- Dec 09, 2019
Inbound marketing is an effective marketing technique to attract, engage, and delight customers. Together with technology, inbound marketing practices enable businesses to adjust to changing market dynamics and provide better customer experience. An inbound strategy may incorporate a number of different channels and content forms to draw website traffic, build trust, and establish business credibility.
Across various industries, the inbound approach has proven beneficial. As per HubSpot’s State of Inbound 2018 report, around 75% of global companies use inbound marketing as their strategy, and they agree that it has proven tremendously effective. In simple words, inbound marketing is not specific to a particular industry and can work in any sector. Even healthcare marketing professionals can take advantage of inbound techniques to grow their business.
Deal with Empathy
Empathy is crucial when it comes to attracting and engaging customers with your brand. If you don’t understand what your patients are looking for, then it will be challenging to connect with them and show them that you are there to help. Most of the time, medical practices are found boasting about themselves, and in the process, they forget about the customers and what they want. Understandably, you ought to speak about your practice in your marketing campaigns, but at the same time, you must not compromise on empathy. Make your patients understand that you understand and are capable of addressing their unmet needs. This will help in winning patient trust as they can relate to your practice, which is, in the end, going to benefit your business.
Strengthen Your Reputation
In the medical field, reputation is the key. Potential patients, before making any decision on whom to trust with their medical needs, check for the provipder’s reputation. A well-reputed doctor or physician whom other patients trust and recommend is found more reliable than the others. Based on what other patients say about your practice, a new patient decides on whether to believe your service or not. Hence, building your practice reputation is essential, and for that, you need to have an active and organized reputation management strategy and program in place. It means managing reviews and testimonials and putting them to use in your marketing materials. If possible, get permission from patients to share their treatment success stories on your website, social media platforms, and other content channels.
Send Clear Messages
Ensure that your messages are clear and can be easily understood by your targeted audience. This is because, as per Facebook stats, it is found that people spend 1.7 seconds only on reading or going through a piece of content. Hence, if your messages are not clearly explained, you are likely to lose out on the opportunity to engage the reader. Therefore, make sure that your current messages are precise, clearly defines your brand and service, and are straightforward for the customers to interpret the right meaning.
Retarget Your Audience
While content marketing, paid ads, and SEO may help in increasing website traffic, but it really can’t influence conversions alone. That is when retargeting strategy comes into play to help boost conversion from website visits. It is a significant media strategy for a medical practice or a healthcare business that works best with both inbound and outbound digital marketing strategy and helps to attract and acquire patients.
Also known as remarketing, retargeting is a type of online advertising that marketers implement to get back the bounced traffic from their website. With retargeting campaigns, the focus shifts to people who are interested in your brand but for some reason, left your site without getting converted into paying customers. Retargeting works as a powerful conversion optimization as well as a branding tool, generating higher ROI than most of the other digital channels.
Include Video in Your Inbound Strategy
Video marketing should be a must part of your healthcare inbound strategy. More than lengthy texts, the audience prefer watching a video on the go. Here are some ideas to best use videos to engage your audience:
- Create and share introductory videos of physicians or any other key medical staff.
- Use videos to explain or educate potential patients on complex procedures or concepts.
- Retarget the audience with patient testimonial videos to convince them to trust your practice.
However, remember that video marketing isn’t expensive, like many think it to be. It’s not compulsory to take the help of a professional to shoot all the time. You can do it yourself as patients look for value and not video-making expertise when they see visual work content.
Don’t Just Stick to Lead Forms
Most of the marketers rely on default lead forms to get insights about the customer. In the healthcare industry, too, businesses follow the same and often don’t dare to think beyond the ‘contact us’ form. It’s high time that you take a step further and try building forms that not only provide information but offers value to your customer in return. The best example of it will be asking patients questions on issues they need solutions for. For instance, if a patient visits your site to avail pain management treatment, instead of asking them contact details, try knowing their pinpoints through an assessment form. This will show that you are here to help and not just do business, encouraging the patient to submit a lead.
Incorporate Conversational Marketing
And here comes the last and the final strategy that is to include conversational marketing into your inbound program. In this type of marketing, brands can easily move their targets through sales funnel using real-time conversations. Many companies use conversational marketing to grow customer base, drive engagement, and win customer loyalty.
Conversational marketing really works as it uses intelligent chat bots and targeted messaging systems to engage with the patient when they visit your healthcare website. Patients don’t have to wait long for responses and can get an immediate answer to their queries. It enables you to provide a happy customer experience, which ultimately benefits your business.
Final Thought
Earlier businesses mostly relied on their outbound marketing strategy. However, time is changing, and a lot of companies are relying on and investing in inbound marketing techniques to generate more leads and build a better brand reputation. However, inbound marketing isn’t a cakewalk as it requires a disciplined approach towards content creation, customer engagement, lead nurturing, and using automation tools to optimize lead flow through the sales cycle. Therefore, with these strategies, healthcare practices and businesses can turn their inbound marketing dream into a successful reality.
