A fundamental aspect that any health professional must take into account regardless of their specialty is knowing how to market their healthcare services. It is very common to find professionals who do not know how to sell their services or who simply dedicate themselves to offering their services at any cost without giving importance to the marketing process, which in many cases generates the absolute failure of their business.
How is healthcare marketing different from marketing in other industries
In a market as competitive as the health sector, it is essential and mandatory to know how to sell, since even if you have a lot of training as a health professional or provide excellent services, if you do not know how to market them, that is of no use to you. In addition, you must bear in mind that for a business to be profitable and successful it requires obtaining large income, which indisputably comes from sales.
However, marketing health services properly is not only about exchanging your health services for money, it involves effectively communicating the value of the services you offer in order to persuade people and earn their trust by showing them how you can help them solve their problems. There are different ways to achieve communicate your healthcare services and generate high income, some of them are mentioned below:
Develop a powerful brand
Developing a powerful brand consists of presenting your healthcare services in the best possible way to achieve not only stand out and differentiate yourself from the competition, but also that your target audience considers your healthcare services as the only ones capable of solving their problems.
Creating a good brand requires hard work to get the right message across at the right time. It implies knowing our target audience, our competitors, and what is even more important to maintain consistency when communicating to strengthen our identity. A strong and consistent brand offers numerous benefits when marketing healthcare services, as it provides credibility, contributes to customer loyalty, and increases the marketability of services.
Create a conversion driven & user friendly website
In an era in which digital transformation is becoming increasingly important, it is common practice for people to go to the Internet before purchasing a product or service to find information about what they need. That is why today it is essential to have a presence on the web, and the best way to do it is through the creation of a website whose design is preferably simple but visually attractive, so that it serves as a marketing center for inform about your services and in the best case maintain communication with patients online. It is important that when creating your website you have a well-defined purpose for your practice, so that in this way you capture in the site everything that allows you to achieve the commercialization of your healthcare services.
In general, a website should contain your contact numbers, a list of your location, a clear and brief description of the services you offer, emphasizing how they contribute to people’s health, as well as a dedicated section to provide educational content that answers the questions patients repeatedly ask about your health services, thereby helping them understand your experience and convince them that you are an expert. It should also be noted that you should avoid using complex medical terms, as much as possible use simple terms so that your audience can understand your content and thus prevent your potential patients from escaping to other websites.
Optimise for search engine results
Search Engine Optimisation better known by its acronym as SEO is a powerful digital marketing technique that allows you to gain visibility, since it consists of the use of a set of techniques to optimise your website and reach one of the first positions in the first organic results page from Google search engines, as well as from other search engines. In other words, it is a great tool to get your doctor’s office at the top of the search engines.
To develop a good SEO strategy, you must incorporate carefully researched keywords into your content so that Google can understand the websites of your healthcare organization and ensure that it ranks the right healthcare-related search terms. You should also check your website to ensure that you have an optimal loading speed and that there are no errors, you must have links that point to each page of your health care website, among others.
Be seen on all social networks
A healthcare provider with an excellent reputation on social media is undoubtedly guaranteed profitability of their business. It is no secret to anyone that social networks have become an excellent means of promoting products and services. Likewise, within the health sector, they have become the ideal means to connect with patients outside of their appointments. The creation and publication of regular content through these channels contributes significantly to reinforcing your image and reaching a greater number of patients.
Video marketing is essential for healthcare
A marketing strategy that is essential in the health sector is the use of video. Various studies have shown that 90% of companies that use video content have the possibility of having an impact on the decisions of the audience, since this strategy captures the attention of the audience in an effective way. By showing testimonials from your patients or simply showing evidence of your experience in the field, you gain credibility and trust from potential patients, which is usually a bit complicated, especially in the health sector. There are different means in which you could add videos to your marketing strategy, one of the most used being YouTube, considered the second largest search engine in the world.
There are many ways to market your health services since there is a wide range of marketing strategies that are ideal, however, implementing the aforementioned without a doubt contributes significantly to the positioning, visibility, profitability and permanence of your health business and therefore to increase your sales which translates into higher profits.
