Nine healthcare marketing mistakes to avoid
1. Poor strategy
Before you start anything, it is important to have a well-defined plan that clearly states your end objectives. If you don’t give planning a required degree of attention, then for sure your efforts will go in vain. You might even end up losing your qualified leads and face a decline in your revenue. You know how to market your services, but if you don’t have a patient-centric strategy, then sorry to say you are just burning money.
2. Ill-managed website
You read somewhere or someone suggested you to have a personalised website for yourself, so you got one. That’s very good. Today, most people perform an online search about their doctors and then plan a visit to their practice. But it’s of no use if you don’t refresh the content or stay active on social media platforms.
Secondly, your website needs to be user-friendly and set up with SEO (search engine optimisation) to rank high in search engine results. Another important thing is to have your website functioning smoothly on different platforms such desktops, mobiles, tablets, etc.
3. Unbalanced promotion
You need to have quality promotion. Both over- and lack of promotion can be a blunder. So, it is necessary to have good content and share it, especially on social media platforms. But you also need to remember “too much of anything is good for nothing.” Don’t over-post and become a spammer, since people never look for sales pitches or obsessive and self-praising write-ups. Post only valuable content to gain the trust of your existing patients and potential ones.
4. Non-personalisation
Even if you are creating quality content, running a dynamic and intuitive website, if you miss the target audience, you will end up wasting your healthcare marketing. Remember to do the right marketing with the right audience at the right time. For instance, a campaign launched for women’s health issues should not be sent to male members in your email listing.
Instead of automated reply over social media or emails, go for a personalised note that will only take a minute for you to write. Automated messages are impersonal and have a good chance of turning off recipients.
5. Ignoring mobile platform
Ignoring mobile technology is one of the biggest blunders you can make in the world of healthcare marketing. Today, most people opt to browse the Internet on their mobile devices instead of their desktops or laptops. Optimise your website, emails and other marketing efforts so they look presentable on a mobile screen.
6. Non-analytical
Just investing in marketing activities and not measuring the ROI is not acceptable. Analytics will help you get an estimation of the time and money invested in an activity and its result. Also, you can rework or modify your strategies to upsurge conversions. Make use of an analytics tool such as Google Analytics. If you aren’t doing this, you will never know the impact of your healthcare marketing campaign on your potential patients.
7. Wrong keywords
As part of website SEO, you need to place the right keywords in your content. Do some homework and research before finalising any keywords. You can make use of the Google keyword planner tool to search the right keywords that help you reach the right audience. Wrong keyword selection will make your work unsearchable and all your efforts will be wasted.
8. Single content format
You need to write valuable content that’s helpful for the reader. But your content type should not be restricted to just blogs; rather, you should include infographics, eBooks, slideshows, videos and podcasts, as well. This helps you repurpose already existing content and invite readers’ attention.
9. Ignoring reviews
Replying to reviews is a crucial part of healthcare marketing. Whether positive or negative, all reviews need to a response. Thank your reviewer for taking the time to give good or bad feedback. Take negative reviews as a learning opportunity and work on improvement. Ignoring reviews creates a perception of you as an unconcerned individual with whom patients can never grow a good relationship or feel friendly.
Healthcare marketing is a major factor behind the success of your practice. If you have recognised your marketing mistakes, work on them and meticulously execute your strategy. This will build a strong online reputation for you. Reach your target audience, engage them and convert them into patients and establishing a long-term relationship.
About Pranjali Singh
Pranjali is a digital marketing content writer at myPracticeReputation, holding 6 years of experience in writing different forms of content. A creative person, fond of writing fiction and poems in her free time. She has done her Masters in English and is pursuing MBA in Marketing Management. She loves to learn new things, irrespective of the source and type of knowledge. She is also a supporter of kinesthetic learning for a better memorisation.
