Digital Marketing for Healthcare: Attract More Patients Online

Healthcare is a rapidly growing industry. It is reported that 62% of internet users do online research to gather information related to hospitals, doctors, diseases, and diagnoses.

These statistics indicate that the numbers are going to get higher from here. when someone searches for medical services or health information online, your clinic, hospital, or healthcare service appears at the top, helping attract more patients and build trust. This is the prime reason why it is important to understand the importance of digital marketing for healthcare.

What is Digital Marketing for Healthcare?

Digital marketing for healthcare is a strategic approach that enables hospitals, clinics, and medical practitioners to promote their services online and connect with patients more effectively. Healthcare marketing lets you promote healthcare services, products, and spread awareness, as these are the basic steps to build trust and drive patient engagement. The quality that makes it stand out from other marketing strategies is that, where other marketing strategies only focus on increasing visibility and revenue, healthcare digital marketing also considers patients ‘ well-being, bonds with ethical standards, and obeys strict industry regulations, such as the Healthcare Insurance Portability and Accountability Act and other data privacy regulations.

Benefits of Healthcare Marketing 

The healthcare industry has benefited from digital marketing in a lot of ways. Let’s discuss those benefits:

• Improved Patient Access:

Because of digital marketing, healthcare providers are easy to contact at any time of the day. Healthcare professionals and organisations use it to make informative educational content for their patients about diseases, medications, and diagnoses. Additionally, med tech platforms use it to let patients connect with doctors.

• Connect With The Target Audience:

It’s a cost-effective way for healthcare providers to reach specific audiences. The contents are mostly about how to cope with diseases/ disorders and any information related to epidemics. With its help, you can share content with a specific demographic. This makes the healthcare industry easy to approach and highly recommended by family, friends, and followers.

• Enhanced Brand Awareness:

360-degree digital marketing involves social media, content marketing, and SEO. Healthcare providers can leverage it to build credibility by spreading brand awareness and enhancing user experience.

Using AI and machine learning, marketers can personalize user experiences, optimize ad spends, and ensure services remain available 24/7, which is crucial during emergencies.

• Low CPA:

Data-driven targeting allows healthcare marketers to reach only high-intent patients, optimizing budgets and reducing unnecessary spending. In addition, digital marketing is useful for repurposing content assets to create multiple content pieces.

• Data-Driven Decision Making:

Digital marketing tools provide valuable insights into patient behavior and preferences. Tracking engagement metrics allows healthcare providers to make smarter, evidence-based marketing decisions.

Core Channels of a Healthcare Digital Marketing Strategy

Core channels of healthcare Digital Marketing are:

1. Optimize your Search Engine Ranking (SEO)

Healthcare SEO is the process of optimizing a healthcare website (hospitals, clinics, doctors, pharmacies, or health services) so that it ranks higher on search engines like Google for relevant medical searches. To optimize the search engine ranking for your healthcare business, you need to follow certain procedures, such as:

• Keyword research – To perform keyword research, you have to understand certain phrases and terms patients use while searching for a health-related query. Then you can use these phrases to create relevant content.
• On-page SEO – You need to optimize on-page content, such as the website content, title, and meta description, to match your targeted keyword. You also need to craft high-quality and informative content for your users.
• Off-page SEO – The most important part of off-page SEO is that you have to earn backlinks from reputable sites, as this helps your site to build a strong online presence.
• Technical SEO – You also have to improve your site’s technical aspects, such as website loading speed and responsiveness for mobile devices. Fixing technical issues increases the crawlability of your medical website.
• Local SEO – In addition, you have to work on local seo too, so that your website is visible to the people of a certain geographical location. Improving local SEO is an important part of healthcare SEO, and to do so, you need to take certain steps like optimizing your Google Business Profile, researching and using location-specific keywords, earning backlinks from local websites, and so on

2. Video Marketing

One of the most useful tools for digital advertising is video marketing. Through video marketing, you can build trust among patients by giving them a real look inside your healthcare facility. It increases awareness for your healthcare brand and improves patient engagement with the help of contextual advertising. The benefits of video marketing are:

• It is a great way to easily educate people about complex health issues.
• Video content firms the bond between patients and healthcare organizations
• Consistent sharing of informative video content increases visibility across all social media platforms, website, and search traffic.
• Video content can be used to lead the patients to take the next step, such as booking an appointment.
• In comparison to text content, video content is more engaging and captures and holds the patient’s attention for a longer time.

