Top Healthcare Marketing Strategies You Need to Know

Beyond PPC: A Smarter Approach to Healthcare Marketing 

Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising has long been a staple in healthcare marketing, but it’s becoming increasingly expensive and less effective on its own, especially with the rise of AI overviews in search-hampering click-through behavior.  

You need to rely on more than just search ads. A modern digital marketing strategy for healthcare needs a more sophisticated, multichannel approach, including: 

• Omnichannel Strategy: Integrating all these tactics into a cohesive, integrated strategy that seamlessly connects with patients across all touchpoints is the key to success. This means creating a consistent brand experience and meeting your audience where they are, more often.

• SEO and Content Marketing: Building a solid foundation of long-term organic traffic by creating valuable, informative content that resonates with your target audience. From a social perspective, video content is officially a mandatory requirement for profile growth.

• Google Performance Max Campaigns: Expanding your reach and connecting with potential patients across Google’s vast network, including Search, Display, YouTube, Gmail, and more. Performance Max campaigns leverage the power of automation to optimize your bids and targeting, ensuring your message reaches the right people more often. 

Diversifying your healthcare marketing tactics and embracing an omnichannel approach creates a more sustainable and predictable patient acquisition pipeline, reducing your reliance on any single channel. 

 

Social Media Targeting for Healthcare Audiences 

Despite recent predictions about the collapse of paid social advertising, the reality tells a different story. Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok remain potent channels for connecting with patients at various stages of their healthcare journey – when leveraged strategically. 

The evolution of targeting capabilities has transformed what’s possible in healthcare marketing. Advanced audience segmentation, sophisticated interest mapping, and AI-powered optimization now enable providers to reach precisely defined patient populations at critical decision points. These developments have cemented social media’s position as an essential element in comprehensive healthcare marketing strategies. 

Measuring What Matters in Healthcare Marketing 

With marketing budgets under increasing scrutiny, it’s more crucial than ever to track and measure your marketing efforts effectively. Old-school, last-click attribution models only tell a part of the story. They make it difficult to understand the full impact of your marketing investments. Instead, consider these options:  

• Content Performance Tracking: This avenue provides valuable user behavior data, revealing patient interests and engagement patterns. Content marketing can then be used to refine messaging, optimize strategies, and personalize patient interactions.  

• Media Mix Optimization: This analysis reveals which channels complement each other, identifies underperforming tactics that need refinement or elimination, and highlights your most effective channels deserving increased investment. 

 

Teamwork Makes the Dream Campaigns Work  

Aligning your marketing and operations teams is essential for a seamless patient experience. For smaller medical practices and their doctors, these jobs can often overlap and take away from primary responsibilities. For larger health systems, the teams can be disjointed with valuable data not being acted upon. Consider these approaches to improve efficiency: 

• Coordinate Marketing Campaigns With Appointment Availability: Make sure your marketing efforts are driving patients to services and appointment slots that are actually available. There’s no quicker way to lose a potential patient than by attracting them for a service that’s fully booked!

• Promote the Services Your Practice Is Best Equipped to Handle: Focus your marketing on the procedures and treatments where your team has the most expertise and capacity. This ensures a smooth and efficient patient experience.

• Target Your Marketing Geographically Based on Where You Have Availability: Concentrate your marketing efforts in areas where your providers have the capacity to see new patients. This helps maximize the impact of your marketing spend. 

 

Don’t Just Collect Data, Use It! Data-Driven Retargeting in Healthcare 

Fragmented data is a major challenge in healthcare marketing. Getting data on your audience is all well and good, but you also need to have strategies and infrastructure in place to capitalize on it. Consider these essential data management approaches: 

• Data Tracking With Follow-Up in Mind: Measure engagement across your website, email, and social channels, with attention to detail when updating CRM systems. This will better inform retargeting efforts.

• Partner With a Dedicated Healthcare Marketing Agency: Take the weight of technical data management off your team’s plate by partnering with experts in healthcare marketing (like us!) with a track record of responsibly using data for marketing purposes, while maintaining strict adherence to compliance regulations. 

 

Ready to Elevate Your Healthcare Marketing? 

At WAX, we understand the complexities of the healthcare market and are dedicated to helping you achieve your goals. Our marketing experts help support industry leaders in everything from broad marketing strategies for health systems to niche, personalized marketing strategies for doctors, and more specialized medical advertising services, too.  

Reach out to us at info@waxcom.com and let’s discuss how we can help you build a future-proof marketing strategy for your healthcare organization!