6 Top Healthcare Marketing Examples
These are some of the best healthcare marketing examples, case studies, and tips to be able to visually see why you should be doing a lot of the things we recommend in our blog posts.
Time to check out some.
These 6 examples of healthcare marketing are actual case studies taken from the years of collective experience with our clients here at Intrepy or my experiences and outcomes.
#1 Healthcare Marketing Examples: Website Design & Tips
An Individual Page for Every MAJOR Service & Provider
Here is an example in healthcare marketing of why it is critical to create an individual page for each individual condition or treatment you want to rank well for in organic search.
Healthcare websites that create a main services page list the services they offer and call it a day.
I can tell you for about 99.9% accuracy that you will never rank for service-specific keywords unless you create excellent, keyword rich, long-form content about each service.
Say we searched for a plastic surgeon in Atlanta that does breast augmentations.
A typical search for that would be “breast augmentation near me.”
As you can see search positions 1, 3, and 8, which happen to be the only practice-specific search results, are all service-specific pages.
These practices created in-depth healthcare content on a page entirely dedicated to breast augmentations not just adding it to a list on their services page.
Book Appointment & Chat Features
One of the sole purposes of healthcare marketing is getting a patient to book an appointment.
Once a patient has landed on the website you need to make sure you are not only providing them the information they need to convert but also make it extremely easy for them to book an appointment.
One of the best ways to skyrocket customer service, begin to build a relationship, and improve site conversions is by integrating chat functionality.
96% of patient complaints were related to none exam room factors, and the #1 complaint was communication.
Once you get a chat function set up on your website and have a front desk person task to manage the conversation the options are endless.
There are tons of conditional functionality that you can integrate such as specific intro questions based on what page they are visiting.
It can even serve as a great way to generate new email address collection by asking for an email if you are away to follow up later.
Integrate into your CRM and add those potential patients into a drip-email campaign if they don’t schedule.
Great Chat Options:
1. Lasso (HIPAA)
2. MedChat (HIPAA)
3. Ngage Live Chat (HIPAA)
4. Intercom (Non-HIPAA)
5. Olark (Non-HIPAA)
Mobile Responsive Website
It has become essential in 2021 for your website to be built for mobile devices.
Mobile traffic owns about 50% of all website traffic now, and that is expected to continue to rise.
As of 2018, Google announced the rollout of mobile first indexing.
This means that the mobile version of your site is the priority that they index and serve in search.
Therefore, if your site is not responsive and built for mobile, it will become increasingly difficult for an effective healthcare marketing strategy.
#2 Healthcare Marketing Examples: Medical SEO
Here are some real-life examples of healthcare marketing when it comes to increasing your search engine optimization and rankings. There are also some amazing tips and case studies on why to implement and how.
Medical search engine optimization can be a complex and complicated landscape, so I am going to take you through some examples of a great local SEO strategy for a healthcare organization.
To get started, check this video out on how to rank treatment pages highly in search results.
Website structure is a critical aspect of search engine optimization.
It is the foundation for all of the other local SEO initiatives, so it is critical to not ignore it.
The basis of any excellent web page or post is a focus keyword.
This is the main keyword that you are trying to rank a page or post for.
However, if you structure things correctly you for rank for many more long tail keywords.
#1 Include Your Focus Keyword in Specific Places on the Page
There are a few critical places to make sure your keyword is included to ensure the highest level of ranking impact.
In the Title Tag of the Page – Close to the Front
This may seem like a given but just placing your focus keyword in a title tag is not near as effective as positioning it as close to the front as possible.
Place Keyword in URL & Keep URL Short
URL length plays a vital role in ranking a page.
A study of 1 million searches on Google showed that short URLs rank the best in search results.
Answer Your Page Topic In Totality
What I mean by this is to rank for a completive keyword Google rewards the best content.
The average length of the #1 organic search result is 2,416 words.
That shows how much Google values authoritative and complete content pieces.
They want to ensure the #1 slot fully answers that person’s medical search query.
This is one of the biggest focuses you need to add to your healthcare marketing strategy in 2020. Improve and lengthen content.
Let’s go back to that search results for “breast augmentation near me.”
If you recall the first search result is below.
Take a look at their page here.
See how in-depth on the top they go?
