PRACTICAL INNOVATION FOR HEALTHCARE DIGITAL MARKETING: 5 OPTIONS

Ongoing Strategic Digital Marketing Innovation Prevents Competitive Stagnation 

Healthcare digital marketing initiatives need to stay ahead of the pace as patient care, technology and competitor innovation never stagnate. Even when digital assets are performing at peak levels and sales are robust, there is already room for improvement. These are 5 options to consider to fortify existing digital marketing attributes or establish new ones:

Video Features

Video is a go-to norm now in healthcare websites being driven by ever-growing adoption and technology improvement across Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube and other social media venues. Live, recorded or animated, use of video has proven to be  directly proportional to higher engagement, user retention and satisfaction. 

Assess existing video assets for updating or enhancement and focus on where new video assets can augment them and other digital marketing measures. Strategically direct time, financial and technical resources to maximize their effectiveness to drive sales.

Artificial Intelligence and Chatbots

Artificial Intelligence ( AI ) is taking the business and healthcare world by storm. Through deploying it in websites, it scrutinizes search patterns, visitor behavior and buyer characteristics to base content improvements on or in real-time deliver personalized text copy and imagery to align with a customer’s journey. Additional investments can lead to developing predictive lead scoring, advanced trigger-based campaigns and further measures to sharpen lead inbound or outbound lead generation actions. 

Chatbots are a great example of the real-time user engagement phenomenon. They can be integrated into a healthcare website, mobile appl, social media venue or other applications to facilitate customer service interaction, lead generation or immediately serve up data and other content to digital audiences.

Content Marketing

Clicks don’t count when they don’t convert to meaningful interaction and sales performance; how demanding are you of your mainstay digital resources? Are you assertively evaluating visit duration, website visit pathways and bounce rate? Are your blog and parallel assets merely existing as standard website features or are they delivering value to users, cultivating productive engagement and driving sales? 

Asking these questions and acting on them appropriately will uncover digital nuggets of opportunities hiding in plain sight. Those vast SEO reports contain valid, focused insights that justify going over them more than once. Be cautious not to change things up just for the sake of variety; strategically isolate specific elements for modification and enhancement then critically assess performance improvements.

Programmatic Advertising

Using automation to orchestrate buying, selling of online ads, television commercials, streaming modules, voice and video to digital-out-of-home media plus other applications is proliferating behind the scenes. Savvy healthcare digital marketing and advertising professionals are using it to make real-time decisions to embrace economic, effective outreach opportunities on the fly and generate trend data quicker for use with these measures and coordinate with other digital marketing assets.

Programmatic advertising is typically not an in-house competency for healthcare organizations, pharmaceutical and medical device manufacturers or service providers. Research its potential then evaluate how it may benefit present and future marketing and adverting goals. If there is a fit, assess the competency of your present advertising / marketing vendors and assess what others have to offer to succeed with programmatic advertising initiatives.

Voice Search

Consumer and commercial engagement of Alexa, Cortana, Google Home and Siri is exponentially multiplying and its on-demand, hands-free attributes have great utility in the healthcare setting. Exploring and piloting new voice search technology or fortifying existing voice search applications can push your digital marketing outreach and engagement levels ahead of the competition. Amazon Alexa, Microsoft Cortana, Alphabet Google Home and Apple Siri are investing heavily in voice search and interaction technology plus there is an array of other healthcare ventures devoted to exploiting its great potential. 

Based on technology advancement and user adoption trends, proficiency in the sophistication of voice technology to engage patient, clinician and business stakeholders for healthcare digital marketing purposes is well on its way to becoming a norm.  Voice search boosts user experience. Due to its prolific use, Google and other search engines are placing a higher emphasis on voice search optimization. This will likely pave the way for SEO performance and voice search ranking measurements in reporting tools and in the design of websites soon in the future. The time to act is now.

LinkedIn: John G. Baresky

Twitter: Healthcare Marketing Guy