Here’s how to update your hospital digital marketing strategy to turbocharge patient acquisition

Today’s healthcare organizations face significant challenges in attracting and retaining patients. Despite its efforts, many hospital systems do not have an effective hospital digital marketing strategy or are not utilizing healthcare marketing efforts to their full potential.

Patients are doing their homework. A recent study found that 77% of patients perform online research before booking an appointment, and another study found that 93 million Americans have searched online for information about health-related topics.

These statistics underscore the vital role of digital marketing in a hospital’s patient acquisition strategy.

If you’re struggling with your healthcare marketing strategy, you’ve come to the right place. This blog will provide the tips and tools you need to build a solid hospital digital marketing foundation to attract new patients and keep existing patients happy. Read on to learn more.

Understanding your patients

Crafting patient personas is crucial for hospitals aiming to optimize their digital marketing strategy and reach their target audience. Patient personas represent a hospital’s ideal patient, characterized by their behaviors, preferences, age, gender, medical conditions, and treatment needs. 

Hospitals can gather this data by conducting surveys, analyzing patient records, reviewing feedback from patient reviews, and examining hospital marketing data and analytics.  

Using this data, hospitals can gain deeper insights that help tailor their hospital digital marketing strategy accordingly and effectively allocate budgets, create targeted content, and design campaigns that resonate with their ideal patients.

What happens during the patient journey

Patient journey mapping is comprised of four stages:

1. Awareness
2. Consideration
3. Decision-making
4. Retention

8 ways to strengthen your hospital’s brand online

Hospitals can use several marketing strategies to increase their online visibility and strengthen their web presence, indirectly aiding patient acquisition and retention. These strategies also engage and educate potential patients, which builds trust and directly aids in patient acquisition and retention.

Here are eight ways to strengthen your hospital’s brand online.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is critical to a hospital’s digital marketing strategy. It aims to enhance its online visibility and attract more patients through organic search engine results. The strategies and practices for SEO for hospitals include:

• Keyword research: Focusing on healthcare terms and phrases potential patients are likely to use when seeking medical information and services
• On-page strategies: Optimizing website content, meta descriptions, and headers
• Off-page strategies: Building quality backlinks and managing online reviews

Hospitals must stay updated with healthcare-specific SEO trends because search algorithms and patient behaviors constantly change.

To ensure that a hospital’s SEO efforts translate to real-world patient engagement, hospitals should track metrics like search engine rankings, website traffic, conversion rates, and patient inquiries.

An essential part of a hospital’s digital marketing strategy, hospital content marketing provides valuable, informative content that resonates with patient needs and concerns even more effectively than traditional advertising.

 A study by Demand Metric found that content marketing costs 62% less than traditional marketing and generates about three times as many leads.

Types of content that effectively connect with patients include:

• Blogs
• Videos
• Guides
• Checklists
• Infographics
• White papers
• Case studies

Avoiding medical jargon in hospital content and provider profiles is essential. If a hospital’s content is presented clearly and easily understood, patients will gain helpful background on their medical situation and the providers who could potentially treat them, leading to increased trust. 

Remember the power of patient stories as a marketing resource as well. Patient stories and testimonials can be powerful tools because they offer real-life experiences and endorsements that significantly influence prospective patients’ decisions.

Social media is another way hospitals can engage with patients and build a solid online reputation (see #7 for more on this topic). Instead of having a presence on every channel, hospitals should choose the right social media platform for their hospital and build a strategy around it. The “right” channel is the one where their target audience is.

Developing a content-sharing strategy involves regularly posting updates about hospital events, new services, provider highlights, and health tips to keep followers informed and engaged and running ads when appropriate (see #6 for more on this talking point).

Be sure to respond to patient feedback and inquiries promptly. Also, track metrics, such as: 

• Engagement rates
• Follower growth, and 
• The volume of positive feedback.

Many healthcare organizations use hospital email marketing to maintain and enhance patient relationships and increase patient satisfaction and retention. Some best practices for email marketing for hospitals include:

Email list cleaning

The process of email list cleaning involves removing inactive or incorrect addresses to ensure higher delivery and engagement rates.