They answer close to every common question a female patient could have about breast surgery.
That is great content.
A great way to get ideas for questions people are searching for is a free tool called Answer the Public.
Type in your page focus keyword in this case “breast augmentation” and voila!
Items in darker green are higher volume searches to target first.
Content Marketing
An active healthcare content marketing arm of your overall healthcare marketing approach is the perfect ongoing SEO you need after you perfect your on-site SEO.
Check this video out on what thin content is and why it is killing the SEO for your healthcare marketing strategy.
This is where the rubber meets the road for building long term digital marketing success and growing organic website traffic.
Just take a look at one of our clients since we took over and implemented an effective content marketing strategy.
They went from doing 3,109 page views in June of 2018 to over 7,467 page views in March of 2020!
That is a 140.17% increase in website traffic in 10 months!
Invest in Keyword Research
It is imperative when any healthcare marketing strategy for medical practices that you start content marketing planning with keyword research.
A few great places to start that are FREE are…
Trusty Google Suggest
This couldn’t be easier.
Go to Google and start typing in the keyword you are planning content for, and Google will spit out popular topical suggestions.
Make sure to include some of those long-tail keywords in your content.
Google My Business is a Top Local Ranking Factor
Most practices and hospitals are incredibly familiar with Google My Business (GMB) at this point.
If you are reading this and have not you need to go and claim or create your Google My Business for your medical practice right NOW.
Here are the step by step instructions to set up a Google My Business profile.
I will skip over that for now.
The biggest thing I want to focus on is making sure you complete your profile IN ENTIRETY.
Go under the info section and max out the relevant categories and fill out the rest of the areas.
info page google my business, and don’t forget to add pictures.
Pro Tip: For the business description make sure to mention your name, main focus keyword, and city in the first 150 words.
Reputation Management & Online Reviews
Reputation and reviews have quickly become one of the most important local ranking factors.
Why? Because reviews create a higher trust score with Google as well as they give relevance in search if you get reviews that contain your important focus keywords.
Check out the example screenshots below of two different searches:
- tennis elbow treatment near me
- skin cancer removal
As you can see in both in the bold text they both have a review on their Google My Business that mentions those terms.
These are the top ranking listings in their respective specialties locally for these search terms.
Where should you start to target new reviews? #1 Place to start is below….
The best way to generate new reviews is by working them into your patient check out workflows via an email or SMS text message.
I recommend connecting with patients within 1-2 days of the patient visit so it is close to the point of service.
Often all you need to do is ask!
When polled 70% of patients said they would leave a review for a medical practice if they were asked.
If you are looking for a more automated approach look for an agency that provides reputation management for doctors service.
Below is an example of a peripheral nerve surgery client of ours, Tim Tollestrup, MD, of an email and SMS text message request to leave a review.
These campaigns have been widely successful by simply asking patients, close to point of care, to tell their story via a review on Google or Healthgrades, etc.
Luckily there are many affordable tools and options, and we recommend automating and involving text messages whenever possible.
Text messages make it easier on the patient and are a faster way of generating reviews. SMS messaging has a 98% open rate!
Citation Building for SEO
Building new directory listings for a healthcare practice is known as citation building.
Standard listings sites are Yelp, Foursquare, Google My Business, and more.
You want to focus on making sure the NAP (name, address, and phone) on your contact page gets added to as many local and national directories as possible.
This will help grow your ranking for your website as well as your GMB.
Some of these verifications will require a phone call to the practice to verify it is a working office with real people in it.
Start with the most recognizable pages as the backlink they create to your website is the most important.
Here is a massive list of 1,000+ local and niche citations by business category that will keep you busy for a while!
Or, if that looks exhausting (which it is, trust me) you can take the whole process off your hands with our physician listings management service.
Backlink Building
Backlinks are one of the major healthcare marketing trends for SEO growth.
What is a backlink?
Backlinks are links from external websites and relevant content that link to a piece of content or page on your website.
Why do backlinks matter?
Backlinks are critical because they give Google an “upvote” that someone else on the internet has seconded this content as a reliable source of information.
It’s like having someone vouch for your website.
This helps build trust in SERPs for that content, and ultimate is a significant deciding factor in how the page will rank.
