7 Tips for Inbound Marketing in Healthcare

The digital world can be overwhelming. Billions of people are online everyday, but how do you find and reach your specific target audience? This can be especially difficult in the competitive world of healthcare marketing.

The good news is that inbound marketing can help cut through the noise. Inbound marketing works to draw in your audience with the help of engaging content. At Pyxl, we work with businesses and organizations from all aspects of the healthcare industry—from research institutions to patient-focused facilities—and we’ve refined our inbound techniques to address the unique problems that healthcare faces in an overcrowded online marketplace.

7 tips for inbound marketing in healthcare and how they can help you reach and engage your specific target audience

1.Figure out who your buyer personas are before you jump into content creation.

Now, ‘buyer’ seems more suited to retail businesses than the healthcare industry but trust me, it’s relevant to healthcare, too. Buyer personas are semi-fictional representations of your ideal customers. If you’re selling a health-monitoring device directly to doctors’ offices, for example, one of your personas might be “Dr. Steve.” If you’ve created a fitness app that will be purchased by consumers, one of your personas might be “Fitness Felicia.” Your personas should be based on market research and real data about your existing customers. Once you have your personas figured out, you can start creating content that speaks directly to them.

2. Blogging is the inbound equivalent of good dental hygiene.

Blogging is an essential part of inbound marketing. Like good dental hygiene, it’s important to the overall health of your online marketing efforts. Blogging provides your audience with a source of consistent, relevant content. And it’s great for SEO. For example, if you are a dental practice, you could create a blog post about 10 tips for maintaining healthy oral hygiene. Not only can this be shared with your existing patients, it will also give your office a greater chance of being found in organic search results when someone searches “oral hygiene.”

For more information on healthcare blogs read, 7 blogging tips for healthcare organizations

3. Use email workflows to nurture your leads (and help save you time).

Email is a great way to keep leads moving down the sales funnel. With email workflows, you can map out content and send it to your subscribers at a time that is right for them. For example, if your healthcare organization has a fundraising arm, you can create email workflows to notify subscribers of upcoming fundraising events and goals.

Check out more tips for email workflows in our blog post, How to Use HubSpot: Email Marketing.

4. Give your healthcare organization a friendly face with social media.

Everyone and their grandma is on social media these days. Creating and maintaining profiles on relevant platforms gives your audience another way to connect with you, as well as learn more about what you offer. Social media can be about day-to-day interactions, as well as big ideas and awareness campaigns. Think about bold campaigns like UCLA’s live-tweeting of a brain surgery. Another example might be if your healthcare business creates prosthetics, you could create a YouTube channel with videos about the design and crafting process as well as showing the prosthetics in use by real people. Just make sure that anything you’re doing online complies with HIPAA regulations.

For more on why social media is right for healthcare, check out our blog post, Does Social Media Matter in Healthcare?

5. Use CTAs and landing pages to drive traffic to premium content.

Make sure your website has highly visible calls-to-action (CTAs) that lead to landing pages with relevant premium content. To make the most of this process, “hide” your content behind forms so that you can capture leads’ email addresses and other useful information, such as job title or zip code. A good CTA for a hospital might be “Sunshine Hospital’s Surgery Preparation Checklist,” and could be placed on any website pages that refer to the hospital’s surgery expertise.

6. Optimize anything and everything that can be optimized.

In order to compete online in the highly competitive healthcare market, you need to make sure that search engine optimization (SEO) is a priority in your digital marketing strategy. When you create content for your website or blog, think about the keywords that you can build that content around. For example, if you are a chiropractor in Boulder, Colorado, you might want to use a locational keyword such as “chiropractor Boulder CO” as well as a long-tail keyword that your patients might be searching for such as “how to get rid of lower back pain.”

Read about 5 Killer SEO Tactics on our blog.

7. Be sure to set goals and constantly measure your results against them.

Many healthcare organizations tend to focus on revenue-based goals. This is obviously very important to any profit-based business and should be included in your goals matrix. However, to stand out in the healthcare industry, you need to start thinking about other goals such as audience engagement, patient satisfaction and search engine rankings. Let’s say that you’ve built a diagnostic app using Apple’s new ResearchKit open-source framework—your goals might be centered around building brand awareness for your new app. Metrics to measure that goal might include social media reach and engagement, as well as website traffic.

Contact Pyxl

If you are considering creating a comprehensive inbound marketing strategy for your healthcare organization, we would be happy to help you strategize and deliver results you can be proud of. Let’s talk!

Updated: Nov 15, 2024