So you’ve decided to embark on an inbound marketing strategy for your healthcare business. Congratulations! Inbound marketing, particularly content marketing, is a perfect fit for the healthcare industry. However, given the highly regulated nature of your industry, there are a few unique challenges you may face along the way. Here are some best practices that can help you quickly get your team up and running and producing the content that will have customers flocking to your products and services.
Understanding Inbound Marketing in the Healthcare Industry
Inbound marketing is a powerful approach for healthcare organizations to attract and engage with patients, build trust, and establish thought leadership in the industry. By leveraging digital marketing strategies, healthcare providers can create a strong online presence, improve patient engagement, and drive business growth. Inbound marketing in healthcare involves creating valuable content, optimizing websites for search engines, and utilizing social media platforms to reach and engage with patients.
In the healthcare industry, inbound marketing is not just about promoting services; it’s about providing patients with the information they need to make informed decisions about their health. By offering valuable content that addresses patients’ concerns and questions, healthcare organizations can build trust and credibility. This approach helps to establish a strong online presence, making it easier for patients to find and connect with healthcare providers.
Social media platforms play a crucial role in inbound marketing for healthcare. They provide a space for healthcare organizations to share content, engage with patients, and build a community. By actively participating in social media conversations, healthcare providers can reach a wider audience and foster stronger relationships with patients.
Bring Together the Right Roles in Healthcare Organizations
In healthcare organizations particularly, it can be difficult to tackle inbound marketing as a lone wolf. There are simply too many moving pieces for one person to do it all by themselves. A well-defined digital marketing strategy is essential for planning, executing, and analyzing campaigns across different digital platforms. Your best bet is to assemble a team of professionals who can take on the following specialized roles:
Many healthcare companies mistakenly use social media solely as a promotional tool, neglecting the importance of engagement with their audience. Don’t think of this list as required headcount, but rather as core competencies your team needs. Depending on the size of your organization, a single individual may be able to take on multiple roles. Be aware that if you are missing any of these competencies, you may be hamstringing your efforts.
Content Creation and Strategy for Healthcare Marketing
Content creation is a critical component of inbound marketing in healthcare. By creating high-quality, engaging, and informative content, healthcare organizations can attract and engage with patients, build trust, and establish thought leadership in the industry. A well-planned content strategy is essential to ensure that content resonates with patients and aligns with business goals.
In healthcare marketing, content must be both educational and empathetic. Patients are often seeking information about sensitive and complex health issues, so it’s important to provide content that is accurate, easy to understand, and supportive. This can include blog posts, articles, videos, infographics, and more. Each piece of content should be designed to address specific patient needs and concerns.
A successful content strategy involves understanding your audience and their journey. By mapping out the patient journey, healthcare organizations can create content that meets patients at each stage, from awareness to decision-making. This targeted approach ensures that content is relevant and valuable, helping to build trust and encourage patient engagement.
Keep an Eye on Compliance
When creating the content that will form the basis for your inbound strategy, care must be taken to meet all relevant regulations, from patient information privacy under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) to FDA requirements for fair balance disclosures.
For these reasons, it’s critical for a healthcare organization to make sure compliance is top of mind at every stage of your strategy. To start, make sure everyone on your team is trained in your organization’s policies.
Put some thought into processes and workflows so you are accommodating whatever approvals may be needed. You might even want to consider adding these stakeholders as peripheral members of your inbound marketing team:
- Product managers
- Sales
- Legal
- Regulatory
- Senior leadership
It can be helpful to get all of these people—your core and peripheral team members as well as any other internal stakeholders—together in a room to talk about what you’re creating and what goals you need to achieve. By obtaining buy-in from everyone at the start of your strategy, you’ll make things easier for everyone down the road.
Align on Philosophy
Across your team, each member will have their own perspective on how to move forward—and that’s terrific. The challenge is to make sure you are all moving forward in the same direction.
Everyone you bring to your team needs to be fully aligned around the philosophy of inbound marketing: It’s not a campaign, a channel or even a tactic. It’s the driver behind your organization’s entire marketing strategy. It’s an all-encompassing approach to reaching your audiences wherever they are. And it’s 100 percent focused on delivering content that is meaningful to your audiences, that helps them solve a problem and that ultimately helps them make the decision to buy from you.
Search engine optimization plays a critical role in achieving high visibility and rankings in search engine results, particularly for healthcare marketing.
Once you have your team assembled, with responsibilities and workflows clearly mapped out, you’re ready to begin developing and executing your bold ideas. Consider downloading our free eBook, Inbound Marketing: Buy-In, Budgets & Best Practices, for more helpful tips.
Measuring Success and Continuous Improvement
Measuring success and continuous improvement are critical components of inbound marketing in healthcare. By tracking key metrics and performance indicators, healthcare organizations can evaluate the effectiveness of their marketing efforts, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to optimize their marketing strategy.
Key metrics to track include website traffic, conversion rates, patient engagement, and social media interactions. By analyzing these metrics, healthcare marketers can gain insights into what is working and what needs adjustment. This data-driven approach allows for continuous optimization of marketing strategies, ensuring that efforts are always aligned with business goals and patient needs.
Continuous improvement is about more than just tracking metrics; it’s about being proactive in making changes. Regularly reviewing and updating content, experimenting with new tactics, and staying informed about industry trends are all part of a successful inbound marketing strategy. By committing to continuous improvement, healthcare organizations can stay ahead of the competition and consistently deliver value to their patients.
