Digital marketing for healthcare has become more important than ever in the years following the COVID-19 pandemic. The increasing strain on our free public healthcare infrastructure, coupled with a boom in the time we spend online, has driven private, commercial medicine into the spotlight.
For a long time, commercial healthcare has existed at the fringes of UK medicine and care—mostly confined to private health insurance in employee perks packages and local private healthcare providers relying on word-of-mouth marketing to attract business. Times, however, have changed, with an increasing number of young people searching for healthcare solutions online.
Just as dentistry practices have long had to compete online for patients and customers, now many other commercial healthcare practitioners will also have to compete if their businesses are to survive and thrive. Healthcare marketing and medical marketing must be digitised and revolutionised if they are to secure your business a future in the UK healthcare industry.
In this guide, the ‘busy bees’ at beefound have compiled a list of 11 key healthcare marketing strategies which you can employ to ‘bee’ found online.
- Adapting healthcare marketing to the modern age
- Digital Marketing for Healthcare in 11 Best Practices
- Strategy 1) Get everyone on board
- Strategy 2) Do your research!
- Strategy 3) YMYL – Your Money or Your Life!
- Strategy 4) Medical copywriting
- Strategy 5) Redesign your website
- Strategy 6) Medical SEO and local SEO
- Strategy 7) Social media advertising for healthcare
- Strategy 8) PPC advertising (pay-per-click)
- Strategy 9) Medical content marketing
- Strategy 10) Return customer marketing in medicine
- Strategy 11) Customer interaction and review feedback
- Conclusion
Adapting healthcare marketing to the modern age
Medical marketing has always been a feature of the healthcare industry, but in the past decade or so, the focuses and techniques involved have changed. In an increasingly digital world with ever more personalised customer expectations, commercial healthcare providers must embrace their online ‘brand’ like any other private company.
Before we delve into the specific marketing techniques you can use to grow your brand online, find new customers and retain them, it’s important to review the changing trends in healthcare marketing:
- Refinement of mass marketing toward the more personalised approach
- Retraining the marketing focus toward the unique medical services you offer
- Moving the goalposts from attracting customers for a single ‘health episode’ to a long-lasting medical relationship
- Migrating from a low-tech, non-market approach to a high-tech market-focused approach
Digital marketing for healthcare in 11 best practices
Across all industries, the increasing digitisation of our world has created a business environment in which you either excel in online marketing, or fall by the wayside. The commercial healthcare industry is no exception.
However, an effective healthcare marketing strategy must adapt the core tenets of digital marketing to a much more personal, consequential customer journey. After all, the services your business provides will often directly affect the health and quality of life of your customers.
Let’s explore 11 healthcare marketing best practices and how they can be remoulded to fit your company’s offering.
Strategy 1) Get everyone on board
First things first, it is crucial that you bring everyone in your team along for the ride. Traditional offline marketing techniques—like billboard and newspaper advertising—are no longer sufficient for promoting your company, in and of themselves.
Marketing teams stuck in the past must be brought on board with your C-suite’s short- and long-term marketing goals. Similarly, tech teams you employ to gather and process patient data may prove fundamental to the successful personalisation of your ad campaigns.
All in all, a united workforce is an effective workforce when it comes to digital marketing in medicine.
Strategy 2) Do your research!
The last time you conducted comprehensive market research was probably when you first established your business—discovering a niche for cosmetic surgery in your local area, or identifying private healthcare solutions which your competitors weren’t providing.
Market research will prove equally important to the effectiveness your healthcare marketing strategy. At this early stage in the process, there are a few key areas of research we recommend investing in.
- Patient (customer) research: In commercial healthcare, your customers are also your patients. As such, it is important to understand the demographics and behaviours of the patient community your practice aims to serve.
- Competition research: Just like in any other business, commercial healthcare providers should also be researching their competition. Ask yourself what competitors do well and what they don’t. Try to identify niches your practice could seek to fill—these will become fundamental focuses of your digital marketing strategy.
- Keyword research: In the sphere of digital marketing, keywords—the words and phrases people use when browsing the web—are everything. In order to establish a winning presence online, you’ll need to know what kind of medical keywords your ideal patients are searching for most often. This can not only help you customise your offering to suit your patients’ needs, but will also prove fundamental when we come to medical SEO.
- Define your marketing objectives: Finally, it’s important to know why you want to invest in digital marketing. What do you hope to get out of it? Greater brand awareness? Improved brand reputation? More patients? Increased uptake to specific medical services you offer? Your objectives will inform your marketing campaign.
