Updated: The healthcare industry and digital marketing
When it comes to health care, people have a lot of choices. If you want to stand out from the competition, you need to be using digital marketing for health care.
You can do this yourself or outsource it to a Denver digital marketing agency. Creating a digital marketing strategy for health care is a little different because of patient privacy. Here are some digital marketing strategies for health care providers.
HIPPA and digital marketing
Before you start digital marketing, you need to make sure you are taking HIPAA into consideration. HIPAA stands for health insurance portability and accountability act, which is the legal term that covers data protection.
If your company is in direct contact with protected health information (PHI), then you need to have extra security measures that protect any physical data storage, network or online process. Some ways you can make sure your digital marketing is HIPAA compliant is by:
-
Not creating email marketing campaigns or social media posts using patient information
-
Using HIPAA-compliant third-party email marketing tools
-
Not using images taken by staff members on social media. Use stock images instead
-
Planning out detailed social media strategies that show what team members can and cannot post
The types of digital marketing for health care
Search engine optimization (SEO)
77% of patients use a search engine before booking their next health care appointment. As a company, you should make sure your website is showing up on these searches. These searches can be related to finding the nearest location or which doctor has the best reviews.
If your website is currently not showing up when you search for your service search engines, then you need to improve or start an SEO strategy. This type of digital marketing strategy helps increase a website’s visibility on search engine results pages using on-page, off-page and technical strategies.
Social media marketing
Using social media as a health care provider can be a little tricky, especially with HIPPA. However, there are still many ways you can use social media to grow your number of patients while also helping retain your existing ones.
Some ways that health care providers can use social media are by increasing their professional network, attracting new patients, increasing awareness about health concerns, educating the general public and combating misinformation.
Email marketing
Trust is a very important factor for many patients and health care providers. Although patients will not see very much except several times each year, you want to make sure that trust is there. One way to build trust is by using email marketing. Emails are a direct way to stay connected with your patients.
This digital marketing channel is also very useful and cost-effective. The average open rate for health care emails is 23.46%, with a super-high 3.62% click-through rate. Out of all the industries, health care has the highest open rate.
Pay-per-click advertising
If you are looking for a quick way to increase your brand awareness, try pay-per-click advertising. This type of advertising can put your ad on the top of search engine results pages (SERPs). How it works is that the advertiser will pay a fee for every click that the ad receives. Be sure to set a budget.
Using this digital marketing strategy is a quick way to increase brand awareness and generate website traffic. You can get instant results when compared to SEO, which takes a while for it to start pushing your website’s rank higher.
Jump-start your digital marketing with the best Denver digital marketing agency!
If you want to improve your healthcare company’s digital presence, then hire us! At Denver Media Group, our team is here to help your business create the strategy that will best suit your needs. Contact us to start growing your healthcare company’s digital presence.