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We’ve already completed half of 2024. Already half of the year is over. However, let’s say the other half of the year is left like the positive maxim, ‘the glass is half full,’ and proceed to some healthcare marketing trends here to stay and rule the rest of 2024.
Healthcare is an extremely vital segment where the consumers’ demand is rising with each passing day. How would you keep up with these demands and stay relevant to them?
Well, you must have come across several competitors in all these years. And, with competitors, comes new methodologies that they are banking on. As a healthcare business, if you have to stay in the market and rule it out, you need to learn the new trends in healthcare marketing.
This blog is a detailed guide on the best healthcare marketing trends in 2024. In this blog, you will learn how technology has infused the healthcare industry, why healthcare providers need digital marketing, and various effective marketing trends in 2024.
Let’s see how healthcare marketers have switched from generic marketing and focused more on patients to deliver better results.
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Healthcare Marketing and Technology Trends for 2024
Have you ever imagined that patients would look into likes and shares much more than going through any doctor’s prescription?
Well, that’s the scenario now.
Now, patients are scrolling their social feeds online much more than strolling around hospitals and clinics. Yes, digitalization has taken charge of the healthcare industry!
Today, if you do not conform to online medical marketing, you lag behind. Online medical marketing is not just about being online. Rather, it’s more about being visible to your target audience i.e., your potential patients who are effortlessly looking for your medical services.
The healthcare marketing has undergone a paradigm shift. Now, no more do people rely on house calls. Instead, they believe in hashtags much more. Remember the days when healthcare ads would appear in newspapers, radio, and television? Fast forward to today, digital platforms have become the new battlefields for grabbing the attention of people.
Digital Channels Take Centre Stage: Healthcare Marketing in 2024
In 2024, digital channels have become the flagbearers of the healthcare industry. Now, various digital channels have become even more engaging with patients, thereby building rock-solid relationships with them. The rapid growth of technology along with increasing digital literacy paved the way for innovative healthcare marketing strategies.
The three essential tools that are ruling the healthcare industry these days and are here to stay for the rest of this year are social media, email marketing, and search engines. All three of these channels allow targeted and personalized communications with potential patients. While you can build a community on social media, sharing educational content via email marketing builds your practice’s loyalty.
Besides, the rise and rapid acceptance of telemedicine and digital health apps expand the scope of healthcare marketing, thereby offering virtual consultations, personalised wellness programs, and health monitoring. All of these yield to convenient patient management.
Further, developing a healthcare website with the help of a digital marketing agency can give you the best visibility to your potential patients. With the help of healthcare search engine optimization and PPC, you can create a strong online presence via strategic content marketing to create high-quality and informative content.
Digital Marketing Benchmarks for Healthcare
In 2024, the healthcare industry is welcoming digital marketing more and more to understand key performance indicators. These vital digital marketing benchmarks for healthcare organisations all aim at maximizing the online visibility of your practice. Let’s take a look at some digital marketing benchmarks for the healthcare industry:
Website traffic aims for a steady monthly increase of unique visitors.
Reduce patient acquisition costs through efficient optimization and targeting.
Aim for higher engagement rates through informative and interactive content.
Achieve better email open rates by personalised email marketing content.
Optimize ads and webpages to excel in average industry CTRs.
Keep on improving landing page designs and websites to enhance conversions.
Maintain top SEO rankings for targeted healthcare keywords.
Implement effective digital follow-ups to increase patient retention.
Track and enhance the usage rates of telehealth services offered.
Why Do Healthcare Providers Need Digital Marketing?
You must be wondering whether your medical practice needs digital marketing. Here are some reasons why need to consult with healthcare digital marketing agencies:
1. Reaches a wider audience
Want to reach a wider patient base? Get into healthcare digital marketing strategies today. Digital marketing leverages various social media platforms to make your potential patients aware of your practice. Through healthcare search engine optimization, healthcare conversion rate optimization, social media advertising, pay-per-click marketing, and email marketing, your practice is sure to see a heap of traffic and enhance your revenue.
2. Builds strong relationships with patients
Today, every healthcare provider has to promote a good relationship with patients. Today, the doctor-patient relationship is more about building a connection and trusting each other. To do this, digital marketing can show your expertise to your potential patients and capture their trust.
3. Cost-effective approach
Compared to traditional marketing, digital marketing is cost-effective. Here, you can allocate a marketing budget to target specific demographics and audience interests. Besides, optimizing your digital marketing efforts here can help you achieve higher ROI.
4. Enhances brand awareness
In the modern digital scenario, building brand awareness of your practice is fundamental to the growth of your practice. Through digital marketing, healthcare professionals can build a solid brand image to increase their visibility and ensure that their practice stays in the minds of their potential audience.
5. Improves patient experience
If you have to stay in the heart of your patients, you have to offer them a seamless experience. And, this is successfully possible with healthcare digital marketing strategies. Right from patient hunting to their aftercare, digital marketing can streamline the processes in your practice and lead your patients from one level to the other effortlessly.
