Healthcare marketing is a very complex process. There are restrictions in advertising medical services, the issue of trust plays a big role, and clients come for various requests: from listing symptoms to finding a specific doctor. Let’s take a closer look at how medical services are promoted digitally and offline.
Limits
In taking care of the health of citizens, legislators limit the promotion of medicines and services. When advertising a medical center, marketers have to operate within tight boundaries. Therefore, we immediately consider the main requirements of the law.
The Ukrainian law “On Advertising” requires people to be warned about the dangers of self-treatment and the need to consult a doctor and read the instructions. The Code of the Republic of Kazakhstan, “On the health of the people and the healthcare system,” insists that advertising be reliable, understandable without special knowledge, and not mislead the consumer.
At the same time, in all three countries, it is forbidden to use some techniques that marketers from other areas have become addicted to.
- Reliability and safety. It is impossible to guarantee the remedy will work to declare the absence of side effects. Also, it is impossible to argue the benefits of natural origin or the conduct of tests required for registration.
- Halo effect. The mention of experts, stars, prominent organizations, and even popular characters in medical advertising is prohibited. In Ukraine, you can’t even show an actor as a doctor, and Kazakhstan forbids portraying children or playing a child’s voice unless the service or facility is specifically for children.
- Cases, and reviews. It is possible to tell how friendly the patient became after teeth whitening and how it helped him in life, only in Kazakhstan. Ukraine forbids any reference to examples of successful treatment.
- Play on emotions. Laws require clinic advertisements not to give the impression that people should use the medical service. You can’t push people to self-diagnose and assume that the audience has some disease. In Ukraine, it is not allowed to portray the changes in the body due to diseases and threatens to worsen the condition if a person does not use the advertised product.
All these rules relate to advertising the definition each country gives in its way. When deciding whether to launch a particular campaign, read the relevant laws and consult with lawyers to avoid fines.
Medical marketing for clinics and medical centers
- Find out which ads bring in patients. Medical marketing will show clear reports on which campaigns bring calls and appointments and which do not.
- Allocate your budget rationally. Get an automatic payback calculation for each launched activity.
- Control how administrators and doctors communicate with patients over the phone. Listen to audio recordings of calls and teach beginners with them.
- Don’t lose patients. Medical marketing will show how many calls the clinic misses and whose fault it is. Send notification of the missed call to email and SMS.
Medical Marketing
A survey of 5,000 respondents shows that patients want more computerized healthcare services.
- 58% of respondents would like to receive a reminder of a visit to the doctor by mail or phone.
- 53% opt for online communication with Ph.D.
- 50% of respondents expect the introduction of video consultations.
The study was conducted in the USA, but it reflects a global trend – digitalization, which is also reflected in the CIS market. People google their symptoms, search the web for pill instructions, and find their doctors online. So ignoring Internet marketing in medicine will not work.
One of the problems of promoting medical services online is incomplete analytics. People prefer to find out the nuances of services and make an appointment by phone. At the same time, they often call rather than fill out a feedback form, hoping to talk to a specialist quickly. Linking phone calls to specific advertising campaigns and requests allows dynamic call tracking. It makes it easy to track the user journey and the effectiveness of digital campaigns.
Contextual advertising of medical services
Contextual advertising can be created quite quickly and easily edited, and it will soon lead potentially interested users to the site – if a specialist works with it. It allows you to reach a wide audience: people looking for information on the web about the treatment of specific diseases, their symptoms, doctors, and even competing clinics.
Restrictions for online advertising in various systems
There are limitations to launching contextual advertising as part of the medical center’s marketing strategy.
- Gmail ads and remarketing for medical and beauty services are unavailable on Google Ads.
- Yandex Direct does not impose functional restrictions but requests documents confirming the advertiser’s certification, and a disclaimer about contraindications must be installed on the ad itself.
- Targeted Vkontakte advertising will also ask for a license, certificates, and confirmation of a doctor’s qualifications, to which you also need to attach a plate for a consultation with a doctor.
- Facebook does not allow health-related ads to be targeted to minors and requires that you follow the general rules of not shocking or misleading your audience.
Promotion of medical services using contextual advertising
After creating a PPC campaign, pay attention to targeting. It often doesn’t make sense to go after reach, including broad match keywords – it’s better to select effective exact match words carefully. Our partners do this when they set up contextual advertising for a dental clinic. Read the case study on how they managed to free up 30% of the budget:
Listening to calls from people who click on contextual advertising is also useful. So you can analyze how well they understand the ad’s message and what questions they ask. Based on this, you can change the ad to bring more targeted hits.
