The Ultimate Healthcare Marketing Manual

Posted on in Resources, White Papers & Guides

Effective healthcare marketing strategies share one vital, all-encompassing characteristic: trust. Marketing to patients is an invitation to put their health, wealth, and happiness in the hands of healthcare professionals they’re meeting at a time of uncertainty and discomfort.

Our downloadable healthcare marketing manual offers in-depth, channel-by-channel insights to help your brand grow. Take our proven healthcare marketing tactics with you; download the manual today!

What Is Healthcare Marketing?

Healthcare marketing is the ongoing process of marketing medical services. Shaped by a healthcare marketing plan, the primary goal is: to attract new patients and/or referring physicians and retain existing patients.

Secondary goals include 1) highlighting elective services and 2) educating patients and families to improve outcomes and increase overall quality of life.

A well-crafted healthcare marketing strategy utilizes all relevant marketing channels, including organic search, local listing optimization, paid media and email marketing. Crucially, every marketing effort should be measured and evaluated based on key performance indicators that allow marketers to calculate return on investment.

Why Is Marketing Important in Healthcare?

Your hospital, clinic, office or practice exists first on a screen. In nearly every scenario, the first contact a prospective (non-emergency) patient has with your practice is digital, which makes digital marketing your opportunity to make a positive first impression and be more visible than your competitors are.

Most healthcare marketing ideas ultimately seek to address three goals:

  1. Patients finding you.
  2. Patients choosing you.
  3. Patients returning to you the next time they need care.

Today’s tech-savvy patients have elevated expectations and habits shaped by years of communicating, working, shopping and relying on technology. From a user experience perspective, your practice isn’t just competing against the rival provider down the street. Your patients are also measuring your digital marketing, your patient portal and appointment scheduling against their experiences on Amazon, eBay and every platform they use on a regular basis.

No pressure, right?

The modern online shopper is your new customer and your new potential customer, and when they shop for healthcare services on their phones, tablets, laptops and desktops – they judge you. It’s time you used healthcare digital marketing to your advantage.

Our Comprehensive Guide to Healthcare Marketing Techniques

Download the guide today to learn how to improve your digital marketing efficiency, build your online reputation and bring people who need your help in the door.

Specifically, we discuss:

Ready to dig in? We promise, this won’t hurt a bit. (OK, you might feel just a little poke …)

Download it now!

Local Listings Management for Healthcare Organizations

A local online listing is the real estate your healthcare organization receives for free at the top of search engine results pages like Google or Bing.

Local listings also include directory sites like Yelp or Vitals.com. Healthcare listings can also appear on maps, apps, voice searches, social media channels and elsewhere. 

Each local listing looks a little different depending on the website or app used, but consists of basic information like:

  • Pictures of your building or office.
  •  A map showing your location or service area.
  • Online reviews (on platforms like Google reviews, Yelp, WebMD, Vitals.com, Healthgrades, etc.)
  • Your street address.
  • Hours of operation.
  • Phone number.
  • Website.
  • Booking link.

But these local listings – which also go by other names like “local SEO,” “business listings” and “location pages” – aren’t impressive or helpful when they’re automatically generated using whatever information about search engines find across the web.

Impactful local listings are created, owned, optimized and managed by you or your hired vendor and they can generate incredible results.

Local business listing management for healthcare organizations is critical and, depending on your structure and resources, there may be no better investment of your time than local SEO for healthcare.

What Does Healthcare Local Listing Management Look Like?

Local listings management encompasses:

  1. Claiming your listings.
  2. Completing the forms required with the relevant information for your business/organization, including correcting all false/outdated information you find there.
  3. Uploading on-brand photos.
  4. Properly organizing and updating listings for your sub-locations – proper parent/child page organization for smaller campuses or affiliated clinics/urgent care centers.
  5. Pushing your organization’s correct vital information to the entire Internet “ecosystem” (i.e. other listing publishers beyond the three major search engines, including IYPs, directories, social media networks and aggregators).
  6. Identifying and suppressing duplicate listings.
  7. Monitoring and reporting location-level problems.

Local listings management for healthcare providers is important when it comes to local SEO (search engine optimization) because the search engines value this information from the perspective of their users. If Google users routinely find incomplete and inaccurate business listings, they might make Bing their default search engine instead.

Remember, your prospects’ first impression of you will most likely be your local listing, whether they perform a branded search for a physician or facility or use service keywords combined with local terms, like “foot doctor near me,” “acupuncture, Denver,” “primary care physicians in Wicker Park,” etc.

Trust matters, and inaccurate hours of operation, poor photos or missing information jeopardizes trust almost immediately.