Hospital email list segmentation

Targeting messages to different patient groups, such as new patients, long-term patients, or those interested in specific services

Email personalization

Using patient names, referencing past interactions, and tailoring content to individual preferences

Hospital email automation

Streamlining processes, allowing for timely and consistent communication

Email metrics

Tracking metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and overall patient engagement

A website is the foundation, or hub, of every hospital’s digital marketing strategy. If a hospital’s website isn’t effective, success with other marketing efforts will be challenging. Your hospital’s website should be well-designed and easy to navigate.

Usability and accessibility

A well-designed hospital website should feature intuitive navigation, a clear and appealing design, and regularly updated content that is accurate, relevant, and easy to understand. 

A hospital website should also be designed to accommodate all users, including those with disabilities, by following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Key features that enhance usability include secure online:

• Appointment scheduling
• Medical records access
• Bill pay
• Prescription refill requests
• Provider communications
• And more!

Patients often consider these functionalities essential, as they streamline the work of managing healthcare needs. 

Conversion rates

Analyzing website performance involves tracking metrics, such as:

• Page views, 
• Bounce rates, and 
• Conversion actions. 

A/B testing is a valuable method for optimizing conversion rates. It involves creating two versions of a web page with slight variations to see which performs better in achieving a desired action. 

Hospitals can identify what resonates most with visitors by comparing data from A/B tests—such as changes in headline wording, call-to-action buttons, or page layout—and refine their approach accordingly. 

Continuous data-driven adjustments ensure the website effectively converts traffic into tangible patient interactions. 

Healthcare paid advertising encompasses various strategies across different platforms, each offering unique advantages. 

• Search engine advertising: Advertising on platforms like Google or Bing allows hospitals to target users actively searching for healthcare services using keywords related to their specialties. 
• Social media advertising: Advertising on social media enables hospitals to reach a broader audience based on demographic and interest targeting. 
• Display ads: Advertising on websites, apps, or streaming TV services can also be effective in raising brand awareness and reaching potential patients.

Creating effective ads involves selecting the right keywords and crafting compelling ad copy. The keywords should be relevant to the hospital’s services and specialties, while the ad copy should be clear, concise, and engaging. 

Landing pages

Even the best ads can fail when they point to landing pages that aren’t well-written or well-designed. Each landing page should be tailored to a specific ad campaign, providing relevant information and a clear call to action. 

A well-optimized landing page can significantly improve conversion rates, ensuring your hospital’s digital paid advertising efforts translate into tangible results.

Measure success

As with any hospital digital marketing strategy, you should measure the success of your digital paid advertising campaign to determine what’s working (and what’s not) and maximize return on investment. 

Key metrics can include:

• Click-through rates
• Conversion rates
• Cost per acquisition
• Cost per click
• Ad impressions
• Quality score
• Engagement metrics

What your patients say is more powerful and credible than any paid advertisement. 

Encourage satisfied patients to leave reviews on platforms like Google, Yelp, and Healthgrades. Respond to positive and negative feedback because it demonstrates a commitment to patient experience and can help address patient concerns. Leverage positive reviews as social proof in marketing efforts because they can further enhance the hospital’s reputation and credibility. 

Hospitals can use a service to monitor and manage their online reputations. Tools like Rater8 can save hospitals the time of manual monitoring and make it easy to track feedback, respond promptly, and gain insights into patient sentiment to improve their services and reputation continuously.

As mentioned in the hospital digital marketing strategies listed in this blog, the importance of data analytics and reporting cannot be understated. You must set up key performance indicators for your hospital’s digital marketing strategy so you can accurately evaluate its success, make informed decisions, adjust strategy as needed, and report results to stakeholders.

Amplify your hospital digital marketing

Learning about the components of an effective hospital digital marketing strategy outlined in this blog is the first step to acquiring the patients you deserve. Now that you know, it’s time to implement it.

Implementing and executing these strategies is no small feat and is often challenging for a marketing department leader to handle alone.

Why partner with TBH Creative

TBH Creative has over 20 years of experience helping healthcare organizations develop and optimize their hospital digital marketing strategy. Our team is knowledgeable and inquisitive. We’ve helped other healthcare organizations just like yours achieve success.

If you’re ready to stop spinning your wheels and create a hospital digital marketing strategy that brings results, contact us today to schedule a time to talk.