DON’T LET YOUR MARKETING MESSAGE FLATLINE. DEFIBRILLATE—AND INTEGRATE.
The healthcare industry is rapidly evolving in the digital age, and we’re here to meet it. The future of healthcare marketing hinges on integration and digital expertise, and that’s our specialty here at Stream Companies.
Perhaps more so than in any other industry, success in healthcare marketing relies on building trust with your audience. To make that happen, patients need to see a clear, consistent, and compelling message across every channel of advertising:
As an integrated ad agency, Stream serves the medical services industry in all its forms:
- Community Health Centers
- Medical Spas
- Telemedicine Practices
- Cosmetic Surgeons
- Hospitals
Bring more patients to your clinic
From mom-and-pop clinics to major healthcare networks, urgent care centers are popping up everywhere. With all the competition, you need a way to make your clinic(s) stand out!
You need a way to drive return business, too. Many patients, while happy with their care, do not intend to return, as they usually rely on their primary care physician for health visits. When you integrate your healthcare marketing, you can change the game and brand your clinic as a top community asset.
Whether you have one clinic serving one community or multiple clinics in different areas, we’ll devise local strategies specific to each institution. By dominating the search engines, locals will view your brand as the leader in local healthcare. Nothing falls through the cracks, as we build digital bridges between your healthcare network and the communities it serves.
NIP AND TUCK YOUR COSMETIC SURGERY MARKETING
There are only so many cosmetic surgery patients around. Your competitors are hard at work capturing the market, and you need to get yourself found first. Cosmetic surgery patients are getting younger and younger, so a sound digital strategy is your best bet. Reach them where they are: online.
You need to dominate organic and paid search engine results in the localities you serve—and we’ll help you do it. Getting found first online is crucial. With relevant digital content and high-value keywords, you can boost your visibility over time. In the meantime, we’ll use healthcare PPC tactics for immediate results.
Targeted marketing is key for dominating the cosmetic surgery field. We have the precision technology to track your campaigns and measure results across media.
As telemedicine rises, you can rise to meet it
Telemedicine is a rapidly growing area of medicine. It’s a market we’re uniquely positioned to understand, a field where healthcare delivery shifts to a more retail-focused mode. At Stream, we know what it takes to drive retail traffic. It’s written into our DNA.
Just as with banking, the movement of medicine to an online platform rewards providers who know how to market trust. In such a personalized field, the absence of in-person contact can be disorienting for many patients. People need to feel you’re “legit” and that they can expect quality care in a digital space.
An integrated, unified message that showcases your unique selling points is key. Accessibility and lower costs have fueled telemedicine’s growth. Show how you balance those with outstanding quality.
Modern med spa marketing
Medical spas are among the nation’s fastest-growing industries. With lots of new technology on the scene, and younger patients’ desire to avoid surgery, these medical aesthetic practices have seen waves of new customers.
But with high growth comes competition—and a need for new modes of marketing. How should you be marketing today if you want to stay competitive tomorrow? And where does integration come into play? Above all, you’ll want a consistent message across all platforms—or perhaps messages in the plural.
Med spas serve more than one audience these days. As people live longer and healthier lives, they may want to turn back the clock a bit as they age. And young adults? They want to protect their youthful looks and head off signs of aging as early as possible.
Your med spa needs integrated advertising messages that speak to both audiences across your full arsenal of marketing channels. At Stream, we have the capability to deliver exactly that. No matter your key demographics, we can tailor messages to attract and ultimately convert them into new—and returning—customers.
What does integrated advertising for healthcare look like?
In the medical field, integrated advertising means traditional and new media come together. At Stream, we know better than to silo our departments. Ours is a place where ideas and strategy travel freely between departments to help you get better value from your marketing campaigns! Here, we’ll show you how.
Integrated marketing keeps your healthcare ad spend cost-effective
Where lies the value in integrated marketing? Any integrated agency will tell you how it keeps your brand and messaging aligned across all marketing platforms. And that’s certainly true. It’s no small thing to keep your healthcare and medical campaigns aligned across media.
Doing so allows customers to move fluidly among media and devices and physical spaces (i.e., your place of business) and receive a consistent brand message. It also allows for more seamless conversion experiences. A customer can hit “pause” and come back later via a different device or media and easily continue. In the modern age, odds are they’ll frequently switch between phones, tablets, and other devices.
Both of these advantages are valuable to customers. But there’s an even more important facet of integrated marketing that Stream truly excels in: keeping your healthcare and medical marketing cost-effective.