3. Social Media Marketing

In medical SEO, this strategy involves using social media platforms to promote your services, share information via content like health tips, patient testimonials, and high-quality visuals. Social media is an effective digital channel that lets healthcare providers connect with their patients. The reason why you must leverage a social media marketing strategy is

• You can gain the trust of the patients by sharing expert-driven health tips and positive patient stories.
• Leverage social media platforms to build a community to give the patients a sense of personal touch.
• You can utilise the patients’ testimonials and reviews to make the brand more authentic and approachable.
• You can directly get engaged with patients in conversation and reply to them professionally.
• Use platforms such as Meta Ads to target specific demographics for your ads to reach.
• You can also leverage social media to educate people about preventive diseases.

4. Content Marketing 

Content marketing is one of the most prominent parts of digital marketing for healthcare. In content marketing, you generate highly engaging, informative, and appealing content that can generate website traffic. The key strategies for a successful content marketing campaign are:

• You can position your healthcare brand as a trustworthy source of information by creating content that directly answers their needs.
• You can also leverage various content formats like blog posts on relevant topics, produce videos featuring the doctors, patients’ testimonials, infographic content, and interactive content.
• Place content strategically on the sites that your target audience mostly uses.
• Track and analyse key metrics like website traffic, engagement rate, and conversion rate. To understand what is working.

5. Mobile Marketing

Mobile marketing strategy is crucial for healthcare digital marketing. See a large number of your potential patients use mobile devices to search for their medical condition and get in touch with their healthcare providers.

Its key strategies involve:

• Design your website to adapt to any screen size, and also the patients can easily book an appointment, find information, and contact you.
• Develop healthcare mobile apps that send medication reminders to the patient, track their health data, set appointments, and let their healthcare providers monitor them remotely.
• Design the entire website with mobile first in mind, which means add buttons that are easy to tap on small screens, minimize the pop-up ads, and increase the website loading speed.

The benefits of mobile marketing are:

• It gives the patients easy access to get information, resources, and services at any time they want.
• With better communication, mobile marketing can serve to provide health benefits.
• A mobile-optimized website builds a patient-centric healthcare experience.

6. Email Marketing

Email marketing campaigns focus on personalized communication with employees by sending emails. The key email marketing strategies are:

• First segment your list to send relevant content.
• Leverage automation for appointment bookings, post-visit follow ups and medication scheduling notifications.
• Use email as an educational resource to spread awareness about diseases, prevention methods, and so on.
• Keep the patients informed about new services, extended hours, and community health events.
• Make sure the emails are reader-friendly with a clean layout and a clear call to action.
• Make sure the emails load properly on mobile devices, as the patients are going to be using them.

The factors that you must consider in an email marketing strategy:

• Obey all the necessary data privacy regulations to protect sensitive patient information. You can also choose secure platforms if necessary.
• Maintain branding in the mails so that the patients are aware of who is sending them the mail.
• Keep the subject line clear, action-oriented to boost patient engagement.

7. PPC Advertising

PPC advertising strategy increases organic visits to your website by placing your website at the top of the search results when someone searches for your services. The key PPC advertising strategies for healthcare marketing are:

• Focus your campaign on specific areas to help you reach potential patients in local areas.
• Use high-intent keywords that suggest that the patient is ready to take action.
• You can build trust by composing clear messages. reassuring and compliant
• Create separate campaigns based on the target audience.
• Leverage advertisement platforms such as Google Ads. You can also use Microsoft Ads, as it has less competition.
• You can optimize your spending and strategy by monitoring return on investment on clicks, inquiries, and appointments.

The benefits of using PPC advertising are:

• It generated quick results, like placing your medical practices on top of search results, soon after the campaigns are live.
• It enables your ads to reach the patients who are actively searching for medical needs.
• PPC advertisement lets you understand your campaign’s performance
• It is cost-effective for your marketing campaigns, as you only pay when someone clicks.

