5 Tips for How to use Inbound Marketing in Hospitals and Healthcare

 image from ChiroPractice

In my previous post, I asked the question, how are you or would you use inbound marketing in healthcare.  To answer this question you really have to ask yourself, "how do I build relationships online?"

For healthcare marketing, we tend to use outbound marketing, pushing our ads out to the consumers with no real message that "connects" to the consumer.  No matter what area you work in healthcare, there is a way you can connect to your current and potential patients.  Ask yourself this: What information are your patients looking for that you could provide the answers to?
People in healthcare hold the key to a ton of information, yet when patients go online to search for information on their symptoms or disease, they find everything but their local hospital or physician practice providing the information.  There are always exceptions to that rule, but for the most part, people find WebMD or Answers.com.

Where do healthcare marketers start?

Understand how the new Google Analytics works:
A great resource to learn this is a free webinar from KunoCreative.  The new Google analytics is now focusing on content and putting the person who is doing the search in the center.  Once you have a better understanding of inbound marketing and how SEO will work for your marketing efforts,  then you can start thinking how you can use it in your healthcare environment.
You might be asking how this helps get patients in your local market....think about this...if you know that content provides value in the eyes of Google, then your patient in your local area that is looking for information about knee pain will find your information more organically (not a paid search).  Google is customizing to the user, therefore, Google will find info for them in their local area and it just might be your great content this time.  The more people, it doesn't matter where they are from, find your information, the more of a trusted site you become, the more likely your local patients will find your website on the top Google searches that are not paid ads.

Benchmark other healthcare systems that are doing it well:
There is a lot of hospitals that are doing this well.  Seattle Children's Hospital is a great example of this.  They have a blog called Seattle Mama Doc where they have one of their physicians posting blogs and providing information to the world wide web.  When benchmarking sites, look at how well they are doing in ratings.  You can do this easily by going to Alex.com and inputting the web address you are looking at.  I also like their Chrome App that you can add to your toolbar to look at the analytics quickly and easily.  What is also nice about Alex.com, is you can compare your hospital to other hospital websites that are in your local area.

Find a platform that works for you:
You don't want to just start a blog and go without a real plan on how you will target your audience.  Start with what message are you wanting to provide and how does it connect with your strategic initiatives.   Once you know what your message is, choose how you will spread this message.  Will it be Facebook, Twitter, Blogging, Google plus?  Pick one, master that first then move on to adding more.

Know what works:
Whether you are using Twitter or Blogging to get your message across, know how many post you should be doing a day/week to get the most out of it.  For Twitter, you don't just want to blast people with message after message, keep them at least 20 mins apart.  For Facebook, post no more than 4 hours apart.  For blogging, post no less than 3 a week and if you can post daily, the more you post the better results you will see (the more content the better).

Engage with others:
The most important message here is that you must engage with your target audience.  I always suggest, going to where they are.  Find groups, blogs, forums, and post helpful information, tips, or just comment and leave your url as your signature.  Don't try to sell them something, use a real voice that patients can connect to.  If you try to sell them how fantastic you are, they will shut down and you lose.  Find physicians, nurses, or other professionals in your area to blog, tweet, vlog (video blog) to help you get the "experts" on the topics that your patients are looking for.

Just remember to be real, provide useful information, and build connections.  The rest will come naturally if you can remember to at least do that.