Benefits of Digital Marketing in Healthcare Industry

Digital Marketing  is transforming every industry and has made its footprint in the healthcare sector.

According to McKinsey, “Technology driven innovation holds the potential to improve our understanding of patients, enable the delivery of more convenient, individualized care and create $350 billion to $410 billion in annual value by 2025”.

Over the past few years Internet and social media has made its presence felt in every industry due to its numerous advantages. Digital marketing is a part of marketing that uses online based technologies and the internet to promote services and products. Digitalization means creating a digital representation of physical attributes and helps in communication and helps you understand the audience’s frame. One of the main objectives of digital marketing is used to raise brand awareness.

Previously, word of mouth was enough in the healthcare industry and we used to visit that particular doctor based on the recommendation given by our families and friends. Healthcare marketing in traditional was seen in various forms like:

·         Advertisements on billboards and public transports

·         Newspaper and Radio Ads

·         Health camps by hospitals in rural places and

·         Testimonials

The healthcare industry is progressing at a very faster pace when it comes to advancements in treatments and medical services. However, this industry is yet to improve on digital marketing for hospitals and effective usage of the marketing tools to market their services and increase awareness among the patients.

Google collaborated with Complete Inc “The Digital Journey to wellness: Hospital Selection”

• 84% of patients used both online and offline sources for hospital research
• Over 48% took over 2 weeks to research before taking an appointment
• 61% visited 2+ hospital sites before converting
• 44% of patients who research hospitals in mobile devices scheduled an appointment
• Patients primarily search on symptoms and condition terms towards the moment of conversion
• Search drives nearly 3x as many visitors to hospital sites compared to non-search visitors
• 83% patients visit hospital websites to know more about the services offered
• 21% of patients use mobile sites or websites to book an appointment
• 12 of them post review on social media sites and
• 6% of patients post a review on a hospital website.

The above statistics prove that digital marketing plays a vital role in the healthcare sector and digital marketing for hospitals helps to stay ahead of your competitors. There are many reasons why digital marketing for hospitals is important. Digital marketing for hospitals enables to influence customers on various social media and according to Mediabistro, 40% of the users are affected by the healthcare information available online and 41% of consumers choose a specific medical hospital or consultant due to social media influence. Digital marketing helps grow awareness in public on a wider scale and about one-third of the total internet consumption is done by watching videos.

The benefits of Digital Marketing for hospitals are listed below:

• Improved Audience Reach and Service Awareness

The healthcare industry is quickly becoming hypercompetitive and if you want to retain the flow of health customer’s, it’s important that they spread awareness among the patients related to services provided by your hospitals. According to research by Google, it is found that 44% of visitors choose to make their appointment either online or by making a call taking the number from the website before visiting the premises. Using digital marketing for hospitals ensures that you have adequate reach to the audience and they are aware of the services that your hospital is offering.

• Showcase Your Services

The Internet gives you an effective platform for showcasing your practice and what you have to offer. Be it highlighting patient’s testimonials or showcasing your portfolio on your website. Digital Marketing for hospitals has never been easier than before to let the world know about what your practice has to offer. With a few simple clicks, your patients can see what you’re all about. An online presence is an extension of your brand.

•   Easier Access for Patients

A lot of healthcare services and practitioners avoid taking any sort of marketing services considering it inappropriate. But Digital marketing for hospitals helps in making things convenient for patients and provides patients an easy access to doctors and saves them from unnecessary research on services.

•  Doctor-Patient Trust

Digital marketing for hospitals allows the flow of communication between the doctor and the patient, allows access to websites and social media websites so that patients can communicate easily. It also gives a closer look for healthcare providers to increase capability, trust and competence from consumers with continuous online presence. Today people can reach out through social media or websites to write a review, ask questions or make complaints.

•  Monitoring

Digital marketing for hospitals not only provides a top quality healthcare service, but also provides marketers the ability to track their profits from their investment in advertising and customer satisfaction from the service provided. Digital marketing for hospitals gives you the ability to track and analyze the results with the help of digital analytics and gives you the much needed vision to see if your efforts are paying off well. You can take insights that you’ve gained from the process to improve your future campaigns. This is one such luxury that you don’t enjoy in traditional marketing methods.

Digital marketing for healthcare is a cost effective tool and gives better results. If chosen wisely, it can improve not only your consumer base but also help you address the problems in your service so that it can help your patients.At Vinn Digital we offer a deal of successful working in the healthcare sector and hospitals to use digital marketing for the healthcare sector and help them reach their goals. We help them by building a landing page that has many features to gain new customers and optimize a better SEO. We scale the performance of our campaigns that can generate appointments. Ad campaigns, SEO and SMM are created using geographic tagging and the search ads are developed to target an audience whenever they search for a healthcare worker.