8. Personalized Campaign

A personalized marketing campaign involves tailoring a personalized message to strengthen your relationship with your patients. It functions based on data from the patient journey.

The strategies for effective healthcare marketing are:

• Leverage data analytics to gather information on your patients needs and preferences, which can help you tailor campaigns, advertisements, and content.
• Create content that is focused on patients’ medical needs rather than just using their name.
• You can utilize AI to provide personalised information on your website.
• Segmentation of your patients based on their specific medical conditions is necessary to create more relevant content.
• This also considers the patient’s journey and guides them with personal touchpoints
• Utilize personal imagery and videos, as these enhance your marketing campaign effectiveness.

The benefits of personalized marketing campaigns are:

• Personalized communication makes the patients feel more valued and understood.
• Personalized contents engage consumers.
• You can help improve patient care by highlighting specific concerns and relevant information.
• You can control the budget by massaging the right people with the right messages.

Developing an Effective Healthcare Digital Marketing Strategy

Below, we will discuss in detail the steps to develop an effective Healthcare marketing strategy:

1. Define Your Goals – Defining goals in healthcare digital marketing, you have to set SMART(specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound) objectives, like increasing patient acquisition by a certain percentage within a specific time. Your goal must be tied to a broader outcome for your marketing efforts. Additionally, guide your efforts in patient engagement, reputation building for your brand, and generating genuine and high-intent leads.
2. Identify Your Target Audience – To identify your target audience in healthcare marketing strategies, you need to categorize your patients based on demographics(age, location, income), psychographics(lifestyle values), and behaviour(habits, decision making). To create a detailed patient persona, patient data, analysis, and market research can be used. This can also help you to tailor your messages, as this data represents your semi-fictional patients.
3. Choose the Right Channels – To choose the right channel for your digital marketing strategies, you have to define your target audience by analysing their habits and the process they use to gather information. You can use Google Ads and SEO for those who are actively looking for medical guidance. Use social media platforms to build community and increase brand awareness, and email marketing for patient retention.
4. Create Compelling Content – Compelling content can easily grab the attention of healthcare consumers and make them click on your link, and increase user engagement. To craft compelling content for your healthcare, you need to focus on patient-centricity, use empathetic jargon-free language, and, most importantly, the content must address the patients’ needs. You need to leverage patient testimonials and staff profiles for genuine storytelling content. You can also use various visual content, such as videos, images, and infographics, to make the content more understandable.
5. Monitor and Analyse Performance – Monitoring and analysing the performance of your healthcare marketing campaign is important as it helps you to control the budget. You have to track key performance indicators such as click-through rates, conversion rates. You can also track the origin of the patient’s call to analyse. To measure a campaign’s effectiveness, you can use tools like Google Analytics and CRM.

Emerging Trends in Healthcare Digital Marketing 

1. AI Integration

The healthcare digital marketing has been revolutionized after the integration of AI. The aim is to create a more personalised patient experience, optimize your campaigns, and drive business growth, and you can do all these by leveraging machine learning and predictive analytics.

The key applications of AI in healthcare digital marketing are:

• It analyses patient data like their medical history, demographics, and online behaviour to deliver relevant content.
• With the help of conversational AI chatbots, patients can communicate 24/7. This also supports common queries and tasks like appointment scheduling. These save you from spending on hiring people to perform those tasks.
• By machine learning, AI can predict patient needs and behaviours, which enables a hyper-targeted marketing campaign. This way, the marketers can target their specific services to the most receptive audience.
• AI aligns content creation and research by analysing patients’ search patterns and identifying trending topics. With the help of AI-powered tools, content creators can produce accurate and relevant high-quality blogs, social media posts, and other content for your website.
• AI tools can monitor online reviews and social media to understand the public perception of your company.

Challenges and risks of AI integration:

• Healthcare organizations have to make sure that their AI programme obeys HIPAA and GDPR, as the patients’ data is confidential.
• Curating the data rigorously is necessary, as if the AI model is trained on biased data then it may produce inaccurate information.
• In a field like healthcare, transparency and accountability are indispensable for any reason. If you are not sure how the AI model is making decisions, this can cause issues among patients and providers.
• Implementing AI models is not cheap; this can draw a boundary for small healthcare organizations.
• Most healthcare organizations still use old IT-based infrastructure, which makes the integration of AI tools difficult.