Drive more conversions with fewer marketing dollars
It’s true. Integration keeps your marketing costs lower than they would otherwise be. After all, a bunch of separate vendors can’t collaborate to eliminate overlapping and unnecessary costs. But at Stream, where every facet of marketing exists in-house and under the same roof, that suddenly becomes possible.
The ideas we create and the materials we develop can often move from one medium to another. The video ad we filmed for your website? We know how many valuable marketing dollars it took to produce that. We don’t want to just use it once. It could be great for a social media post—or as a clickable link in an email.
It’s just one video, but the possibilities are endless. And that leads quite nicely into our next point…
Use one marketing channel to boost the power and reach of others
With over 20 years in this business, we know how your different marketing channels interact. We know how using one effectively can boost the effectiveness of the others in your arsenal.
John Donne once wrote that “No man is an island,” and the same could be said for your marketing channels. They crave interaction—and here are some of the ways we provide interplay among them:
- Social media drives more website traffic, which enhances SEO
- Emails and social media are used to market digital inbound content
- Direct mail includes addresses for your website and social media channels
- Paid search ads strategically link to the most relevant content (not just your home page)
The list could go on and on. The point is, every channel is interconnected. It pays to think of them that way when you develop your healthcare or medical marketing campaign strategy.
Healthcare and medical content marketing
For many hospitals, clinics, and other health services providers, content marketing is a natural fit. It’s easy to see why. After all, healthcare decisions are some of the most important decisions people make every day. To earn trust, why not educate future patients and their families about the services you offer?
Content marketing does that. And by answering people’s pressing healthcare questions, it does even more by driving your organization to the top of search engine results pages for the search queries that are the most relevant to your business. In the age of the internet, the best marketing lets your people find you.
A peek into our content creation process
As a HubSpot Certified Agency Partner, Stream knows the content creation principles that will drive more people to your website via Google searches. We use keyword research tools to identify the most popular, most relevant search terms related to your business. Then, we use those to center your content.
But it’s not all about keywords. The search engine optimization (SEO) and conversion value of your content comes from how well you answer people’s questions—and how well you show those same people how your services will cater to their needs. We create content that:
- Is informative & authoritative. This is healthcare we’re talking about. It’s important to get the details right. You want your company to be seen as an authority in your field, and that means your audience will need to trust you. It’s about facts and the way your content presents them.
- Uses people-centered storytelling. At the same time, we want your content to be easily understood. We use a conversational tone for all medical and healthcare content we produce.
- Leave self-promotion in the rearview mirror. Look, we know traditional advertising relies on self-promotion—a lot of it. But inbound content, especially in healthcare, is meant to build a relationship rather than incentivize immediate action. Your voice should sound impartial—informative, not salesy.
A team of content experts working together
Integration means a lot of hands are on your healthcare or medical content—including yours if you like. Our copywriters and video editors create 100% unique written and visual content for humans—and our search engine optimizers ensure that Google can read it, too.
And of course, you’re the expert in your healthcare field. You know how complicated the subject is—and how important it is to get every detail about your services, procedures, and unique selling points right. So, we can create an approval path for you so you can have final approval on every piece of content created.
Make your input known to the people who work directly on your content. You’re the most essential piece in our integration, after all!
Why paid and organic search work better when integrated
In Stream’s Integrated Media department, the value is right there in the name! The right hand always knows what the left hand is doing—but how does that help you notch wins for your healthcare organization?
It will be the case that you rank better organically for some search terms than others. Why waste paid search dollars chasing after those same terms? Our paid search specialists work hand in hand with our search engine optimizers to ensure this doesn’t happen.
Together, they will make sure you’re not bidding on keywords you already rank higher for organically. It’s a simple, strategic way an integrated ad agency can help medical and healthcare businesses optimize the way they deploy their marketing dollars.
Bridging the gap between traditional and digital marketing
Your healthcare organization relies on a potent mix of traditional and digital advertising techniques. On their face, these may seem like the most dissimilar media types in the marketing sphere—so how will you bridge the gap between them? Stream’s experts in integration certainly have a few tricks up their sleeves.
1) Geotarget
Are you identifying your website’s visitors? And when we say identify, we don’t just mean their names—we mean their email addresses and exact physical addresses. At Stream, we offer our customers Shopper Suite by fullthrottle.ai, the customer connection platform that does exactly that.
What does that have to do with integration? We’re getting there! With this valuable customer data in hand—secured with their permission, of course, via an opt-in request to share their location—you can reach web visitors via a variety of digital and traditional channels.
