According to Google, 88% of people looking for health information start the same place they do when looking for cat videos or muffin recipes: search engines. That means marketing healthcare services depends on understanding which forms of search engine marketing will be most effective when it comes to this specific field. If you’re running a health services organization, it’s best to look at some top healthcare advertising agencies and evaluate their online efforts before making a decision. In order to do that, however, you’ll need to have a basic understanding of what you’re looking for in terms of online health services marketing.
Of course, some general inbound marketing strategies such as branding your company and putting out effective calls to action will always apply, regardless of the service or product you’re providing. But there are three specific trends you and your healthcare advertising agency should think about in connection to healthcare marketing:
Expanded Local SEO Efforts
Search engine optimization is a broad field, but you’ll specifically want to look for healthcare advertising agencies that perform local SEO; while a few types of health businesses might be able to operate nationally or internationally, most health services need to be marketed to prospective patients in the immediate area. That means doing the time-consuming work of building and correcting various citations of your business information online. As part of your local optimization efforts, a good advertising agency will also make sure your online presence is mobile friendly. More than half of local searches are performed on tablets and smartphones, meaning that important leads are lost every time mobile usability is neglected.
Unique Content Creation
When it comes to more general SEO, the name of the game in recent years is quality. Search engines don’t just tally up keywords and backlinks; they look at the quality of a website in order to determine where it should fall in the rankings. Understanding this concept is absolutely vital to achieving better online visibility. Nowhere is this more important than in creating unique content that you can post on your site and elsewhere around the web. If a marketing agency isn’t offering to create such content or guide you on how to create it, then it’s very unlikely you’ll be happy with the results of any SEO efforts.
Social Media Engagement
A recent Nielsen study found that 70% of brand marketers planned on increasing their social media advertisements, and that’s just one of many indicators of how social media is increasingly becoming tied up in the online information economy. Social media advertising and engagement strategies offer a surprising number of opportunities to health services providers. For a plastic surgeon, good engagement might look like sharing before and after photos; for pediatric or geriatric services, it might be smarter to get involved with online communities centered on caring for children or the elderly. As in all marketing, sticking to a target audience is the best way to increase return on investment.