6. Stay ahead of the competition
In this highly competitive healthcare industry, you have to stay ahead to be a leader. Digital marketing gives you this competitive edge where you can study your competitors, find out their loopholes, implement them into your marketing campaigns, measure the results, and refine strategies from time to time.
7. Measurable results
One of the striking advantages of conducting digital marketing in your healthcare practice is its ability to accurately track and measure results. You can use various analytical tools to gain valuable insights and refine your performance. Through this data-driven approach, you can make informed decisions and optimize your marketing strategies for effective results.
What Problems Can AI Solve in Healthcare Marketing?
With the advent of artificial intelligence, the entire healthcare marketing has transformed. Today, AI can solve complex healthcare procedures and address these key challenges:
1. Personalization
With AI, you can personalise your marketing efforts and analyze your patient data, their preferences and behiaviours. Be it targeted marketing campaigns or tailoring communications, AI can be your best healthcare assistant.
2. Predictive analytics
To stay out of the crowd, you need to stay aware of the recent trends. For this, AI can be your perfect guardian angel. With AI, you can anticipate the healthcare trends, services, and latest updates and tweak your content marketing game accordingly.
3. Customer journey mapping
With AI, you can map and track your patient’s journey effectively. Analysing interactions and touchpoints can help you understand your patients’ journey better. And, the moment you figure this out, you can customise your marketing message accordingly to persuade your patients.
4. Content optimization
If you can enter the correct prompt, AI tools can optimize your content according to your audience. This improves your search engine ranking, visibility and accessibility to patients.
5. ROI measurement
Track and measure your marketing campaigns to check their effectiveness with AI. Get real-time data and figure out what works and what doesn’t to maximize your ROI.
6. Chatbots and virtual assistants
Chatbots and virtual assistants powered with AI help you with immediate patient engagement and customer service. This is exactly what your patients want. They’ll prefer healthcare practitioners who offer immediate help.
2024 Marketing Trends to Watch: Strategies for Effective Online Medical Marketing
In the past few years, healthcare industry has suffered a backlash. The plethora of staff members in healthcare organizations have made it challenging for the providers to serve their respective communities. Result? Many healthcare professionals have undertaken healthcare marketing strategies to enter into the digital world.
As a reputed and experienced healthcare digital marketing agency, we have come up with the latest trends and techniques you ought to follow to boost your healthcare practice in 2024.
1. Greater emphasis on personalization
Now, personalized healthcare has come even more in demand than anything else. You’ll be surprised to know that 50% of the patients have left various healthcare professionals who didn’t offer any personalisation.
As a healthcare professional, your goal for healthcare marketing should be to improve the patient experience. Overall, it should be simple and strategic.
For this, you can:
Use online response and query forms to understand the patient’s concern and prepare yourself from beforehand.
Offer robust patient profiles that deliver patient records and personalised information.
Use AI-powered chatbots to guide patients and deliver personal care experience.
2. More patient-focused content
Generally, the better the patient engagement, the better is the pateint experience. In fact, people have complains over poor patient engagement and 61% of them want to enjoy better communication and engagement with doctors.
Patient engagement means better communication with patients. You have to ensure that your patients are seen and heard. For this, you need patient-centric content that boosts them to engage more.
To do this:
Develop a content marketing plan that aligns with your patients.
Brainstorm topics that your audience and community cares about.
Create blogs and articles to add a humanized touch to your healthcare practice.
3. Emphasis on HPAA
Violating the HIPAA regulations can cost you immensely like they have always been. While you pay more attention to healthcare digital marketing, keep HIPAA regulations under top priority.
Make sure that your marketing efforts and patient personalised experiences are always in compliance to protected health information. Use security tools to keep patient information under wraps. After all, as a healthcare professional, it goes without saying that you have to protect your patient’s data.
4. Enhanced social proofing
What most of you miss out on is considering healthcare industry as a full-on business. As providers of healthcare, you need social proofing to back up your services and build trust amongst your patients.
76% of the people check reviews and testimonials online before booking an appointment with a healthcare professional. Keeping the high competition of the industry in mind, social proofs of your work can make you stand out in a competitive space.
But how do you incorporate these social proofs into your marketing campaigns? Here’s how:
Encourage your patients to write reviews online after they’ve seen you.
Run customer testimonial campaigns.
Gather video testimonials of your happy patients.
5. More focus on mental health
Previously, mental health was not even a toic of discussion. But now, the health and wellness sector have taken charge of this and are building awareness around mental health issues.
This sudden rise and emphasis in mental health occured by 25% in the first year of the pandemic. Considering this data, create humanized content on mental health and build awareness of your practice.
However, here are some effective marketing strategies for mental health:
Celebrate mental health success stories of patients.
Encourage others to come out and speak about their mental health.
Organize mental health talks and shows.
6. Augmented social media presence
Any business can thrive on social media, provided it knows the perfect strategy. Similarly, leverage social media to boost the presence of your practice.