Analyze what requests patients most often apply for. This can bring unexpected insights. For example, it has become a discovery for our clients that people are more likely to seek information about diseases of the joints than the back.
SEO for medicine
According to a study of SEO for the medical services market, 74.2% of traffic comes to clinic websites due to SEO. And this is despite the many mistakes researchers have noticed in website optimization. For example, 84% of resources did not show reviews of doctors, and only 18% of clinics indicated appointment schedules.
It is important to place information about the doctors working in the clinic: specializations, certificates, and awards. List the procedures these specialists carry out so that the person understands what is ahead of him. Make an informative site, and traffic will grow. And so that it eventually converts into leads, place phone numbers and a callback form in a conspicuous place.
At the same time, do not forget about the technical optimization of the site. Check page loading speed, and find and fix broken links and images. Optimize your site for mobile platforms because they already account for most of the world’s traffic. The competent setup of the company’s website, improvement of link weight, and content optimization made it possible to quadruple the traffic of the clinic’s website.
Registration in the databases of online maps will help attract patients who are looking for clinics nearby. This applies to emergencies and preventive procedures and consultations convenient for a working person to get near home or work. In addition, the presence of an institution on the map increases the credibility of potential customers.
Registration in Google My Business and Yandex Catalog is a must-have for promotion in these systems, but do not lose sight of local directories and directories. Links to the site from reliable sources will become an excuse for search engines to increase the site’s position in local results, which will attract free relevant traffic.
Social Media Marketing
Promoting medicine on social media is not an easy task. Users are more likely to share memes than clinic content that is reminiscent of illness. However, this is a fertile ground for promotion among a young audience, who would rather search for information on the net than turn to “their” doctor. Therefore, it is worth investing in building an expert image for individual specialists and entire clinics.
Make viral content that will increase the awareness of the clinic. People are happy to share interesting facts, infographics, and motivating jokes on their pages. Clear and creative content is a direct way to increase traffic from Social Media Marketing.
Social networks are also useful for collecting feedback. Comments, likes, polls, and other engagement elements will help you understand what customers like, what worries them, and what to focus on to improve the image. Use these tools to research the most relevant audience.
Offline
There is an opinion that one of the disadvantages of offline promotion is the inability to analyze its effectiveness. But this is not entirely fair. Static call tracking allows you to track what sources customers call from and optimize offline campaigns so that they bring more customers. This is especially true for medical institutions that people attend by appointment.
Outdoor advertising
In medical services, it is logical to rent places “outdoor” near the clinic or its branches. Large medical centers place their outdoor advertising along the main transport arteries. Investing significant budgets in this promotion format increases brand awareness among all city residents.
Advertising in the media
The media audience is much more fragmented than the outdoor advertising audience. Display advertising will come in handy when introducing a new service to the market which had no analogs before. So a wide audience learns about the existence of such treatment, its benefits, and its indications. Also, advertising in the media will be useful to network institutions with a large network of branches.
Benefits of Medical marketing for medical business
- The only official technology partner of Google Analytics among similar services in Eastern Europe.
- Ready-made reports on key parameters and the ability to create your reports on 30+ parameters.
- You can manage 95% of the settings according to the instructions from the Medical marketing agency knowledge base.
- Really fast and professional support – response time less than 4 minutes.
- Ready-made integrations with popular CRM systems and other services.
Conclusions
- Laws limit advertising in the medical field, so marketers cannot apply many of the best practices from other business niches. We advise you to consult with lawyers before launching campaigns to avoid fines.
- Contextual advertising platforms also have restrictions in the healthcare sector. Some may even require license scans during the moderation process.
- More than half of the traffic comes to the websites of medical companies due to SEO. Raising the issue in a narrow area and for a specific location is important.
- Social Media Marketing can be a great tool for collecting feedback and improving services. It is also worth developing the image of an expert for your specialists.
- Offline promotion is still useful because not everyone trusts information on the Internet. Also, billboards or light boxes are seen by all city residents, and an audio clip can be heard on the radio in public places. Display advertising will help tell about new services or promote a network clinic.
- Call tracking will help you track the effectiveness of offline and online advertising. After all, when people are in pain, they most often call and do not wait to be contacted.
