14 Strategies to Master Healthcare Marketing in 2024

Healthcare marketing is more important than you think. Without effective marketing, potential patients don’t know you can solve their problems. Without a healthcare marketing strategy, patients likely won’t even know who you are. 

You need a good medical marketing strategy to make patients realize they need you. You must do the work for them by building brand awareness for your medical organization. 

So keep reading to learn about the 14 best healthcare market strategies you can use in 2024. 

Why is Marketing in the Healthcare Industry Important?

Marketing in healthcare is just as important as any other industry for the following reasons. 

Awareness 

You need to ensure your patients know about their treatment options. Giving them awareness improves health outcomes and patient satisfaction. 

Access More Patients

Healthcare providers also need marketing to improve their service visibility and reach more potential patients. 

Competitiveness 

The medical industry is highly competitive since patients choose their healthcare providers. So, you need to stand out. 

Growth 

Healthcare advertising achieves growth for healthcare organizations by both attracting new patients and retaining existing ones. 

Credibility 

Effective healthcare marketing strategies convince patients to trust you as a healthcare provider. 

14 Healthcare Marketing Tips and Strategies in 2024

Follow these 14 strategic healthcare marketing tips to take your healthcare advertising to the next level. 

1. Be Consistent in Your Branding

You want consistent branding to establish consumer trust in your organization. Your branding includes the organization’s unique selling point (USP). For example, do you offer a family-friendly environment? Maybe you provide a spa-like ambiance.

Consumers remember your organization based on these qualities. You also want to focus on your organization’s achievements. For example, perhaps yours is the only clinic in your area that provides body-fat testing services. 

You’ll have to discover what works for your specific brand. Think about what best represents your organization. Your healthcare marketing strategy should then revolve around that. 

For example, the Mayo Clinic is internationally famous for providing excellent medical care and a patient-focused work culture. That’s developed a high degree of trust among their patients. 

2. Having an Adaptive and Responsive Healthcare Website

Having a responsive website is a must in today’s digital-first era. A responsive website provides consistent user experiences across devices by adjusting to the screen. 

A responsive website isn’t just easier to use for consumers. It’s also great for search engine optimization(SEO). Google has a mobile-first indexing approach that prioritizes responsive websites. 

So, having a responsive website ranks you higher in search results than your competitors if they have unresponsive sites. 

You need a responsive website. For information on how to create one, check out this guide by W3Schools. 

3. Optimizing Healthcare Marketing: Unveiling Local SEO Trends

SEO marketing for healthcare has significantly changed in the past three years. The new focus is all on balancing on-page and off-site optimization. For a brick-and-mortar business like yours, you need to focus on specific services for specific areas. 

For example, you could realistically rank as a provider for LASIK surgery in your local area. That’s a specific service provided in a specific area. Google prioritizes this. 

Going into 2024, the key tools in the healthcare SEO arsenal include location pages and Google Business profiles. You want to combine these two to compete in the ‘near me’ searches on Google. 

You can also optimize the pages on your site for individual doctors and medical professionals. Focus on their specialties and achievements to win in local SEO healthcare marketing. 

Click here if you’d like to learn more. 

4. Revolutionizing Healthcare Marketing: The Impact of Video Marketing for Doctors

Including doctors in your healthcare video marketing is one of 2024’s top marketing strategies in healthcare. Including established physicians increases your organization’s trust and credibility. But it has challenges, too. 

A high-quality doctor video invites patients into your organization and builds a genuine connection with them. Simple video content is also easier to produce than blog posts. 

Videos can also be more engaging. For example, you can create videos where doctors provide expert guidance, answer FAQs, or present scenarios. 

An example could be a doctor explaining how your organization treats patients with kidney stones. Your goal is to provide the most educational value across social media. 

If you’d like help achieving that, we recently introduced CaptureMD, a SAAS healthcare video marketing tool. You can use it to create doctor and patient videos quickly in less than 2 minutes. 