Instantaneously, Shopper Suite can blast these website visitors with:
- Direct mail and emails
- Audio and video marketing
- Social media marketing
- Digital display ads
And of course, by the power of Stream’s integrated advertising team, these traditional and digital marketing channels will all be aligned and on message based on user activity on your website!
In many ways, fullthrottle.ai’s customer data platform fuels our approach to traditional and digital integration. It offers the artificial intelligence and automation you need to execute marketing across channels.
2) Television, meet video
You know there’s still value in television advertisements—but you know younger consumers are cutting the cable cord. Believe it or not, you don’t need to choose between them. It’s never an either-or approach when you have integrated healthcare and medical advertising.
Find out what your target audience likes. Then, film a TV spot that tells your story. We will use our relationships with media vendors across the nation to help you get more purchasing power for a slot for your TV spot. And of course, we don’t stop there.
Filming a TV spot is a great investment because the content you create can be reused. It can be repurposed for digital marketing channels—videos on your website, YouTube channel, or even Connected TV ads, which may reach that youthful audience that is giving up traditional TV.
3) Direct mail, meet website and social media
We touched on this concept earlier, but it deserves its own section. People still enjoy receiving letters and promotional leaflets in the mail, so long as that direct mail is high quality and—just as importantly—targeted to address their needs.
So, send out those physical letters—but be sure to integrate them with your digital presence when you do. Not only can you use call to actions to prompt recipients to visit your website or social media page, but you can use easy-to-follow links via QR codes to do it.
Research shows this is a more effective way to prompt people to visit your website. It removes the temptation to wait until the next time they log in on a laptop or desktop, which will almost certainly lower the response. Better to let them access the site at the moment they read their mail!
4) Create personas
A persona isn’t a real customer—but it can be an excellent stand in for one. These fictitious characters can help you define and understand the kind of customers you are chasing in the complex and multifaceted healthcare sector. You’ll learn how to reach them, too.
The best place to start? Research. Look at the profile of your current customers and create personas based on what you know about them—any similarities relevant to the service you market. These personas can be used in digital and traditional media to create a consistent message.
BEST PRACTICES FOR:
Healthcare integrated advertising
We want to leave you with some best practices for healthcare integrated marketing. Stream will use these strategies to boost your business in a competitive advertising space!
Cross-device optimization
Consumers in the healthcare space may not convert all in one go. Some may begin the journey on a smartphone or tablet, put it down, and then finish up later from a laptop.
Optimize for cross-device usage, and your omnichannel marketing will be all the more effective. With a more streamlined and professional online experience, customers and patients will be more likely to stick with your services well into the future.
Balance the short- and long-term
Short-term burst campaigns can bring in a lot of traffic. You need to balance them with continuous online visibility for the long term. With this approach, known as “always-on marketing,” you can enhance your online presence with organic and paid digital media.
Keep your messaging consistent
Use the same slogans, identities, and brand colors across all your marketing channels for the best results in integrated healthcare marketing.
A unified omnichannel approach will keep your brand top of mind and change perceptions of your brand. Home in on your central themes across all channels. You might just change a skeptical audience’s opinion on your brand values and all that you bring to the table.
What are your competitors doing?
Your brand doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Integrated marketing campaigns need to weave a coherent story about their brands, and your competitors are an excellent resource for inspiration. Draw from their successes to create some of your own!
Just keep in mind: However good their approach may be, you can do better. You only need the right tools and the right integrated healthcare advertising team at your disposal.
Optimize your integrated media buy
With all-inclusive strategies, media coverage, and the data to understand how the two work together, you’ll make smarter decisions about when and how to use the marketing tactics in your arsenal.
With Stream as your partner, we’ll take you beyond the broad theory and into the nitty-gritty details. Learn what platforms to harness at what time. Meet your audience where they are and fine-tune your marketing for better return on investment.
We access thousands of quality data segments to behaviorally target the audience that drives revenue for your business. Our database and list of addressable households mean we can deliver creative marketing across media, optimizing for ad type and placement.
We’re a fully integrated healthcare marketing agency, so the right hand always knows what the left hand is doing! For coordinated media buys that maximize your ad spend, integration is the key piece of the puzzle.
ONE TEAM, ONE MESSAGE, ONE OPTIMIZED MARKETING FUNNEL
Three-fourths of healthcare advertising is providing world-class care. That other quarter is an integrated marketing campaign that shows your future patients who you are and what you do in a clear and decisive way. It cuts through the static and gets you seen and heard by the right people.
At Stream Companies, we have our finger on the pulse of many healthcare industries. From urgent care to hospitals, med spas to cosmetic surgery, we have the expertise you need to succeed. Reach out to us and speak with our healthcare integrated advertising team today!