Therefore, once you create an excellent piece of content as part of your healthcare marketing strategy, you need to focus on building high-quality backlinks back to that piece.
Here is a great example of a backlink we built for a large orthopedic practice that wanted to generate more SEO for a procedure that they focus on.
You can see the blue link in the middle for “total joint replacement in Tennessee” on this CuriousMindMagazine article that links back to the page about that particular topic.
CuriousMindMagazine has a high domain authority and generates millions of patient visitors per month!
#3 Healthcare Marketing Examples: Digital Advertising to Target New Patients
Here are some great examples in healthcare marketing of leveraging digital advertising and how to use it to reach new patients.
One of the top digital healthcare marketing strategies is leveraging paid advertising in the right way to reach highly targeted, local patients.
However, we see many practices blow through ad budgets with little to no ROI or even an effective way to know if the results were positive.
I have broken down a good rule of thumb for each of the popular digital advertising platforms and when to leverage them for your practice.
Paid Search Ads Examples in Healthcare Marketing
The two most popular SEM platforms for healthcare practices are Google Ads and Bing Ads.
What is fantastic about Google Ads is the level of search intent targeting you can do based on which keywords you are bidding on.
This will help determine how “purchase-ready” a potential patient may be.
A great example is an orthopedic practice that could bid on the term “knee replacement” which in theory is a great fit.
However, their budget could end up being spent on people looking to educate themselves on what a knee replacement is and not looking for a provider in their area to perform the procedure.
However, you could be better served bidding on “knee replacement surgeon Atlanta” which would highly correlate to a patient that is a very warm lead.
Google Ads and Bing Ads are great for practices looking to target specific keywords for procedures or surgeries that they make a considerable margin on and able to spend some funds to acquire high-dollar patients.
Here are a few more examples of search ads for a client of ours in the hormone space and the orthopedic space. We are leveraging search ads for their medical practices to amazing results.
You can check out their case studies here:
Social Media Advertising Examples in Healthcare Marketing
Social Media Advertising Examples in Healthcare MarketingOne of the top healthcare marketing trends in 2021 is leveraging social media advertising to promote and grow medical practices.
There are so many options and platforms to leverage how do you know which are best?
Now that Facebook owns Instagram we find a combo of the two platforms, depending on your target marketing, is ideal.
Here is an amazing case study and example of healthcare marketing leveraging social media ads for a client we were marketing COVID testing for back-to-school parents in Brooklyn, NY.
The most effective types of digital advertising campaigns on social media are retargeting or “offer-based” ads.
Retargeting ads are when you drive traffic to your website via organic or paid search methods and then retarget those people with ads on social media.
This is effective because these ads are not cold outreach because the potential patient has already been to your website in search of information and maybe not ready to book an appointment.
Here is a great retargeting ad example for orthopedic marketing for a client. We are serving these ads to patients who have visited their website or social media before.
You will notice they are mainly focused on showcasing new patient reviews we have generated for them as a means of “social proof” that says “hey you know about us but see what our patients have to say about us.”
This helps get potential patients over the edge to take the next step to booking an appointment.
#4 Healthcare Marketing Examples: Video Marketing
Video is the preferred method of how people consume information in 2020.
With a patient’s attention span now barely that of a goldfish around 8 seconds you need to capture and communicate quickly.
Video marketing is a highly effective healthcare marketing strategy to reach new patients.
The fantastic thing is creating a video does not have to be as expensive or daunting as most healthcare organizations think it is.
We have tons of practices creating highly engaging and compelling video content and reaching new patients.
Youtube is the second largest search engine behind Google and can be much easier to rank for highly competitive keywords over Google search.
Above is a video healthcare marketing example of a client that we got set up on Youtube to promote a new laser machine for skin resurfacing that they had purchased.
Invest in getting a high-quality intro and outro animated graphic that you can reuse on all your videos.
This will help add a touch of high quality to it without crushing your budget.
Learn Youtube SEO
Once you have your video templates and have a content calendar created go about producing 3-5 videos per month including your providers and demos.
Videos show up in search results now so they can be a quick and effective way to rank well in organic search for highly competitive healthcare marketing keywords.
Pro Tip: Get your videos transcribed and put them up on the website with your Youtube version embedded,
This will allow you to benefit from the blog post style SEO and the video SEO when people watch the Youtube video on your website.