5. Assessing the Digital Patient Experience

The modern digital patient experience is complex. It involves potential patients interacting with your website through telehealth and remote monitoring. Your website is your organization’s ‘front door’ because it’s how patients first interact with you. 

As such, you need it to provide accurate and relevant information, including your contact details. You can achieve this by including relevant images, smart copy, and value-added experiences like prompt appointments. 

Patient experience should be your priority. You want to give potential patients the smoothest possible experience on your website. Prioritize patient experience over aesthetics. 

The best way to improve user experience is to understand patient engagement across platforms and map their journey. You want to build a tailored hospital marketing strategy for your website. 

For example, the American Nurse Journal achieves this by promoting patient portal engagement. Their portal improves doctor-patient communication. 

6. Establishing Expertise in Your Medical Specialty

The most popular marketing strategy in healthcare is advertising as an authority in your medical specialty. You can do this by implementing proactive public relations strategies, like sharing new developments in your field with the media. 

For example, perhaps your organization has recently tested the effectiveness of a new drug. You can publish your results with the media. Doing so establishes your organization as an authority figure and increases your credibility. 

You should only submit credible information that demonstrates your expertise. You can access the media through platforms like HARO(Help a Reporter Out). You should publish new information at least semi-regularly. 

An example of a healthcare brand that does this is CVS Health. The CVS Health group has four separate brands: 

• CVS Pharmacy 
• CVS Speciality 
• CVS Minute Clinic 
• CVS Caremark 

Each brand specializes in a different field. Each brand provides expertise but collectively benefits from association with the CVS brand. 

7. Integrating Physician Referrals into Medical Marketing Strategies

Physician referrals are an excellent organic marketing strategy. Use them to obtain new patients for your organization. Maximize referrals by maintaining smart relationships with physicians. 

Do this by establishing ties with new professionals, regularly following up with existing ones, and creating a simple referral process. 

Your competitors are already doing this. They’re leveraging their relationships with skilled physicians to expand their customer base. 

The Institute for Neurodegenerative Disorders (IND) is a great example. They have a dedicated formal referral network of neurologists in Connecticut. Through their approach, they’ve become a top recruiter for Parkinson’s disease studies. 

8. Leveraging Graphic Design in Social Media Ads for Effective Science and Emotion Communication

Graphic design is an effective tool in healthcare social media advertisement. Use it to elegantly present scientific facts and make emotional appeals to viewers. 

The best example of this is BetterHelp’s e-therapy service ads:

This ad visually shows how excessive phone use causes insomnia, a common problem. The graphic is both relatable for audiences, and it impacts them emotionally. It’s also a way for the BetterHealth brand to empathize with their audience. 

This ad also meets Meta’s personal attribute standards. 

Also, notice how BetterHelp cleverly includes a statistic to start their narrative. They claim that 75% of people benefit from psychotherapy. They then claim it also impacts sleep health. Their ad’s graphic is also clearly about sleep health. 

And in the end, they position themselves as the providers of the solution. They offer psychotherapy services, which improve the sleep health of 75% of people. 

This is a compelling approach because of its simplicity and coherence. 

9. Encouraging Healthcare Consumer Reviews

86% of US consumers trust personal recommendations when choosing a physician. That means providing online reviews is crucial to building your organization’s credibility. You should proactively ask existing customers for reviews. 

You need a proactive approach because patients are unlikely to provide reviews otherwise, even if they had a good experience. 

Doing so highlights the positive aspects of your organization and builds your physicians’ credibility. One strategy to achieve this is integrating automated HIPAA-compliant review platforms into your marketing healthcare strategy. 

These platforms let you request and monitor reviews. Ensure that you use a HIPAA-compliant platform to avoid controversy or legal problems. 

For example, Intermountain Healthcare is a healthcare organization that successfully requests reviews. They increased their positive review share from 78% to 88% by receiving 12,000 5-star ratings through Reputation’s review requesting tool.

