A health system digital marketing strategy is a complex, ongoing process. The most helpful tactics and strategies change over time, as will your health system’s marketing needs and goals. But despite the challenge, effective digital marketing is a necessary investment in the future of your health system.
Health System Digital Marketing Trends to Watch
There’s quite a bit of advice out there about navigating this process and boosting your health system’s visibility online to attract prospective patients. If you’re finding wading through this sea of information difficult, you’re not alone.
When crafting a digital marketing plan for your health system, focus on these three tasks:
- Creating fresh, compelling content to power your SEO
- Designing your website to support SEO and work well on all devices
- Using PPC campaigns to complete your digital marketing mix
1. Fresh Content Keeps Your Audience Engaged
Content marketing is one of the most powerful parts of health system digital marketing. Ensuring your content is informative, engaging, and easy to read allows you to reach new prospective patients. These traits boost your site visibility and enhance the attractiveness of your content to both site visitors and search engines.
Clearly, the quality of your content is important. But quantity is important, too. Creating one batch of good articles for your health system’s website and stepping away isn’t enough. Without fresh content to discover, prospective patients have no reason to return to your site.
Search engine algorithms crawl and index sites with a steady turnover of content more often, which improves your ranking.1 Developing new content also keeps you up to date with and involved in conversations about advances in medical treatments and evolving health concerns among your target audience.
2. Design Your Website With SEO and Mobile in Mind
Your content isn’t the only factor influencing your ranking. Your website needs strategic metadata, including meta tags, and descriptive, user-friendly URLs.2 These not only improve the experience of your users, but they also improve your health system site’s ranking.
Site architecture is also important since a well-organized website with a clear hierarchy of pages is easier for both search engine algorithms and prospective patients to read. Search engines (and humans) prefer websites with fast-loading pages. The same is true for websites that respond easily on smartphones and tablets.3
Just because your website works well and looks good on one kind of device doesn’t guarantee it will impress on another. By designing your site to be fast and responsive, you create a better all-around experience.
3. Create PPC Campaigns that Connect and Convert
SEO is a big piece of your health system digital marketing strategy—as it should be! But pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns should be another important part of your digital marketing mix.
While SEO campaigns can take several months to deliver results, PPC delivers quicker returns. By bidding on keywords most relevant to your audience’s interests, paid advertising puts your name directly in front of highly motivated prospective patients. PPC campaigns also provide a treasure trove of data through A/B tests.4 Testing allows you to compare the click rates of different ads to identify what assets have been successful and which have not.
When setting up PPC campaigns with A/B testing, focus on comparing ads with just one difference. First, compare different ad copy, then compare different keywords, then move on to different target audiences. Once you find the winning strategy, use the insights you’ve gained to improve your PPC ads and fine-tune other aspects of your digital marketing strategy.
These strategies work synergistically to increase your health system’s visibility, drive traffic to your website, and generate more leads. But implementing and managing a complex health system digital marketing campaign takes time and consistent fine-tuning to realize the best ROI.
That’s where specialized agencies like Dreamscape Marketing provide expertise and support to help you successfully navigate the digital landscape. Call us at 888.307.7304 to schedule a discovery call and learn how our health system digital marketing strategists can help you make the most of your marketing budget and reach your business goals.
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