In those days, hospitals relied heavily on word-of-mouth marketing to attract new patients. With the rise of the digital medium, marketing for hospitals is now accessible for even a single doctor.
With the wide range of tools and marketing channels reaching a larger audience and increasing customer base is achievable.
Today, every road, every street has a multispeciality hospital or poly-clinic, with many arising as day passes. This has made it difficult for hospitals to differentiate themselves from the competition.
Hospitals are now turning to marketing strategies to stand out and attract more patients. A lot of private hospitals invest in brand awareness, free medical camps, health check-ups, and other things.
After working with 100+ hospitals, clinics, and doctors, we have drafted the exact blueprint to marketing for your hospital in a profitable way.
Why is hospital marketing strategy important?
Irrespective of any industry, it’s important to set up a plan and budget for marketing to reach out to the target audience. Many ask, why should a doctor or a hospital market for patients?
The market is becoming saturated and the current generation— millennial or Gen-Z get to their phone to search for any solutions or answers.
It means, if you’re not present on the platforms your competitors are, you are losing the market share in a steady motion.
Marketing helps a hospital or clinic or doctor to,
- Build brand awareness – Until people around your hospital or clinic don’t know that you’re presently serving in that location, no one is going to walk-in.
- Lead Generation – Marketing helps you generate more leads to the database— could be hot or warm or cold, you should plan marketing funnels to nurture them consistently.
- Strong online presence – As per digitalismedical, almost 77% of patients discover a hospital or clinic via search engines like Google. Almost 90% of the people consume health related contents from social media, as per invoca.
- Increases new patients – Hot leads converts (fix appointment) immediately. But the warm and cold leads need to be nurtured with continuous education through blogs, social media, newsletters, etc.
- Referrals – Hospitals business rely high on word of mouth (referral), and it becomes so stronger, when you hire more patients
With the development of technology, healthcare services have become more accessible and user-friendly. Mobile phones can now provide real-time access to medical records, appointments, and other important healthcare information.
This has made healthcare more efficient and convenient. So, today your major marketing budget should be spend on digital or online marketing channels.
8 Proven Hospitals Marketing Strategy
If you don’t promote your service or brand, who does it for you? Have you ever countered the giant hospitals around your location or state or country that is still investing in marketing?
- It’s so easy for any hospital to stand out of the competition with,
- Proper branding strategy (Visibility around local site)
- Better clinical proposition
- Content strategy (informations for patients)
- Complete marketing funnel
- Lead generating marketing channels (Online and offline)
- Strong sales team in converting the leads
- Clinic or Hospital management software for managing and follow-up
- Complete automation with the help of CRM.
- Be consistent until you grow your brand to multiple dynamics.
Let’s decode one by one,
1. Branding Strategy for hospitals
Creating brand awareness, and reaching our brand name to the target audience, resulting in an increase of Google search for your brand, is simplified as branding.
Your focus should start from Logo, brand color, brand font, that people should remember for your color— whenever your target audience sees your brand color, they should 1st think of your brand.
From there, remembering your logo, drawing them with ease.
Here are few creative methods, you can include them to create a huge brand awareness,
- Free consultation campaigns – This is one of the best ways a new clinic or hospital can make people step-in as new outpatients (OP). We have successfully launched many hospitals in new locations with these campaigns rolling out in Social media Ads, YouTube Ads, and even TV ads.
We have generated almost 4000+ leads in just 6 months with this strategy.
- Billboards – One of the best ways to reach your brand to the target audience is by investing in billboards located near your hospital. You need to create a curiosity that aligns with your solution towards solving their psychological desire.
- Community collaboration – Investing in community collaboration is one of the best ways to reach millions of people in your locality. Example of community collaboration is organizing or partnering a marathon event (like awareness over a cause).
- Serve educated content in Social Media – The best thing that requires only time, and less investment on editing is posting reels in Instagram or tik tok. Creating more awareness and informative videos can reach millions of people within a month if the content gets viral
- Create an App, and make your patients participate – Mobile application is your real asset, and that’s where you own your patients. Gamification is one of the processes where you can keep your patients active with the app. You can involve them in a 7 week diet food competition, workout plans, etc.
- Influencer campaign over a special day – Recently, we launched an influencer campaign for kidney day with one of our clients, and it became so viral. The context of that campaign was to create awareness over a Kidney health check-up and patient in-flow. We created a competition among the creators with a huge winning price, and asked to create content around kidney day, and post the content using the hashtags (we planned to trend)
- Speaker at Medical Associations – Every hospital invests a lot on technologies and latest innovative machines to provide precise diagnosis and treatment. The best way to promote such treatments is by delivering a speech on the latest machines or high-risk cases you handle. This can get you more brand reach and referrals from general physicians and consultants from the association.
2. Pirate funnel for Hospital marketing
Creating a pirate funnel (AAARRR) helps to plan the acquisition, and retention plan for every patient.
Here is a sample funnel you can use for hospital business to increase and retain patients
- Awareness Stage – Use social media, blogs, viral video marketing, Meta brand awareness campaigns to create brand visibility and to reach millions of target audience. Leads or appointments is not the focus at this stage
- Activation stage – This stage focuses on driving the target audience to landing page or web page, from various sources like social media, blogs, ads (push and pull), email-marketing, influencer marketing.
- Acquisition stage – Lead generation phase is generally known as the acquisition stage. When you have a form on the website, or running any lead generation ads, you can acquire more leads (contact information— name, mobile no, and email id)
- Revenue stage – With a super-cool sales team (telecallers or inside sales executives) you can convert the lead into appointments. As I said earlier, leads might be hot (immediate appointment), warm(might fix appointments within a month), and cold (might fix appointments within a year). It’s your sales team duty to work on multiple follow-ups, and marketing team to work on automations with informative contents, and offers.