2. Balancing Capacity to Meet Patient Demand and Boost Revenue

In the healthcare industry, it is important to balance capacity to maintain patient capacity and simultaneously grow revenue. And to do so, you have to synchronize resources like staff, available beds, equipment, and patient demand. A mismatch between these two can lead to problems for both patient expectations and revenue.

Impact on patient expectations

• Patients have to face delays in booking appointments when demand exceeds capacity, leading to dissatisfaction.
• Long waiting periods and rushed care leave a negative impact on patients’ perception, leading them to seek other healthcare organizations.
• Delay in care can lead to higher rates of complications faced by patients, readmissions, and a rise in the mortality rate.
• Overburdening your staff with tasks can lead to their mental and physical fatigue, resulting in a reduction in personal care.

Impact on revenue growth

• Longer waiting periods can lead to cancelled appointments, giving an advantage to your competitors.
• Managing a complicated, overwhelmed system can lead to higher expenses as you have to either hire more staff, or pay existing staff for overtime, or hire contractual staff.
• This also leads to a reduction in referred guests because of the unsatisfied patients.

3. Carefully remarketing ads 

For healthcare marketers, careful remarketing is a must. Careful remarketing involves obeying privacy policies like HIPAA to maintain patients’ trust.

Compliant remarketing strategies involve

• Avoid targeting the audience based on health conditions; instead, your remarketing ads should be around general non-sensitive website interactions. You can target those who have visited your website once but did not navigate to the service pages. Create a group of readers who regularly read non-sensitive content, like blogs on healthcare tips.
• Perform segmentation based on high-level service line category. Like a cardiac can retarget its audience to its cardiac care page. Notify the users to remind them to fill out the form related to their query, but the message must be a call to action, not specific to the service page they visited.
• You can use different ad platforms, like Google Ads, social media ads, to target users who have visited your site while they were browsing for simple health-related searches.
• Write the ad copy in a sympathetic and caring tone. Highlight credentials, years of experience, and certifications.

4. Self-Appointment Options 

Self-appointment plays a crucial role in modern marketing. Self-appointment is a convenient and accessible way for patients to book an appointment online, via a portal, or through text message. Patients can use this to view available time, book appointments conveniently. Patients can even reschedule and cancel the appointments digitally.

For a better understanding, let’s discuss how it functions:

• When the patient visits your site, if it is an existing patient, then they can directly log into their account, but if they are new, they have to sign up first
• A pre-defined list is provided that contains the possible reasons behind the patient’s visit to your site. Another system will also be included that asks the patients about their symptoms to guide them to the most appropriate type of visit
• This system uses departments’ and providers’ calendars to present available time slots. This eases the patient journey by showing them the doctor and the time slot that works best for them
• The self-scheduling software syncs the time slot selected by the patient with the practitioner’s main scheduling system, and it sends a confirmation via sms or email
• The system sends automated reminders to the patient that reduce the no-show rate.

5. Privacy and tracking changes

Privacy and tracking are part of digital marketing strategies for healthcare organizations. It focuses on protecting the patient data to maintain the patients’ trust, and it encourages honesty with healthcare providers. On the other hand, tracking improves the quality of care for patients. It provides real monitoring of patients’ vital signs, enables remote evaluation, helps in staff scheduling, and emergency responses.

Changes in privacy and tracking involve:

• You can implement stricter regulations, like the General Data Protection Regulation, which requires explicit consent for processing sensitive data.
• Use encrypted multi-factor authentication and strong access control to protect patient data from unauthorised access.
• Patients have full control over the information they share.
• You can implement technologies to log and monitor the real-time data usage and block risky activities like unauthorized access and emails.
• Privacy by design sites are more reliable.

In addition, tracking has many impacts, such as:

• The digital revolution has increased the capabilities of tracking to include more data points and potential uses.
• The increased risk of tracking misuse can compromise the patient’s health data.

6. Healthcare consumers are looking for authenticity

For healthcare organizations, authenticity is the foundation of trust. When a healthcare industry is marked as authentic, it has more chances to foster loyalty and encourage word-of-mouth referrals. A healthcare digital marketing agency is what connects the consumer with the industry on a deeper,. Personal level that creates a sense of community around shared values and causes.