Here are more Youtube SEO Tips to watch before posting any videos.
#5 Healthcare Marketing Examples: Social Media
I am going to skip what social media is and get to some examples in healthcare marketing and which platforms are the best to focus on.
I know 99.9999% of practices and hospitals reading this post understand at some level the power and reach social media carries.
The problem is answering “is it really effective for healthcare marketing?” and “what platforms should I be on?”
To answer the effectiveness question simply YES.
If done right social media is a highly effective way to reach new patients and create brand loyalty.
A great example is we have a medical spa client that was present on Facebook and Instagram when they approached us but severely underutilizing the platforms.
We revamped their strategy and focused on building engaged, local women that fit in their target demographic surrounding their 3 locations.
When we got started, their Instagram was two years old with around 200 followers.
Their Instagram was driving little to no real traffic to their website which is what is most important.
Generating leads via social media to the website or via messenger.
After 12 months of implementing a proactive and dynamic social media marketing strategy, they have grown to over 2,200 followers generating 100s of website visitors a month.
Check out the numbers below from Feb 2020 and the fantastic news is the followers by city graphic that shows the core of their followers are in the cities they have their locations in.
High quality, local traffic!
That is the power of social media. In just one isolated example.
What are the best social media platforms for healthcare practices?
There is value in each of the major platforms; however, we think there is a priority of platforms that are the best fit for medical practices.
- Youtube
Facebook and Instagram are the two most critical social media platforms to include in a healthcare marketing strategy.
We created a handy optimal posting time infographic for you to reference.
Pro Tip: I recommend posting on Facebook 3X per week and Instagram daily with up to 2-3 posts per day if possible.
#6 Healthcare Marketing Examples: Tracking & Analytics
Successfully tracking your healthcare marketing strategy implementation is critical. Here are a few examples of how to effectively track your healthcare marketing success.
Analytics and reporting should become a great healthcare marketer’s best friend.
Here is an example of the marketing growth dashboards that all of our partner clients get 24/7/365 access to.
As you can see it is easy to see all of your analytics and conversion tracking metrics right in one master dashboard.
It starts with making sure you are tracking your program effectively.
Also, make sure you are tracking your phone calls. Here is a healthcare marketing example of call tracking that we leverage for our clients.
Too often we see potential clients when we do a practice acceleration session missing out on 50% or more of their lead data because they are only tracking form submissions.
If you do not have a dashboard or analytics tool, here are some of the most important free platforms to make sure you have what you need to get started.
We leverage these tools on a daily basis to grow our website and our client’s medical websites:
Google Search Console
This is a free tool provided by Google that allows you to track the search engine rankings of your medical practice website.
Not to mention it helps you catch errors that can pop up from time to time and cause search ranking issues on your website.
Google Analytics
This is a mainstay that every practice must have on their website.
To say it just tracks traffic to your website is a major disservice.
There is an extremely powerful analytics tool that can show you loads of valuable information about how patients behave on your website.
Google Tag Manager
A must for tracking not only Google Ads but many other tracking tools and software.
Facebook Pixel
Get it on your website. I have seen too many people go for years without embedding the Facebook pixel.
Then in walks a healthcare marketing agency and we are missing years of data that we could have leveraged to advertise and remarket to your patients.
Attribution is King
Attribution is powerful.
It shows you the journey that your patients are taking from the first conversion to what they are doing the rest of the time in the marketing funnel.
It is essential when we market for our clients because it allows us to show them not only what is driving the most leads, but ultimately what is converting patients into booked appointments.
Which is what really matters!
Wrapping Up Healthcare Marketing Examples
When putting together effective healthcare marketing strategies for your practice make sure to leverage the examples of healthcare marketing you read in this blog post.
The core components include a well-designed medical website, local SEO, digital advertising, physician liaison marketing, and social media.
Remember to focus on the quality of the content you are making and focus on delivering REAL value to your patients.
If you do that, all you need to focus on is hiring for help on the technical execution.
I hope you found these healthcare marketing examples and case studies a help and were able to glean some ideas to help improve your marketing strategy.
If you are struggling to get started feel free to reach out for a free consultation. We offer medical marketing services to healthcare organizations and practices.