- Retention stage – In this stage, we would recommend to use a clinic or hospital management software like ficodo to manage automatic follow-up appointments. The more a patient visits you for the same problem in future, more likely you increase CLV (customer lifetime value).
- Referral stage – The final stage of customer acquisition is building a strong referral strategy. New patients increase by both doctors and patients referral. You have to strategically improvise the referral plans.
3. Plan and execute content strategy
In today’s digital era, content is available everywhere and easily accessible. You might have found this, your competition investing time and money on content creation— be it text, audio, or video.
It means, you should spend time in creating content or hire a healthcare marketing agency like us. We have grown our clients social media followers from 600 to 15k+ within a year time, especially on Instagram.
This has added almost 20 new patients every month just from Instagram, 10-15 patients per month from facebook, and 25 patients from Facebook.
Apart from this, carousels (pdf) are used in pinterest, which attracts traffic to the website.
As a strong SEO servicing company over the globe, we create consistent helpful content under the “blog” section of the website in a proper interval. This has helped to build “topical authority” and have increased overall organic traffic to the website.
4. Creating a landing page and optimizing them for higher conversion
When it comes to healthcare, our NSM (north star metric) is to acquire high quality leads. It’s only possible if you direct all your paid campaigns to the landing page.
Why the landing page?
- Easy to build, and configure all the tracking tools.
- You can create a message or content that is highly intent to convert the visitors.
- Zero distractions— the only option the user has is to provide the lead information or leave the web page.
- FOMO (fear of missing out)— Our landing page will be designed in such a way to share all credibility, so the target users don’t miss out on reaching your hospital.
Once created, we launch the landing page for the campaigns, and analyze the user behavior with the help of heatmap tools like Microsoft clarity or hotjar.
From the soft data collected from these heatmap tools, we will re-align the landing page to get maximum leads.
5. Lead Generation Campaigns
As I said in the above section, leads are the lifeline of a hospital business. Marketing agencies like us, invest a lot of time in creating profitable campaigns that get our
clients potential leads— hot, cold, and warm.
Here are couple of ways, where we help our clients to generate leads,
- SEO – Organic leads from the website is the first preference, but SEO takes time at least for 6-12 months (for a good brand value and good domain age website)
- We set up forms and other converting lead magnets in the website to drive leads from the organic traffic.
- Paid Advertising – Meta and Google Ads are the preferable digital marketing channels to get leads.
- Social Media – Using social media to increase brand visibility and acquiring leads
- We will also be active in the relevant forums, and groups like facebook to get leads.
6. Have a strong sales team
Lead generation is useless, if you don’t have a proper sales time to nurture them and fix them appointments.
The role of an inside sales or telecalling team is to convert the leads by understanding the nature of their urgency.
To be frank, as per our experience,
- Only 10-15% of the leads books appointment immediately
- 25% of the leads will “just enquire”
- 15% of the leads will say, “busy, call me later”
- 20% of the leads will “not pick the call”.
- 25% of the leads will be spam (irrespective of what you do— even after manual entering on lead details)
On standard the spam rate will be 40-50%, but we make sure it is under 25%.
But, after following up, and automating the process (will speak a little in the next section), we have increased other set of appointments from the above leads list,
- 2nd month – 10% of the lead
- 3rd month – 5-7% of the leads
- 4th month – 3-4% of the leads.
It requires a continuous nurturing and sales process to make sure the leads are converted into walk-ins.
One of the best things, 7 Eagles unique strategy about handling hospital or clinic marketing is, we support the inside sales team on behalf of them.
7. Setup Automation process with CRM
The best thing about digital marketing is, the campaigns work tirelessly while you sleep. In the upper hand, automation comes with the additional benefit of doing a repetitive manual task with a single effort.
Automation process will be seamless if it’s initiated from a CRM, where all the leads are stored. You can trigger automatic campaigns for various tag of the leads like, visited, fixed appointment, no reply, call later, not interested, etc.
Here are couple of things you can automate,
- Immediate whatsapp and email trigger once the lead is submitted through any source.
- Automatic WhatsApp with the patients 2 days and 2 hours before the appointment date.
- Sending a review link post the consultation for the patients through Whatsapp marketing.
- Automatic reminders through WhatsApp and Email marketing for the follow-up consultations.
Check with your marketing team, whether the complete automation is set up.
8. Use a Clinic or Hospital management software
If your clinic or hospital doesn’t have a cloud-based CMS (clinic management software) or HMS (Hospital management software), you’re 100 miles away from your patients.
CMS/HMS software helps you to,
- Communicate with your patients
- Schedule the appointment
- Digitalize prescription and medical records
- Pharmacy, lab, and patient management at one center
- Maintaining EMR.
Digitalization of your clinic practices can improve patient retention, as their complete medical records are in one-click.
More than customer acquisition, retention is more important.
It also helps to streamline the process of your clinic or hospital, as all the processes are automated. It can also help to reduce costs, as most of the processes are automated.
Conclusion
- In the current digital age, every hospital must work on a complete marketing strategy to improve the leads, and walk-ins.
- The growth process of any hospital starts with strong brand awareness— it could be through free consultations, master health check-ups, community collaboration, and viral marketing.
- Brand awareness doesn’t mean lead generation or appointments or walk-in. To bring more leads into the system, invest on organic and paid marketing channels.
- Digital marketing for hospitals combined with traditional outreach helps to expand reach, improve engagement, and boost revenue for hospitals.
- As the healthcare market becomes increasingly competitive, hospitals can achieve sustained growth and success by building brand awareness and leveraging technology.