Create social media content to which your potential and existing patients can relate to. The content you create for social media should aim to humanize your practice and speak of issues that your patients are
facing.
To create engaging social media content for your healthcare practice:
Understand your target audience and devise a content plan accordingly.
Be active and present on social media platforms.
Repurpose content that works well.
7. Highlight on chatbots
Recently, AI has allowed chatbots to extend their reach and offer a more personalised patient approach. So, here, you need to invest in an advanced chatbot tool that offers dynamic personalisation and HIPAA-compliant experience to patients.
Make sure to look for a chatbot that offers quick answers and directly connects with patients seamlessly. Further, the chatbot should be able to direct patients straightaway to specialists whenever it receives prompts.
8. Requesting for patient reviews
The volume and frequency of reviews matter, especially when you’re on a mission to build an online presence for your healthcare practice. A majority of patients these days book appointments with doctors only after reading previous patient reviews and testimonials.
To acquire more patient reviews:
Train staff members to ask for reviews from patients.
Implement an automated reviewing system.
Let patients know that their opinions matter.
9. Boosting online search results
According to a survey by Patient Perspectives, 3 out of 4 patients look online for doctors and related other medical care. So, not having a website and a proper online presence can cost you heavy.
This is where you need full-on healthcare search engine optimization. The data analytics of Google ranks pages in terms of proximity of the searcher, relevance of search terms, uniformity of the address, and frequency and amount of reviews.
Here, the trick is to focus on medical SEO. This will help you land at the top of the search results.
10. Confirming business directory listings online
This is one of the most talked about trends in healthcare marketing these days. Here, you have to claim your profiles to make the most of your search directories and fill them with accurate information across directories.
The more detailed information, address, contact details, links, reviews and photos you add, the more Google will show you to your potential patients. Make sure to monitor your reviews regularly as part of your reputation management program.
11. Improve patient engagement with CRM
Retaining patients is as important as growing your practice and acquiring new ones. You have to find opportunities to re-engage with your lapsed patients. And the only way to do this is through customer relationship management or CRM.
Through health-industry-specific CRM applications, you can offer a more personalised and patient-centric experience. These applications help you with:
Reminders of appointments, vaccine schedules, and more.
Video content on new providers in practice
Post-appointment surveys
12. Multi-channel patient acquisition strategies
In the digital world, a patient’s journey comprises several stages and in every stage, you ought to target your prospective patient to make them take action. Here, creating an omnichannel presence is key to engaging and influencing your patients at all stages of the journey.
To build an omnichannel marketing strategy for your healthcare practice:
Make patients aware of your practice as their solution.
Create educational content to nurture patients.
Show them the kind of care they can get from your practice.
Conclusion
Feeling overwhelmed already? Well, we know that’s a lot of information for healthcare digital marketing. However, if you have to stay on trend in today’s competitive marketing place, start taking action one by one.
We understand that healthcare professionals didn’t spend 5 years in medical schools to become marketers. In that case, the best option is to hire reputed healthcare digital marketing agencies who understand your industry and can help you with strategic marketing.
Looking for one right now? Connect The Clinics is all ears!
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What are the top digital marketing channels for healthcare providers in 2024?
The top digital marketing channels for healthcare providers in 2024 are websites, email marketing, and social media. Through websites, you can create an authoritative online presence while email marketing will help you build awareness of your practice. On the other hand, social media will give you a rock-solid community of your potential target audience.
2. How can I personalize my healthcare marketing strategy?
To personalize your healthcare marketing strategy, first work on understanding what your potential patients want. Learning about their concerns will help you figure out the content pillars around which you can create creative content.
3. What are some key marketing metrics I should track for my healthcare practice?
For your healthcare practices, you should keep track of patient acquisition costs, ROI, appointment rates, conversion rates, and patient satisfaction scores. Besides, tracking website traffic, and social media engagement will give you an idea as to whether you need to refine your strategies.
4. How can healthcare providers build trust and value with patients in 2024?
To build trust and value with patients in 2024, you need to be more responsive than before. Start creating patient-centric content that engages your patients and lets them follow you recurrently. Besides, building a CRM application can offer your patients a better user experience which will automatically build trust and loyalty.
5. What are some considerations when choosing a healthcare digital marketing agency?
While choosing a healthcare digital marketing agency, make sure to check the reputation and expertise of the agency. If needed, you can ask for some of its past works to understand whether they are capable of working with you in the healthcare industry. Checking out customer reviews and testimonials is another key element of choosing a good agency.
6. What are typical PPC benchmarks in the healthcare industry?
Typically, the PPC benchmarks in the healthcare industry include CTR or click-through rate, and CPC or cost per click. Also, it is crucial to check the campaign targeting strategies.
7. What is the importance of effective digital communication in healthcare?
Through effective digital communication in the healthcare industry, you can inform your potential patients about your practice with clear messages. Besides, it gains more visibility and traffic to your website. Further, Google starts noticing you and pushing your content to rank better.