10. Implementing PPC and Display Ads in Healthcare Marketing

Even with the best healthcare SEO practices, you’ll still face competition from paid advertisements. PPC and display ads appear first on search engine result pages for specific terms. 

PPC and display ads are effective because they have a clear return on investment(ROI) and budget controls. Use them to ensure your organization dominates search results even against organic competition. 

Mayo Clinic achieved this. They target specific keywords related to their healthcare services. This attracts and directs potential patients to the Mayo Clinic website. 

11. Evaluating Website Speed for Healthcare Services

Consumers don’t tolerate slow-loading websites. They dislike slow-loading websites so much that even a 5-second delay can lose you a potential customer. A slow website also impacts your SEO rankings. So you want to increase your website’s speed. 

Use Google’s PageSpeed to test your site’s speed. If it’s too slow, consult a web developer to improve it. Also, compare your site’s speed with those of competitors to better contextualize performance. 

An example of a speed-optimized website is the Pain Specialists Perth. Their website has smooth navigation and a quick loading speed, which improve user experience and retain potential patients. 

12. Programmatic Display: A Leading Trend in Healthcare Advertising

Programmatic advertising is one of the latest healthcare digital marketing trends. Use programmatic advertising with geofencing to build an omnichannel approach for attracting patients. 

Programmatic advertising involves using automated technology for media buying and ad placement. Use it to purchase ad placements across different social media channels in real-time. It’s a cost-effective method compared with traditional ad placements. 

You can also use Over-the-top (OTT) and Connected TV (CTV) channels to deliver video ads to patients. 

An example of a healthcare organization that achieves this is Banner Health. They use geofencing to target patients based on location and deliver ads across multiple devices when a user enters the target location. 

They use this strategy to track visits when devices enter their geofenced facilities. 

13. The Importance and Careful Execution of Remarketing Ads

The growing importance of remarketing is also one of the latest marketing trends in healthcare. Remarketing is an effective B2B lead generator that’s often underused in healthcare practices. 

You need to remain visible to potential leads after they visit your website and until they convert. An effective tool to achieve this is programmatic displays since they lead in cost per appointment. 

Programmatic displays may initially require time and investment, but they will become a low-cost driver of leads and appointments. 

Athenahealth is an example of a healthcare organization that achieves this. They use both paid search and social media remarketing to re-engage users. That way, they also stay on top of their patients’ minds. 

14. Monitoring Your Healthcare Marketing Strategy

Monitor your marketing strategy in healthcare to improve it over time. Do so by regularly evaluating your healthcare marketing strategy’s return on investment (ROI). Do so to also adjust your marketing budget annually. 

You should carefully study your performance metrics and visualize results on a performance analytics dashboard. Make adjustments according to these metrics. You can use these tools to improve your analysis: 

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Use a CRM like HubSpot to track how consumers engage with your marketing material, including emails, ads, and calls. 

Mandala AI

Use Mandala AI to monitor your brand and get analytics of your online brand performance on various social media platforms in one dashboard.

Google Analytics 

Use Google Analytics to identify which keywords your website ranks for and which you could rank for. You’ll also get insights into your website’s performance. 

Google AdWords 

Use Google AdWords to track your Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns to understand the effectiveness of your paid ads. 

A HIPAA-compliant Call-tracking System 

Use a call tracking system to monitor the performance of your paid advertising and front desk operations. 

Matoma 

Matoma is an open-source marketing tracking software that provides analytics like Google Analytics but comes with full data ownership and user privacy protection. 

Healthcare Success

You’ve just learned about marketing strategy for healthcare. You’ve also learned about marketing a hospital. And you know now the latest trends in healthcare marketing. 

Modern healthcare marketing is all about integrating technology to maximize user experience and establish your credibility. You need a smart marketing strategy for healthcare that leverages graphic design, your physicians’ expertise, and a fast and responsive website. 

You’ll have an easy time marketing hospitals after you’ve implemented these strategies.