The factors that patients look for in the healthcare industry are:

• Consumers check whether the healthcare industry is delivering what it is preaching.
• To build trust among the patients, healthcare organizations need to be accurate and truthful in their research.
• Consumers stick to those healthcare providers that are highly ethical and that protect the patient’s privacy.
• The healthcare products and research must reflect the real-world challenges and population. This ensures the findings and benefits are applicable and useful.
• The best way to strengthen the trust of the patients is by sharing stories that your patients can relate to.
• Patients put their faith in healthcare brands that fight against a cause something the patients believe in.
• As this world is becoming digital, healthcare brands must protect personal health information.

The Most Efficient Digital Marketing Tools for Healthcare

Digital marketing tools in healthcare play a vital role in improving patient acquisition, patient experience, internal efficiency, and overall trust. Below are the most effective categories of tools used by modern healthcare organizations.

1. Patient care tools

Patient care tools include a wide range of equipment and technologies. Here we will discuss the two prominent category of patient care tools, one is online scheduling, and the one is a telemedicine platform.

1. Online scheduling

It is a software platform that lets patients book appointments while also helping the healthcare provider schedule appointments. It is great for reducing no-shows and improving efficiency.

The features of online scheduling tools are:

• 24/7 appointment booking portal
• Collects patient data like medical history & insurance
• Automated reminders reduce no-shows
• Shared calendar for staff with buffer-time planning
• Integrated payments during booking
• Patient portal access for records & communication

Examples: CureMD, SimplePractice, NextGen Healthcare

2. Telemedicine platforms

It is a Digital platforms that enable video consultations, secure messaging, and remote care. This platform provides a range of services that include remote diagnosis, consultation, issuing e-prescriptions, all together making healthcare more accessible.

The key feature of telemedicine platforms is:

• It enables the patient to connect to the healthcare provider via video, audio, or a chat-based process.
• It also has data integration that makes the process of data collection and transmission secure, including data from remote patient devices.
• The doctors can utilise the platform to issue digital prescriptions for medication and diagnostic tests.
• Patient portals are there for managing appointments, accessing medical records, and making communication with the clinician easy.
• It also provides backend support for scheduling, billing, and insurance claims.
• It provides access to a wide range of medical specialties that include general medicine, dermatology, and cardiology.

These are cloud-based or locally installed software that uses secure technology to protect patient data.

2. Administrative tool

In healthcare, administrative tools are digital software that are used for streamlining operations, managing patient data, and handling back-office tasks. Some notable administrative tools are the EMR/EHR system, staff management.

1. EMR/EHR System

EMR is electronic medical records, and EHR is an electronic health record, which is a digital copy of a patient’s medical history. The basic difference between these two is that EMRs are specific to a single practice, whereas EHRs are designed to be shared between multiple practitioners.

Key features of EMR and EHR are:

• It is a computer software that allows healthcare providers to manage patients’ health records.
• Useful for managing patients’ appointments, cancellations, and reminders to improve efficiency.
• It generates reports to track patients’ outcomes, track quality measures, and perform performance analysis.
• It sends e prescription to the medical stores and makes the medication management efficient.
• It is a secure gateway for patients to access their medical information, communicate with providers, and manage appointments.
• It is also useful for ordering tests, tracking results, and integrating them directly into the patients’ records.

2. Staff management

This administrative tool uses technology to improve the efficiency and productivity of the healthcare staff. It is very supportive for marketing goals like patient acquisition, reputation management. Its functions align administrative tasks, coordinate staff efforts, and ensure compliance in a fast-paced environment.