The Local Listings Leader: Google Business Profile

By far the single most important local listing any business can claim and manage is Google Business Profile (GBP). Formerly known as Google My Business, GBP is a free tool for businesses to manage their online presence across all Google products, including Google Search and Google Maps.

Google Business Profile on Google Search

In Google Search, your local listing takes the form of what’s called a “Knowledge Panel.”

For entities in the healthcare industry, it typically takes up the top two-thirds of the right side of the page (on desktop) and looks like this:

Your Google Business Profile should include:

  • Name of organization. Use the name of the organization as it appears in the real world. And be sure to follow Google’s special rules for healthcare practitioners, which we will cover in detail in our section on setting up your GBP.
  • Link to your website. If your business has multiple locations, each link should take users to the relevant location page. If you’re managing the listings for a smaller provider or single office, it’s okay to link people to the homepage. Don’t use a link shortener like Bitly; include the full URL.
  • Link to Google Maps driving directions. If you have a separate billing office or multiple addresses, please put your main address where people will want to drive to. Of course, a practice with the same name that operates in multiple locations can have multiple listings, one for each location.
  • Google Reviews snippet. A lot more information on how to get positive reviews from your patients and customers is included in this marketing manual.
  • Business category (Example: Dentist). Tip: You can directly edit this. Be concise, local and accurate. Check out this full list of supported medical/health categories from Google, which begin in row 103. Sometimes, this renders as a Business description (Example: Dentist in Garfield Township, Michigan), which you can add and edit.
  • Business information (address, hours, phone). Tip: This information, if not managed properly, can really throw customers off. Keeping hours, address and phone updated is crucial.
  • Suggest an edit. Clicking this option leads to a pop-up where users are invited to edit the listing’s name, location, hours, etc., or mark the location as closed, non-existent or a duplicate. Tip: If you forget to update your address after a move to a new building, people could use this feature to suggest to Google that you no longer exist.
  • Questions & Answers. This is where the “Ask a question” button encourages visitors to ask your business a question. Tip: If users have not asked any questions, ask and answer some yourself. Start with some basic questions such as “How many doctors work here?” or “Are you a chiropractor?”
  • Reviews from the web. This offers a snippet of review ratings and the number of reviews from third-party review sites, like Facebook. Clicks to, in this instance, your organization’s Facebook page. Tip: You can encourage reviews from your staff members and former patients to get the rating you want.
  • Popular Times. This feature allows users to select day of the week and see when your organization is most and least busy throughout the course of a typical day. Includes a “Plan your visit” feature that tells users how long patients/customers typically spend at an appointment. In this portion of the listing, Google collects data from user devices to detect how busy a location is. From there, they can collect daily visitor averages and provide live data to inform users as to how busy a location is.
  • Write a review & add a photo. These buttons link users to Google reviews and the Google sign-in to upload stored photos of the business or organization.
  • Reviews. This section features excerpts of actual reviews from Google reviews, including a small picture of the reviewer and a link to view all Google reviews.

How to Claim Your Google Listing(s)

For healthcare organizations with fewer than 10 locations, which represents the vast majority of private practices, claim and begin to manage your information across Google Search and Maps by going to google.com/business.

We’ve got a step-by-step guide to creating or claiming your Google Business Profile when you’re ready to get started. 

How Physicians and Facilities Should Set Up Their GBP

There’s a difference in how individual physicians and facilities should set up their GBP listings.

If you’re a single practitioner practice, you’ll only need one GBP listing, so your work is easy from there. If you’re a multi-practitioner practice, every individual healthcare professional should have their own listing if:

  • They operate in a public capacity, or
  • They can be directly contacted during regular business hours.

Multi-practitioners with multi-location facilities can create a listing for each location. From there, you should make sure each doctor is only searchable at one location. While you can have a doctor at multiple listings, it can dilute the search power. Do your best to choose the location that makes the most sense for a doctor’s listing.

Optimizing Your Google Business Profile Listing

Most established medical practices have had GBP listings for years, but optimizing your listing will improve its value to users and your practice.

  • Optimize your listing by filling out as many fields as possible. Unique photos and even a video of your practice go a long way in maintaining the professional and personal atmosphere a doctor’s office needs.
  • Ask for reviews from former patients or encourage staff members to leave reviews from their personal accounts. This is a great way to get your reviews and ratings up.
  • You can also ask and answer your own questions in the FAQ section. This anticipates common patient questions and provides detailed answers to remove barriers to conversion.
  • Keep listing information up-to-date by adjusting hours of operation, holiday closures and contact information as needed!

