In the wide world of advertising, no two industries are alike. For more than two decades, Stream Companies has blazed trails in the retail arena, delivering quality traffic to small and large businesses alike.
If you work in the healthcare industry, you know its messaging, demographics, and services are vastly different than those of the standard retailer. However, their marketing needs are just as great—in some cases, greater.
Want to know how Stream’s precision, multifaceted advertising strategy can help healthcare industry professionals blaze new paths of their own? Just read on to see how!
Getting into Gear: A Patient-Focused Strategy
At one time, choosing the right doctor for you or your family was as simple as scheduling an appointment with the office closest to work or home. Back then, you’d rely on word of mouth for recommendations. However, in 2019, it’s safe to say the word-of-mouth era is officially finished, and it’s all thanks to the internet.
With the prevalence of review and ratings websites, even in the medical industry, patients are doing their own research before making a call. As a matter of fact, Pew Research shows that “47% of internet users search for information about doctors or other health professionals before engaging with a health business.”
To secure that engagement, doctors, practices, hospitals, etc. need to do more than simply build credibility. They need to build trust, and Stream’s patient-focused advertising is geared to do just that.
Speaking the Same Language as Your Patients
One of the main reasons healthcare consumers are reading reviews and testimonials online before selecting a doctor or practice is that they’re looking for the best experience possible. Beyond sheer medical expertise, they want a personable staff, welcoming atmosphere, and the same high level of “customer service” they’d expect from a retailer.
In speaking the experience-based language that patients are looking for, Stream helps health businesses to attract, convert, and retain new patients. How do we do this, exactly? It’s all through an integrated approach that blends the holistic and the granular elements of advertising.
Enhancing Your Brand Through Traditional Advertising
Traditional advertising has been around a lot longer than you might think. Record of the first billboards date back as far as the 1830s with the very first advertising agency being established in 1843. However, the history of healthcare advertising (beyond one-off ads for early cure-all medicines and tonics), can be traced as recently as the late 1970s.
At their outset, healthcare ads stayed firmly in the traditional arena. Radio and video were utilized to help providers attract new patients in an increasingly competitive healthcare landscape. While methods changed drastically after the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, traditional ads still proved effective for their localized, homegrown nature. A doctor-patient relationship is a deeply personal thing, after all, and local radio and video ads affect a more personal nature.
Keeping Up with the Video Marketing Boom
Integral to the Stream strategy, whether it be for audio or video, is the use of advanced business intelligence tech. Integrated reporting and analytics software mines in-depth data about your business, its historical advertising efforts, and overall industry position. This information is combined with detailed demographics analyses to help your traditional ads reach the healthcare consumers most likely to engage.
In recent years, we’ve seen a major uptick in the use of video marketing in the healthcare industry. Why, you may ask? It all goes back to the experience-based strategies we talked about earlier. To put your doctors and services in video format helps patients to see personality for themselves. They’re more likely to trust doctors when they see them as people and not just white coats.
Our reporting and analytics mean we can share these video and audio marketing efforts on a wide-reaching but focused scale, one more likely to yield engagement.
Showing Healthcare Compassion Through Reputation Management
Video is just one humanizing element Stream employs in its integrated healthcare advertising approach. Another lynchpin is the use of reputation management—an increasingly pivotal ingredient in successful strategies across all industries.
We touched on that old “White Coat Syndrome” in terms of video marketing impacts. However, reputation management, the act of interacting with patients on review and ratings websites, can be just as effective (in some cases more effective) when alleviating longstanding patient concerns.
Well-Rounded Review Responses
The internet of the modern age has turned into a repository for user thoughts and opinions. Consumers especially are empowered to voice their opinions when it comes to retail; entertainment; and yes, healthcare. In the end, they just want to discuss their experiences.
Bad reviews are an inevitability in every industry but can easily be misconstrued in one as technical as healthcare. Stream aids in tactfully responding to bad reviews to help rectify the experience, providing a compassionate touch that’s needed to foster patient trust.
It’s not just the bad reviews that need a response, however! Responding to good reviews shows just as much thoughtfulness on the part of healthcare professionals and can be instrumental in building patient-focused, experiential credibility.
Developing Your Website with the User Experience in Mind
We all know how attached people are to their devices these days, so it’s no mystery that a well-developed website is crucial to the success of your health business. As a matter of fact, another Pew study has shown that a staggering 77% of patients are using a search engine before making an appointment.
Stream website development is highly comprehensive, focusing not just on the design but on facets such as usability, information architecture, content creation, and more. In the end, aesthetic appeal is important, but will yield very few conversions (appointments) without structured touchpoints. Now, what exactly do we mean by that?
Everything in Its Right Place: Website Touchpoints
“CRO” stands for “Conversion Rate Optimization,” and it’s something you’ll want to become very familiar with in implementing an effective healthcare marketing strategy. Stream client Kremer Eye Center, an innovative LASIK Eye Surgery leader in PA, NJ, and DE, became familiar, and their results truly speak for themselves.
From August 2018 to August 2019, Kremer aimed to increase the number of conversions on the “Schedule a LASIK Consultation” prompts on their website. By further repositioning and highlighting Calls to Action (CTAs) and adding new contact pages, the Stream strategy yielded a 90.91% increase in goal completions.
Similar web strategies majorly boosted Kremer’s traffic from 2018 to 2019, too. There was a 23.86% increase in page views as well as a 47.37% increase in new users.
These gains weren’t all about design. Touchpoint reconfiguration as well as Search Engine Optimization (SEO) played a major role, too!
SEO Content Creation: Empowering Patients Through Education
One of the best ways to engender trust in patients is to empower them to make the big decisions for themselves. Is there a way to effectively do this before you even convince them to schedule an appointment or consultation? At Stream, we say yes, and all because of SEO web content.
Half of SEO content creation is about fine-tuning your web pages with keywords that will grab the attention of Google. However, the other half is about an empowering Inbound Marketing strategy that positions prospective patients as savvy decision-makers.
Attention-Grabbing Content: Attract with Teaching
In the case of one of the most renowned healthcare networks in South Jersey and the Delaware Valley, Cooper University Health Care, their treatments were regionally and nationally lauded. However, they didn’t just want to be known for their medicine. Cooper is also a regionally leading academic hospital teaching the next generation of doctors and surgeons. How could their web content reflect that?
Inbound Marketing and the Stream strategy has helped them bolster not just their website but their blog. By writing content that teaches patients, they’re providing all the needed tools for someone to take the next steps and make an appointment.
Early in life, you learn to trust your teachers for their knowledge and compassion. As an adult navigating a competitive healthcare landscape, the very same holds true.
Is It Time to Enhance Your Healthcare Advertising?
Though the evolution of healthcare advertising can be counted in just a handful of decades, that time has seen an incredible boost in strategies and results. If you suspect these detailed advertising tactics may be exactly what your healthcare business is missing, Stream is here to help.
Contact our team online to enhance your healthcare advertising strategy today!