Its key features involve:

• It improves hiring by writing a descriptive job description, opening advertisements, and interviewing to build a strong team. A structured onboarding process is the key to integrating new employees with the business
• Investing in the training and maintenance of the staff for ongoing professional development and career growth to keep the employees motivated
• Performance management is a part of staff management, which includes setting clear goals, performance management, and providing constructive feedback, to motivating employees
• performing constant communication via regular team meetings and on ne check-ins is a great way to build trust among staff and also smoothens collaboration
• Managers must be aware of the labour laws, provide a secure work environment, and handle issues like conflicts and data privacy correctly

3. Marketing tools

The healthcare marketing team uses certain marketing tools that are useful for attracting patients, building trust, and improving patient engagement and outcomes. Healthcare brands use these marketing tools for educating the public, showcasing their services, and strengthening their bond with patients through constantly reaching out to them. Examples of some of the marketing tools category:

1. Email automation

It is a powerful healthcare marketing tool that performs repetitive tasks like appointment reminders, patient education campaigns. It improves patient engagement and loyalty by enabling personalized communication.

2. Social Media Scheduling

The healthcare marketing team uses this tool to enable consistent and strategic content delivery to engage current and future patients, build brand awareness, and provide information on time.

4. Communication Tools

The role of communication tools in healthcare marketing strategies is to improve the quality of patient safety, enhance the coordination among providers, provide patient satisfaction, and boost overall efficiency. Example of communication tools is:

1. Chatbots

These are versatile tools of communication that are specifically implemented for enhancing patient experience and engagement, performing administrative tasks, and assisting the patient with clinical support. Some of its benefits are:

• Chatbots are available 24/7.
• It provides a personalized and interactive experience.
• It can perform repetitive tasks like scheduling appointments, answering patients’ queries.
• Chatbots can guide patients based on their symptoms.
• Patients can share their symptoms without thinking about being judged.

5. Data management tools

Data management tools are crucial for healthcare as they enable research that is completely based on data-driven insights. They improve patient care by making accurate clinical decisions and accurate records. It reduces cost and improves overall efficiency. Some of the best data management tools comes under these category:

1. Analytics platform

Analytical platforms perform the role of a data management tool in healthcare by aggregating, cleaning, and analysing data from various sources like EHRs, claims, and wearables that create actionable insights.

The key benefits of an  analytics platform are:

• Platforms can easily identify the patients who are at risk. It forecasts health outcomes and supports clinical decision-making.
• It is cost-saving as it optimizes resource allocation, manages inventory, and streamlines the workflow.
• Descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analysis can turn raw data into actionable insight.
• Platforms can easily understand the patient behaviour to create more effective engagement and communication strategies.

2. Reporting dashboard

This data management tool allows platforms to make better decisions regarding patient care, operations, and finances by consolidating and visualizing complex data. Some benefits of reporting dashboards are:

• It allows quick access to patient data, accelerating patient care and treatment.
• It enables population health management by identifying key trends and risks.
• Centralizing data eliminates the need to switch between multiple systems, ultimately making workflow management easy.
• It allows clinicians and administrators to make informed data-driven decisions by presenting data in a clear, concise, and visual format.
• It provides insights into financial metrics like revenue cycle management, claims, and billing.

Digital Marketing Mistakes to Avoid

In the healthcare industry, digital marketing has a huge impact, and if managed correctly, it can make your healthcare marketing efforts worthwhile. There are some common digital marketing mistakes that you must avoid, like

1. Lack of a clear objective –

Lack of a clear objective is generally caused by poor communication, organizational pressure, and a lack of a standardized process. There are other reasons too behind this, like if for any reason the patient feels undervalued due to poor resources, training to help patients. This impacts the patient, the healthcare provider.

• It affects the patient satisfaction level negatively and makes patients feel less confident.
• Lacking an objective can lead to worse treatment response.
• The combination of a lack of clear goals and high productivity targets can lead healthcare providers to anxiety and stress.
• It can cause lower productivity, as a lack of goals can make the healthcare provider engage with less important tasks.

Here is how you can solve them

• Implement the SMART goals framework to specify the goals and make them measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
• Training of providers in effective goal-setting and communication techniques is a must.
• To encourage patients to actively participate by providing them with resources and making the language more understandable.
• Make time for provider and patient communication to integrate goal setting into the clinical routine.