Strategy 3) YMYL – Your Money or Your Life!
As a commercial healthcare provider in the UK, it is crucial that you familiarise yourself with the guidelines of Google—the world’s most popular search engine—as it is most likely through Google that you will find new patients, and they’ll find you.
YMYL stands for ‘Your Money or Your Life’. It is a shorthand way of defining websites and pages which carry a high risk of harm to individuals’ health, safety or finances. In the healthcare profession, almost every webpage you publish will come under this category because you are either providing advice or suggesting services which could impact your customers’ health.
As such, when writing the copy for your website, your ads and your social media pages (see: ‘Strategy 4’), it is of paramount importance that you follow Google’s YMYL guidelines. We can effectively boil down YMYL writing guidelines into two camps:
- Put people first, not search engines: Rather than writing content with the primary intent being to rank highly on search engine page results (SERPs), make sure to put your patients first, instead. This doesn’t mean you should avoid SEO, but does mean your webpages should feel directed to the individual, not the web browser.
- E-E-A-T: A classic Google acronym, E-E-A-T stands for ‘experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness.’ These are the four guiding principles which should inform your medical copywriting. When developing copy for social media, your website, Google ads and more, it is imperative—because your work qualifies as YMYL—that it is 100% original and human-written (no AI-generated content here!), authoritative and trustworthy, and demonstrates clear experience and expertise in your field.
In short, if your products or services could potentially affect a customer’s health and safety, you need to demonstrate appropriate care and responsibility, whilst being 100% clear and transparent. You could, for example, cover yourself by including legal disclaimers at the top of medical advice blog posts or service pages.
Strategy 4) Medical copywriting
Copywriting is the art of creating text for websites, pages, PPC and Google ads, social media posts and more.
For each different format, successful marketing campaigns tend to adapt the tone-of-voice (TOV), language, and focus of the copy. In commercial medicine, the copy you use to promote your business is arguably of even greater importance than in other industries.
Your copy will be read—depending on your offering and business structure—by people in distress, worried patients and grieving loved ones, and/or by other businesses, HR professionals and the like.
When drafting your copy, it is therefore important to know which demographic you’re addressing, and to adapt your writing style to best appeal to your readers. For example, selling health services to private insurance firms will require a very different style of marketing copy to selling medical products to a patient dealing with a long-term illness.
Strategy 5) Redesign your website
From copywriting to website design, the cornerstone of any business’s online presence is its website, for a number of reasons.
- The first time many of your patients and clients will interact with your business will be through your website.
- The quality of a user’s experience (UX) on your website will inform their opinion of your brand.
- The ease with which a user is able to navigate your website’s interface (UI) will impact how readily they are able to engage your services or purchase your products.
- The loading speed and accessibility of your website have a direct impact on how long a user is likely to spend on it—and the longer they spend on site, the more they might spend there.
Your website design is of great importance to the type and longevity of the relationship you build with customers. Sites should be clearly branded, memorable, easily navigable and accessible, enjoyable to use and designed to draw potential customers in from the top of your marketing funnel toward a conversion. We’ve written an entire blog on the essential features of an effective medical website.
Of course, it’s important to focus not just on the look and feel of your website, but also on the backroom technical stuff known as SEO.
Strategy 6) Medical SEO and local SEO
SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. It encompasses a wide range of techniques which, when combined, can help to raise your online profile by ranking your site higher in SERPs—just one among a range of benefits SEO can hold for small businesses. Medical SEO can include practices such as:
- Crafting content with carefully selected keywords, designed to beat the competition and catch Google’s attention when these keywords are searched for.
- Improving the load speed and structure of your website and its pages by reducing media size, making proper use of H1 headings and alt tags, etc.
- Gathering quality backlinks from other authoritative websites to yours, thus improving your trustworthiness and authoritativeness in Google’s eyes (see: ‘E-E-A-T’)
Any healthcare providers operating on a local level should also embrace the benefits of local SEO. Local SEO is a specialised form of search engine optimisation designed to target specific local demographics searching, in this case, for nearby solutions to medical concerns. Improving local SEO rankings can require different techniques to more general SEO improvement.
Strategy 7) Social media advertising for healthcare
Social media may not seem like the kind of place you’d find healthcare brands, but in this day and age, almost any business can benefit from a well-worked social media presence.