Beyond Google – Local Listings Management

No doubt, Google is the king when it comes to search. But that doesn’t mean you can afford other search engines.

Here are just a few of the sites, aside from Google, you’ll need to manage your local listing on:

  • Yelp – Arguably the most influential review platform on the internet.
  • Apple Maps – More people than ever use iPhones; learn more about Apple Maps.
  • Some websites more specific to healthcare marketing and local listings management are:
  • Vitals.com – physician rating and review system.
  • Healthgrades – another 5-star rating system that can include more than just doctor information.
  • Angie’s List – a service industry-oriented review site.

It might be easy enough to optimize your GBP listing, but local listing management is no easy task. There are third-party services out there that make it less nightmarish.

Here are a few of our recommendations for local listings management services:

  • Moz Local – it’s the most affordable to get your local business listing up to speed, but the speed part is a major factor. They use aggregators which means the data takes a while to populate and isn’t always 100 percent accurate.
  • Brandify – uses a combination of direct relationships and aggregators. They do the heavy lifting getting everything up and running, as well as supporting you afterward. They’re more expensive than Moz and less than Yext, but they can take longer than Moz to get your listings live.
  • Other options include Whitespark or Synup.

There are many local listings management services; you’ll have to decide your budget and move forward.

Reviews for Healthcare Organizations

Chances are, your organization already has Google reviews and additional reviews across crowd-sourced review forums like Yelp, Healthgrades, Vitals.com, Facebook (automatically a part of any business’s Facebook page) and myriad additional doctor review sites, all available for your prospective patients to read.

Here, we look at why online reviews are so important, and we consider the best practices for healthcare organizations for how to manage them to maximize their potential for creating business and minimize the potential damage of negative reviews.

How important are patient reviews?

Online reviews are a critical part of the decision-making process for any potential customer, but they play an outsized role in healthcare.

Do patients use online reviews?

To find a new doctor or specialist, 77 percent of patients read online reviews as their first step. That’s because online reviews serve a similar role in marketing as word-of-mouth referrals. 89% of consumers read reviews before making a purchasing decision and 49% of users give online reviews the same level of trust as a personal recommendation.

Good online doctor reviews encourage reluctant patients to get off the sideline and commit to elective procedures and appointments they’re nervous about.

Good reviews can also earn you out-of-network patients you would never get otherwise. A whopping 48 percent of survey respondents were willing to pay out of pocket to see a doctor with more favorable online reviews than the next-best in-network doctor.

How Do You Get More Online Reviews?

The best way to get good reviews – and this is going to sound simplistic – is to be good at what you do.

Be your best, from reception to medical care to checkout and billing.

On reviews posted to medical review sites, about half of all complaints were about:

  • Bad medical outcomes.
  • Bad medical care/advice they received.
  • Misdiagnoses they received.

The other half of the complaints were about customer service issues like:

  • General rudeness/evident lack of caring.
  • Taking too long to get an appointment.
  • Lack of responsiveness of the front office.
  • Waiting room/emergency room delays.
  • Billing mistakes and insurance issues.

These are common, relatable experiences that prospective parents have a genuine interest in evaluating. The more context and information you can add, the more control your brand maintains in the narrative!

The best way to get reviews is simple: ask!

Send an email. Countless email marketing services will automate requesting reviews for you. After the appointment, send patients an email asking them to review their experience. Be genuine and make it as easy as possible for people: Instead of just asking for a general review, link them directly to a Google, Yelp or Facebook review box, not just your Google Business Profile page.

Give them a printout. Before patients leave the office, hand them a printout that includes your sincere thanks, your absolute commitment to their well-being, and a soft call to action that encourages them to leave a review.

Include a prominent section in your online portal. They’re logging in anyway, so why not encourage them to take a minute to offer their feedback?

Use a link shortener. Whether you’re asking by email, patient portal, or other form of digital communication (such as your website), use a link shortener like Bitly to avoid sending patients a very long and unnecessary URL.

How Doctors Should Respond to Negative Reviews

No one likes a bad online review. No matter how careful you are, or how professional your practice is, you’re bound to get some negative online reviews.

When a patient leaves a 1-star review, take a deep breath and follow these steps:

1. Keep it short. Focus on the complaint, provide the reviewer an opportunity to resolve the issue, and move on.

2. Acknowledge the issue. To make patients feel heard, restate the complaint in your own words and invite the user to contact the office. Try to include a direct phone number or email to someone in the organization who can handle the problem without bouncing the patient between employees.

3. Take it offline. Especially with patient privacy at a premium, keep any further discussions private. If the issue is resolved satisfactorily, reply to the negative review to thank the customer for their patience and for allowing your practice to make things right.