2. Ignoring seasonality

Ignoring seasonality in healthcare is when the healthcare organization overlooks regular, predictable patterns of fluctuation in patient demand, specific illnesses, and revenue that occur at certain times of the year. It is caused by certain factors such as weather, holidays, and school schedules. Ignoring seasonality has certain consequences, like:

• Ignoring seasonal planning can lead hospitals and clinics to face the issue of being understaffed and overstaffed during off-seasons.
• It can result in an inadequate supply of medical resources like flu vaccines, which potentially increases the mortality rate.
• Healthcare facilities that do not account for revenue fluctuation may face a financial crisis.
• Being understaffed during peak times can increase the risk of medical errors.

Here is how you can address this issue:

• By creating quarterly or rolling budgets, organizations adapt to anticipate revenue and volume changes more easily.
• Historical data allows providers to predict future demands and helps in better planning for patient volume, staffing, and inventory.
• Healthcare organizations can use targeted campaigns to promote preventive care during off-peak season.
• Healthcare organizations and providers can allocate budget by scheduling elective procedures during slow periods.

3. Neglecting Mobile Optimization

It means creating websites, apps, and patient portals that are difficult to use on mobile devices. This leads to a poor user experience, lower engagement, and higher bounce rates. It has a negative outcome for both the patient and the provider.

You can get out of this situation if you keep these points in mind:

• It must be easy to use for people of all ages and technical knowledge.
• Design the system in a way that it is easy to navigate, even in high-stress situations.
• Optimize the website’s loading time by compressing the images, minifying code, and leveraging browser caching.
• Contact legal and compliance experts in the early stage of website development to navigate complex issues like HIPAA and GDPR.

4. Not offering Online Scheduling

It refers to when healthcare providers do not allow patients to book, reschedule, or cancel appointments on patient portals or apps. Healthcare providers do this for some reasons, like as avoiding data breaches, avoiding the cost of implementing new technology, or maintaining personal phone-based interaction with patients.

The solution to this issue is:

• Implement a system that can be integrated with your EMR and practice management software to automate the scheduling process.
• Allow the patient to book, reschedule, and cancel appointments without needing to call.
• Provide real-time availability of appointment slots.

5. Ignoring Patient Privacy

When a healthcare system fails to protect a patient’s private health information, it violates both ethical and legal boundaries. This can be caused by discussing a patient’s health condition in a public area, mishandling of electronic records, unattended paper records, and so on.

To avoid this issue, you can follow these steps:

• Only collect the necessary data from the patient.
• Auditing the IT systems regularly to identify potential risks and vulnerabilities.
• The organization must have a contingency plan in the event of a data breach.
• The patient data, whether they are in transit or at rest, must be encrypted.
• Maintain a secure disposal system for patient health information documents.
• Train your staff for data handling and recognizing attempts to breach patient data.

6. Generic keyword

Using a generic keyword for the meta tile, description, and title tag of your website is another common mistake made by healthcare organizations. Using a generic keyword has certain drawbacks, like attracting irrelevant traffic, struggling to push the rank in the search engine result pages, and so on. The best way to tackle this issue is:

• Choose long tail keywords that are highly specific and align with the patient’s clear intent
• Optimize location-specific keywords to attract more patients who are looking for medical help in their preferred areas
• Tailor your keywords around where the patient is in their journey, from the early stages of research to booking an appointment.

7. Less Research on the Targeted Audience

When the healthcare provider fails to understand the patient’s needs, it causes less effective health communication and intervention, and also leaves a negative result in strategic marketing. You must refrain from making these mistakes by following these steps:

• You need to do a strategic research of competitors’ marketing strategies.
• Use digital platforms and social media platforms to target certain patient demographics.
• Curate a website content marketing campaign that specifically addresses the needs of your target audience.
• Use research and patient feedback for a better understanding to improve your services.

Conclusion

To conclude, the purpose of this blog was to guide the healthcare organization and providers to make it easy to understand the importance of digital marketing in healthcare and how it can be utilized to attract more patients. In this blog, we have discussed the importance of digital marketing, how it can be beneficial for healthcare, its core channels, how you can develop an effective healthcare marketing strategy, its emerging trends, the digital marketing tools that are proven to be efficient, and the common mistakes you must look out for. We have discussed all the parts of healthcare digital marketing in depth.

In case you still have any doubt regarding how you can perform a successful digital marketing operation for your organization, you can contact a well-experienced digital marketing agency that has been in this field for a long time. This can save you time and boost the performance of your healthcare marketing efforts.