How To Get Started with Inbound Marketing for Healthcare Companies

As a healthcare marketer, you’ve been watching the vast changes in healthcare marketing over the past few years (read more in State of Healthcare Marketing). However, with schedules and budgets stretched tight, it might be a change you’re resisting. This post can help you walk through some initial, manageable steps for how to get started with inbound marketing for healthcare companies specifically.

1) First, what is inbound marketing? 

Inbound marketing is the method of creating online content (blogs, social media posts, videos, infographics) that attracts your potential customer as they search for answers. Once they’ve landed on your content, the hope is that they will click through it and eventually come to the purchase stage of the buyer’s cycle. Read more on inbound methodology here.

2) So how does inbound marketing work for hospitals and other healthcare companies?

The Pew Research Center recently released a study stating that 72% of internet users searched for healthcare information online (read more about the study at Becker’s Hospital Review). We know people are always going to have questions regarding their health, and can assume they want thorough and reputable answers. Now, we also know they’re starting to see the internet as a worthy source of information.

Enter: your marketing team! If you can answer these healthcare questions and get people to keep coming back to your site for more informative content, it’s more likely they’ll come to you when they need a doctor’s appointment or new healthcare provider.

3) How do we even start increasing our content?

a) Choose your platform: Our go-to content management software is WordPress (read why here), but there are plenty of free tools for aiding your content management.

b) Get to know your audience: You can’t create quality content if you don’t know who you’re talking to. With a plentitude of content out there, visitors won’t read through content which doesn’t speak to them. Break down each of your audiences, using a guide found here, so you can better understand what content they would search for, when they’d look for it, and how you might show up in their results.

c) Set up a promotion schedule or automate promotion: Consistently rolling out new and updated content is key, so whenever a searcher needs an update, you’re their go-to source. Make sure you aren’t being sporadic – be mindful of your content by sticking to a schedule or even automating, using a tool like Buffer or Hubspot. Read more about marketing automation in this post.

What else should we be sure to do with our content?

a) Monitor: If you don’t analyze and then document this strategy, it won’t improve. You need to know what’s working and what’s not. Monitor Google Analytics (with a best practices and set up blog) and set up a Documented Content Marketing Strategy for best results.

b) Optimize your best content: There are tons of free tools for inbound marketing, but sometimes in order to get higher quality traffic, you should pay for more. For example, if you conduct paid ads the likelihood your content will show up in search results increases. What is more, if you run ads during open enrollment periods (when a lot of people are searching for healthcare), the likelihood that sales-ready leads will land on your site also increases.

How do you use paid ads? If you’ve tracked your content, you’ll know which content people especially like. With this, you can select that content for paid ad campaigns right at that time period. Since you already know people like the content, your click through rate will likely be higher and your cost-per-click would then decrease. For more on paid ads read Kissmetrics Blog “5 Things You Must Do Before Jumping Into Paid Advertising.”

Concluding thoughts:

With the majority of healthcare marketers planning to increase their investment in digital marketing (take a look at Econsultancy’s report for more on this), make sure you’re making plans to join the race so you become the go-to resource before others. For help setting up your inbound marketing strategy, contact the digital marketing agency ArcStone.