It may seem impossible for a simple five-star rating system to make or break your practice, but reviews are that critical to earning patient trust and confidence.

An Achievable Healthcare Content Marketing Strategy

Content marketing for healthcare is no different from content marketing in any other vertical. Hospitals and health organizations need to attract, engage and delight their audiences to keep them coming back and refer other people they know. Doctors and dentists need to establish trust, authority and expertise, which are the qualities that can differentiate their practice from the competition.

Out of all the major industries, healthcare has been one of the last adopters of content marketing. The organizations and offices that are winning customers and dominating the digital landscape are those with industry-specific marketing strategies for healthcare professionals firmly in place.  

Why Bother with Healthcare Content Marketing?

Over the past decade, Mayo Clinic, Cleveland Clinic, WebMD and other dedicated medical advice hubs have cornered the market on healthcare content. Why should smaller healthcare organizations try to keep pace?

Because content marketing is essential to building brand awareness and trust!

Blogs and resources may not push a patient to schedule an appointment today, but they can put your practice first in the queue when patients do need assistance. Local practices often compete with larger sites thanks to Google’s emphasis on serving quality, local content when it makes sense; Google knows a local doctor’s office is a more realistic option for care than a practice seven states away.

A user who comes across a well-written, informative and entertaining piece of content about in-office teeth whitening vs. at-home teeth whitening will remember that dentist’s office the next time they’re thinking about a cleaning service and other dental topics.

Content marketing is also exceptionally efficient. It generates more than three times as many leads as outbound marketing and costs 62% less!

At the heart of content – especially healthcare content – is trust. Providers’ websites say an awful lot about them in the first two seconds someone sees it. Consider this: If you’re having a complicated procedure, would you rather be operated on by the surgeon whose blog looks like it was written by a kid or the one that offers authoritative information and resources?

  • What if their brand video looks like it was produced in the early 2000s? Does that mean their knowledge is equally out of date?
  • What if their website used Comic Sans?

No one should choose a doctor based solely on their blog or the font on their website (unless it really is Comic Sans). All other things being equal, a decisive differentiator can be the trust and authority earned through quality content marketing.

Content Marketing Drives Appointments

Most of your prospective patients live within driving distance of your brick-and-mortar location, and many search for local terms, like “near me,” “Ann Arbor,” “Emmet County” (users in rural areas often use county-wide searches), or “southeastern Michigan” if they’re willing to travel farther for uncommon expertise.

While primary care physicians have a network of trusted referrals, patients are increasingly taking ownership of their visit to a specialist. Some insurance plans even give their members pre-paid gift cards just for shopping around for procedures. When it comes to their healthcare, individuals are enjoying more freedom than they ever have.

That’s where healthcare content marketing comes in.

Let’s say a user searches for “pediatrician Ann Arbor.” Here are the results for that query:

How did these pediatricians get into the local pack? And how many clinics, practices, medical centers or solo practitioners in Ann Arbor were NOT listed in this local pack? Where are they? Why aren’t they there?

One of the best ways to get into the local pack – and drive appointments – is with high-quality, localized content.

Here’s how to do it!

Create Relevant Content About Your Area

Imagine you’re a pediatrician in Traverse City, Michigan (240 miles northwest of Ann Arbor). These are some examples of healthcare content marketing you could create:

  • A blog post about the best beaches in the area that have shade available, which can then be tied into the importance of using sunscreen and managing kids’ exposure to the sun.
  • An article about how Traverse City gets almost no sun in the winter, and when it’s appropriate for children to start taking vitamin D supplements.
  • A quick video about ice fishing (a very popular sport in the area), and the dangers of young children getting frostbite, as well as how to prevent it from happening.

Google wants to see healthcare organizations as the most relevant for their area, and they’ll reward businesses that are. The content should be highly authoritative; Google evaluates websites for their experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness (known as  E-E-A-T), and they want to see sites provide their readers with a professional experience.

Optimizing web pages for local keywords and publishing helpful, informative content about specific medical conditions drives site traffic and practice appointments.

Creating local and authoritative content is just one way to secure your spot in the local pack. See the sections on local listings and Google Business Profile for more information.

Don’t Be Afraid to Get Social

Is healthcare too serious-minded for TikTok accounts and Facebook pages?

According to an article published by the US National Library of Medicine, 70 percent of healthcare organizations, including hospitals, health systems, and pharmaceutical companies, actively use social platforms.

