Healthcare Marketing Hub

The large-scale shift of healthcare from the hospital to the office, continued group consolidation, and increasingly consumer-driven healthcare offer growth-oriented, innovative physician groups real opportunities to deliver great patient care, significant growth, and substantial value creation. But the industry also faces real challenges with staffing shortages, wage pressures, increasingly expensive IT and technology investments, and regulatory requirements making it harder to thrive and grow.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is vital to healthcare digital marketing. While Google doesn't disclose the precise details of its ranking algorithms, they’ve confirmed the significance of certain factors. Before delving into them all, there is one factor we want to highlight:

“Is it necessary to have a landing page for our ad campaign, or could we direct users to the homepage of our main website instead?”

As a medical digital marketing agency, we hear this question a lot. While an effective homepage is a marketing asset, a landing page is indispensable for targeted medical digital advertising. Keep reading to find out why, as well as learn landing page best practices and examples.

Any organization needs effective marketing strategies to thrive, and the healthcare industry is no exception. However, determining how much to budget and allocate can be challenging. This article will explore spending expectations, the factors influencing healthcare marketing budgets, and the increasing significance of healthcare digital marketing.

I’m sure by now you’ve heard the term ‘SEO’ and perhaps ‘SEM.’ If you don’t know what one or either of those terms means, you’re not alone. The marketing industry is chock-full of acronyms, and keeping up with all the terminology can be challenging. But don’t worry—we're here to help.

Digital advertising has become an essential component of healthcare marketing. With so many strategies available, determining the best approach can be challenging. While the debate between organic marketing (marketing material posted for free) and inorganic marketing (paid advertisements shown to a targeted audience) persists, both tools should be utilized accordingly.

Today, nearly 60% of consumers will use the internet to search for a new service or care site. Many healthcare marketing agencies offer digital marketing assessments to see if your practice’s marketing efforts are up to par.

Congratulations on launching your healthcare marketing campaign! After months of planning, you finally get to see your efforts come to life. At Evolve, we know this can be both exciting and nerve-wracking. However, it's important to remember that a healthcare campaign's success is determined not by the launch day but by its duration.

It's no surprise that medical practice owners are increasingly investing in digital solutions. After all, quality of care is no longer enough to gain and retain patients. According to NRC Health's 2019 Healthcare Consumer Trends Report, 80% of patients surveyed would switch care providers for convenience factors alone.

The patient journey has certainly changed over the past several years. More importantly to you as a medical practice leader, however, you must note that the traditional model of attracting and retaining patients through healthcare marketing has been completely upended. Today's patients have access to all the information they could possibly need about their conditions and their next steps right there, at their fingertips. The internet has made that information so widely available, in fact, that most patients take it for granted.

The simple truth is that not all digital marketing agencies are created equal—and that's okay! Neither are the clients. In order to select the right digital marketing agency for your healthcare organization, you need to find the right mutual fit strategically, tactically, and culturally. Accomplishing that key goal, however, requires an understanding of many of the aspects of digital marketing, including:

Choosing the right healthcare marketing firm for your practice can make a huge difference in the ROI you get from your marketing efforts. Unfortunately, many practices end up making the same mistakes when they hire a digital healthcare marketing agency. Those mistakes can decrease overall ROI or leave healthcare practices struggling to meet their marketing goals. Are you making these errors in hiring a marketing agency?

Healthcare marketing is incredibly important. Finding the right healthcare digital marketing agency can make a huge difference in your ability to market your practice successfully. Unfortunately, we regularly have conversations with medical practices looking for a new healthcare marketing company because they have determined that the old one simply isn't a good fit anymore.

At Evolve, we believe that the goal of a medical practice website is to convert. You want your website to bring in traffic, provide potential patients with the information they need, and, ultimately, convince them that your medical practice is the right choice for their needs. According to Google, the average medical practice website has a conversion rate of 6%. In basic terms, that means that out of every 100 people who visit a website, 6 will convert: they will call the practice or fill out a form requesting an appointment. Interestingly, the top performers in medical practice websites have a conversion rate of 20.4%.

Google PPC, or pay-per-click, is one of the most popular and effective forms of search engine healthcare marketing for medical practices. It has been proven as one of the fastest and most predictable ways to get patients in the door. Unfortunately, many medical practices rely on healthcare digital marketing agency teams for their marketing efforts, and not all of those marketers are created equal. Quantitative performance varies widely due to both the skills of the digital marketing practitioner and their capacity to keep up with the continuous evolution of Google's algorithms, which are driven by AI-based technology.

It doesn't matter if freelancers, outside agencies, an internal team or a combination of these execute your healthcare digital marketing programs. One thing remains constant, though. At a minimum, it’s critical to evaluate your marketing efforts at least annually to see how your efforts are performing relative to the key factors that determine your overall success. These factors can include your business objectives, local competitors and industry best practices. Evaluations are critical for several reasons.

For many providers, including medical care providers, ADA compliance is an unknown. You may not realize that your website needs to be ADA compliant, especially if you have not had to worry about it in the past. However, ADA compliance is a growing threat to any organization with a consumer-facing website—and it's particularly a problem for medical practices since they often attract lawsuits due to the perception of having deep pockets.

Your patients may do a great deal of research before they decide to use your practice. They want to feel confident that you are the best-choice provider for the services they need and that they can count on you to help them accomplish their medical goals. In today's era of healthcare consumerism, many people are taking their medical care in their own hands, including looking up online patient reviews before they choose a provider.