When you work with a great team of medical providers in a competitive marketplace, you want to make sure that those providers get to care for as many patients as possible. Getting members of your community to book appointments is one of the most important parts of any healthcare marketing strategy.
After all, if people aren’t making appointments, then your team can’t do their work to help people get better, recover, and get healthier.
Here is a common problem, though: many clinics are responsible for their own marketing, and they end up using a strategy that just doesn’t work. Essentially, they use their contacts list and send out emails that encourage people to make an appointment today.
You have probably seen these emails yourself, or perhaps you have even sent some of them. They have subject lines like this:
- Book your first appointment today!
- Call us now for your lipo consultation!
- Don’t wait; contact us today to learn how you can live life pain-free!
These aren’t bad emails to send, but they also aren’t the most effective way to market your services. That’s because few medical procedures are “impulse buys,” and if you only market to people who are ready to make an appointment, you are missing out on all of the potential patients who are early in the process of considering what you offer.
Table of Contents
Sales funnels matter in healthcare marketing
HubSpot can help you nurture and convert leads
Are you ready to come up with great ideas for your inbound marketing campaign?
Sales funnels matter in healthcare marketing
Healthcare companies should not ignore the sales funnel.
The concept of the sales funnel--which is sometimes called the purchase funnel or conversion funnel--is all about nurturing leads from beginning to end. Who are your potential customers? How can you make them aware of your brand? How can you develop trust between yourself and your potential patients? What do they need in order to take that final step of booking an appointment and becoming a customer?
These are the questions that the sales funnel addresses! At the top of the funnel, you have every single person who might be interested in your product.
That group gets smaller with each successive step in the marketing and sales process. Some people won’t be interested in your service, so you don’t need to try to convert them. Some will never hear about your medical practice. But the ones who do hear about your practice and are interested in your services move down the funnel towards becoming a customer.
This is your target audience!
Finally, at the bottom of the funnel are those who are ready to take the leap and schedule their appointment.
If you’re only focusing on the people at the bottom of the funnel, and you never work to make sure that you are nurturing people from top to bottom, you will have less overall success and lower ROI on your digital marketing.
HubSpot can help you nurture and convert leads
HubSpot is an incredibly useful tool for the healthcare industry. HubSpot is all about building relationships between customer and provider. In today’s market, a digital marketing campaign will include relationship building, lead nurturing, and excellent customer service.
HubSpot allows you to manage all the essential pieces of your healthcare marketing plan.
Plan a great content marketing strategy.
Content marketing means that you don’t just promote your company; you also provide an important free service to your community. What is that service? Information.
Through blog posts, special content offers, free information, and a great healthcare website, you establish yourself as an expert in your field. As the potential patient comes to trust you as an expert about their medical conditions, they also start seeing you as the best place to go to get help for those conditions.
HubSpot is an all-in-one platform that helps you find and acquire new patients through their unique marketing tools. These are tools that help people find you through search engines (Search Engine Optimization, also called SEO), rather than through paid advertisements.
You can’t just have a haphazard content strategy. You need to be intentional in your marketing tactics! HubSpot gives you the tools you need to make this happen.
Get the metrics you need.
Keeping track of your metrics helps you measure the ROI of your marketing efforts. HubSpot provides phenomenal tracking through its reporting tools.
Whether you want to look at how much new traffic you’re generating, how many visitors are returning to your website, what are the characteristics of your converted leads, or any number of metrics, HubSpot’s customizable dashboards will help you get all the reporting you need.
Automate the process where you can.
Automation, when done well, improves your marketing processes, saves time, and reduces the labor costs associated with running a comprehensive marketing campaign. When done poorly, automation can be confusing and end up taking up a lot of your time.
Great news: HubSpot makes automation easy and attainable.
HubSpot uses all of the information in your sales funnel and combines it into a complex automated system to nurture leads and drive sales.
The Workflow app helps you develop personalized emails that are triggered by visitor actions or characteristics.
Here’s an example! Let’s say you run a chiropractic office. You know that there are people who are going to visit your website depending on their unique needs. Maybe they have lower back pain, maybe they are pregnant or nursing, or maybe they are plagued by migraines. You don’t want to send an email to the migraine sufferer about your unique services for expectant mothers, right?
HubSpot allows you to reach out to users who have visited unique pages on your site in order to offer them the services that they are looking for. Following up on their website visit by sending them an email that targets their specific concerns will be far more effective than every visitor getting the same exact messaging.
Are you ready to come up with great ideas for your inbound marketing campaign?
We love working with medical professionals because we know that you do important work in your communities. Many health care providers are struggling because of the pandemic, especially those who provide services that people can push back until things have calmed down. This has made it hard for companies to effectively grow their businesses for some time.
If you have experienced this slowdown, creating a comprehensive and effective inbound marketing campaign will help you make up for some of these losses!
And if you have been seeing consistent patient visits over the last year, a new marketing strategy will help you see the growth you have been hoping for!
Why do we recommend working with a professional marketing company?
Inbound marketing requires the effective application of complex tools, marketing theories, and strategies.
HubSpot provides you with the tools you need, so when you are ready to choose a marketing company, be sure to choose a preferred HubSpot partner. HubSpot Partners are companies that have a proven track record of success with their complete array of marketing tools, apps, and programs.
When you’re ready to partner with one of Canada’s best inbound marketing agencies, get in touch with us here at ThinkFuel. We know HubSpot, and we know the industry of private medical providers.
We can’t wait to see what we can do for you.
Disclaimer: This is a friendly reminder that because we are not attorneys, we cannot offer legal advice. This information should not be interpreted as legal advice, and you should consult your own legal counsel for compliance issues related to your industry, state, and municipality. Regulations change regularly, and it is important that you maintain HIPAA compliance, as well as compliance with all relevant data privacy and data protection regulations.
