better understand these non-english speaking patients’ questions, mitigate issues and quickly and accurately enact marketing strategies to display all of the benefits of your practice. Here at NewGen, we have a specialized bilingual call center that can help your brand reach out to more patients.
Personalized Care
Industries across the board and within the health and wellness space are developing customized plans, products, and services for individuals. This in turn allows these individuals to be able to get a closer, detailed look at their health.
For example, check out this vitamin brand. They customize wellness plans based on a quiz customers take to learn more about their nutritional needs: https://www.humnutrition.com. Healthcare and wellness consumers have begun to prefer personalized care. Care that is specific to their lifestyle, their health goals, and their needs.
How You Can Personalize Your Care Plan
Most healthcare practices have been forced to move away from a product-focused practice. This shift has led them to a more consumer-based practice. They’ve adopted new strategies that focus more on consumer satisfaction. This is what makes personalized care plans so crucial.
A great way to keep current consumers is through the development of a personalized care plan. This makes the consumer feel valued and cared for. It gives them and whatever they may be experiencing a sense of importance. Focusing too much on the product can have negative effects on your brand and customer satisfaction.
Personalized Care Can Attract New Patients
Being able to market personalized care plans can help attract new patients. In the changing landscape of healthcare, patients don’t want to be treated as just a number anymore. New customers will gravitate towards brands that give their situation the importance they feel is necessary. Thus making the importance of personalized care and customer satisfaction skyrocket.
The Power of Word of Mouth
Putting importance on the customer will also increase word of mouth. Word of mouth is when your customers talk to others about your practice. This can also help attract new customers, as your current customers talk about your practice to other customers. This exposes them to your brand and can lead them to consider the services you offer.
How NewGen Helps Healthcare Marketing
At NewGen, we understand that this information can be overwhelming and stress-inducing. However, we are more than capable of handling all aspects of healthcare marketing. Whether it be the aforementioned call center or video content creation. We want to help market your brand in the best way possible, attracting new customers and maintaining current ones.
If you are curious about what we have to offer feel free to contact us today!