You?ve built and designed a gorgeous website for your medical practice. You?ve optimized your social media accounts to attract wider audiences.
You?re investing in word-of-mouth marketing and referral marketing to build trust with your potential users. Still, your conversion rates are not satisfactory.
One of the most effective ways to build stronger relationships with your audiences is to turn them into your leads and to start engaging them through personalized content.
Here are a few powerful tactics that will help you generate qualified leads for your healthcare company.
1. Provide Delightful Website Experiences
Your website is your healthcare company?s identity card. This is where your searchers first land when researching your medical practice. Now, irrespective of the medical field your organization belongs to, there are a few rules you need to follow.
- Boost your page load time. Website speed is one of the most significant ranking factors and, above all, it determines how users will perceive your website. Today?s users are more demanding and they expect your website to load in less than 3 seconds. Otherwise, 50% of them will kick your site.
- Increase the security of your website. The security of your patents and employees? data should be your paramount. There are a few rules to follow. First, switch to HTTPS, as SSL certificates offer an additional layer of data protection and encryption. Second, your site should meet the regulatory mandates for HIPPA, PCI, and FDA.
- Make your site mobile-friendly. We?re living in the mobile-first era. Google says that 77% of users are searching for local healthcare services via their smartphones. Make sure your content fits the smaller screen, use legible fonts, minimize distractions, increase the size of your buttons, and simplify your signup forms.
These are the basics of on-page optimization. Next, you need to tailor your website optimization to your target audience?s demands. Let?s take the example of hospitals and urgent care centers. Visiting these institutions is usually highly stressful, so make sure your website experience minimizes frustration. Choose a welcoming, user-centric design. Create a comprehensive FAQ page, where you would answer your audience?s most common questions. Provide photos and videos of your facility and include 360-degree video tours. You could also include profiles of each doctor, along with their photo and brief biography. Inform users about urgent care wait times, provide detailed map directions, and offer online payment opportunities. Make your contact information prominent and provide chatbots and live chat support to provide real-time feedback.
2. Optimize your Website for Search Engines
The above mentioned Google report claims that almost 90% of users rely on search engines when searching for healthcare-based queries. Given that the majority of online searchers click on the top three links in the SERPs, your goal is to rank as high as possible.
Do keyword research and you will see that there are millions of online searches for terms like ?doctor,? ?urgent care,? ?hospital? and so forth. Each of these searches is your opportunity to get yourself noticed by your target audience and turn them into organic traffic.
Now, to convert your website traffic into leads, you will need to adopt a user-centric approach to keyword research. In their recent post on keyword research, the OMG digital marketing company claims that marketers need to understand search intent in order to drive relevant traffic and, ultimately, convert them into leads. For example, you should include frequently asked questions in your content and FAQs to appear in Google?s answer boxes. You should also optimize for purchase-related keywords (e.g. buy), contact search terms like (e.g. call), as well as branded and competitor keywords.
Optimize for Local Searches
With the rise of voice search and mobile searches, local search is getting massive. For starters, write local content and optimize your website for location-specific keywords, such as your city, state, neighboring locations, or ZIP code. You should also include phrases like ?hospitals near me? or ?clinics that are open now,? as this is how voice searchers are looking for health services in their vicinity.
In addition to optimizing your website, there are a few additional steps to take. For starters, claim and verify your Google My Business listing. Optimize it by determining your healthcare company?s categories, keeping your NAP (name, address, and phone number) information consistent, providing an informative description of your company, including hours of operation and maps, and allowing user reviews.
3. Create Authoritative Content that Generates Leads
Content marketing is key for businesses in the health industry. By creating valuable, informative, and unique pieces of content, you will position yourself as a highly informative online resource and earn loads of share and backlinks. Sure, this would maximize your visibility in the online world, helping you attract more qualified leads and build trust with them.
Now, to get the most out of your content strategy, you should diversify it. In addition to traditional blog posts, why not write comprehensive case studies, how-to guides, ebooks, or whitepapers? Podcasts, webinars, and explainer videos have also been gaining lots of popularity. These are all amazing content forms that can serve as powerful lead magnets, taking your lead generation efforts to the next level.
For example, if you?re providing direct-to-customer healthcare services, you need to create content that resonates with your target audiences. Your goal is not only to educate them, but also to encourage them. Your content marketing strategy is an amazing opportunity to discuss topics related not only to healthcare, but also to lifestyle, trends, and mental wellness that have been gaining lots of attention over the past few years.
4. Take Advantage of PPC and Remarketing to Increase Online Exposure
Organic traffic is the nerve center of your online presence, but it? not always enough. For example, social networks are a great way to raise brand awareness, promote your deals and offers, and drive more traffic to your website. Still, your target audiences? feeds are packed with branded messaging, making it more difficult for you to stand out.
The same goes for SEO ? remember that it doesn?t deliver stellar results overnight. On the contrary, you will need to invest months of hard work, testing, and strategizing in order to appear on the first page in the SERPs.
Therefore, if you want to increase your exposure faster, allocating your marketing resources to paid search is always a good idea. Its major benefit is that, once your campaign is approved, your ad will start showing up in the search. Most importantly, Clutch.co claims that 63% of searchers will click on Google ads. The increased visibility results in greater brand awareness and helps you maximize your traffic and leads.
One of the most powerful features of PPC is definitely remarketing. Just like its mere name says, it targets people who have already visited your website and interacted with it somehow. For example, if you?ve ever clicked on a website and seen an ad for it once you left it, well, that? remarketing.
For your healthcare organization, this is one of the key lead-generating tactics, as it builds relationships with users that already know who you are.
Over to You
Lead generation plays a fundamental role in your healthcare company?s online marketing strategy. Just think about the mountains of websites you visited only once in the past and then totally forgot about them. That?s because they?ve failed to grab your email address and nurture their relationships with you.
This is something you want to avoid. Build a solid lead generation strategy that backs you up. Remember that there are no uniform rules on how this works. Instead, you need to experiment with different methods of generating leads for your medical practice and focus on those that deliver the best results.
Hope this helps!