The Benefits of Using Social Media in Healthcare

Organizations like MD Anderson use social media like their Facebook page for a variety of purposes. These include: 

  • Communicating with patients, customers and the community.
  • Increasing visibility of their organization.
  • Marketing products and services.
  • Providing patients with resources.
  • Promoting events.
  • Sharing public health messages.
  • Boosting fundraising campaigns.

What is the cost-benefit analysis of going to Facebook,  X and YouTube and maintaining a best-practices type of maintenance of those accounts?

Opening accounts on social platforms is free, but your organization needs to dedicate manpower (that’s money) to producing content that’s professional, appropriate, helpful and strategic. You’ll need to post regularly so your organization looks active and lively.

One of the healthcare marketing challenges in social media is time. If you don’t invest in any platform you decide to adopt, then it can have a negative effect on your business.

On the plus side, surveys cited in the US National Library of Medicine reveal that: 

  • 57 percent of consumers said that a hospital’s social media presence would strongly influence their choice regarding where to go for services.
  • A strong social media presence was interpreted by 81 percent of consumers as being an indication that a hospital offers cutting-edge technologies.
  • 12.5 percent of healthcare organizations reported having successfully attracted new patients using social media.
  • Social media platforms are not just megaphones; they are also tools that allow you to do things you could not do otherwise, like:
  • Using your Facebook page Groups functionality to offer patients online patient support groups.
  • Using your organization’s LinkedIn account to create an employee advocacy program.
  • Using Facebook Live or Instagram Stories for community outreach and patient engagement.

Healthcare organizations also currently use their social media accounts to promote prevention and public health campaigns (flu shots, ladder safety, antibiotic resistance awareness) that could not be effectively launched from their website alone.

A health system, clinic or LASIK practice with social media accounts that are sharp-looking, active and helpful come across as competent, tech-savvy and interested in serving its patients and prospects.

The three most popular social media platforms for healthcare organizations are Facebook, X and YouTube. Read on to find out how to use social media most effectively for your business …

Choosing the Right Social Media Channels for Healthcare

Want to make managing your social properties as easy as possible? You can probably eliminate 50 percent of them right now. Boom! You just cut your workload in half.

Streamline your social media marketing to focus on the most relevant channels and stick to them.

Which Social Media Channels Are Right for Me?

First, be honest with yourself about your organization’s resources and processes. Are you expanding into social media marketing without hiring someone else to manage it? Will every post or video have to go through medical and/or legal review? Do you find yourself stressing over what to post to the detriment of other initiatives?

It’s also critical to firmly establish goals. Simply having an account isn’t a valuable goal. Think about what constitutes a win for your brand on X, YouTube, Instagram, or Facebook.

  • Is your goal to build awareness of your practice?
  • Attract new patients?
  • Recruit staff?
  • Galvanize your employees?
  • Drive donations?

Knowing what you want out of social media will help you determine which channels are worth your time. Get in touch for a social media audit and more expert advice!

Proven Paid Media for Healthcare Marketing

Paid media marketing is a universal tool marketers use to drive traffic and gain leads. The advertisements you see in Google? The “promoted” notes at the bottom of social media posts? They’re all paid media!

Paid Media Marketing Strategies for Healthcare Organizations

Paid media offers marketers a range of options to position ads in front of the right audience at the right time. Below you’ll find just a few ways to use paid media to generate cost-effective, high-quality leads.

  • Consider a local search ad on Google Maps. It’ll help people who are new to town find your practice.
  • You can find out where your competitors are advertising in search and promote an offer to lead people your way instead. Perhaps run a “FREE pair of glasses” advertisement.
  • Retarget patients for those non-urgent medical needs. Experiment with static images and videos to get parents to choose you as their pediatrician, for example.
  • You can get a list of new homeowners in your city, and pair direct snail mail with direct digital mail advertising. Start serving ads with El Toro five days before the mailer arrives and keep serving ads online a few days after they get the mailer.
  • If you want to start simple, try boosting an engaging Facebook post.

Website Design and Development

Having a website and maintaining a solid online presence might sound intimidating to the healthcare marketing world. Our developers use tools that connect with other healthcare marketing tools to preserve patient privacy while providing an intuitive, seamless experience with every click.

Here are a few ways to improve your site’s user experience.

Need More Healthcare Marketing Tips? We’ve Got You Covered.

Oneupweb has helped healthcare organizations of all sizes improve their marketing impact and grow their business. For over two decades, we’ve combined deep industry experience with white-glove customer service to help clients reach and exceed their business goals.

Let Oneupweb put together an integrated team of designers, strategists and developers to support whatever is next for your healthcare brand. Get in touch or call 231-922-9977 today to get started.

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