There are lots of different social media platforms to pick from when establishing your brand online, each with different core demographics and formats. TikTok, for example, is a purely video-based platform with a younger audience tending toward Gen Z. Facebook mixes media and caters to an older demographic, whilst Instagram and X display image and text-based content respectively, to both the young and old. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is used almost exclusively by working professionals, often in the C-suite or at executive levels.
Small businesses in the medical field can benefit from social media marketing just like any other business. Social media marketing is free, connects you directly with your customer base, and opens up new demographics you may have struggled to reach using more traditional marketing techniques.
Strategy 8) PPC advertising (pay-per-click)
PPC Advertising, short for pay-per-click and sometimes also referred to as CPC (cost-per-click), is a cost-effective form of digital marketing designed to put you directly in front of the right person’s eyes, at the right time, for the right price.
There are pros and cons to PPC, but when managed carefully and regularly reviewed, healthcare providers can employ PPC to bump their products and services to the top of the queue.
Let’s say, for example, that you provide aesthetic cosmetic surgery in London, UK. You could research location-specific keywords (pertaining to your unique offering) to discover which of them are being searched for most often. For example, you may find that keywords like “Botox London” are more popular with your target audience than “Botox professionals in London”.
With preferred keywords to hand you would, to follow our example, craft appealing adverts for your various cosmetic offerings attach these to the keywords you’ve chosen to bid on. The highest bid and highest-quality webpage wins, with you only paying for the ad when a potential patient (i.e., customer) clicks on it.
PPC healthcare marketing has one of the highest conversion rates of any industry, as of 2024, resulting in an average 8.71% conversion rate per click—more than two points higher than the cross-industry average for Google paid search ads. The costs associated with PPC can vary greatly depending on industry and the popularity of the keywords bid for.
Strategy 9) Medical content marketing
Content marketing is a subtype of digital marketing for healthcare and medicine. With content marketing, you create ‘content’—that could be blog posts, videos, infographics and more—designed to engage your target audience.
The goals of content marketing are wide-ranging and can be adapted piece to piece. For example, you may want to create a video with the goal of selling a specific product or service of yours, or instead you might want to raise brand awareness through an online article.
In the field of healthcare marketing, it’s important to remember the rules of ‘Your Money or Your Life’. Because your profession is likely to have a direct impact on your customers’ health, the content you produce must be original, accurate, and trustworthy.
It’s also worth considering how different styles of content may affect your brand image—e.g., will a meme derail your professionalism? Or could it be used to attract customers at the top of the marketing funnel, in combination with more authoritative content further down?
Blogs can be really effective in digital marketing for healthcare. They are a chance to showcase your unique expertise and to establish your brand as the authority on a particular market niche. Try to come up with exciting, engaging and informative blog post ideas to grab your audience’s attention and instil confidence in your brand’s ability to solve their medical issues.
Strategy 10) Return customer marketing in medicine
Digital marketing isn’t just about securing new custom, it’s also about retaining and improving the value of your existing customer base.
Regular email newsletters sent out to previous customers can, for example, keep your brand in their minds. You could also use newsletters to reestablish brand confidence and advertise new and improved products and services.
Loyalty programmes, memorable branding and quality customer service are further examples of effective return-customer marketing strategies.
Strategy 11) Customer interaction and review feedback
And finally, speaking of quality customer service, it is important not to let the fundamentals slide when expanding your digital healthcare marketing strategy.
Customer service is especially crucial in commercial healthcare, medicine, dentistry, cosmetics and more, because your customer base wants to feel that they can trust you to look after them. Trust tends to be fostered by the personal interactions individuals have with your business—and in the world of digital marketing, these first interactions are likely to come through reviews.
Up to 98% of consumers, or patients, will check out a company’s online reviews before engaging with the brand. The manner in which you handle reviews, therefore, can have a direct impact on your click-through and conversion rates.
When responding to reviews, it’s important to always remain professional, whilst personalising responses to the individual. It’s perhaps most important never to avoid responding to negative reviews. Learning how to respond to negative reviews is an art. Doing so efficiently and professionally can prove the difference between resolving an issue quietly and having it explode in your face—damaging your business reputation and potentially losing your customers.
Conclusion
Medical marketing must be approached with care. Your offering may have a lasting impact on customer health and quality of life, and as such extra care should be taken when drafting a healthcare marketing strategy.
With this beefound guide to digital marketing for healthcare, however, we hope we have equipped you with all the tools and knowledge you need to extract maximum ‘honey’ from the online ‘flowerbed’.
Nevertheless, we know that not all businesses have the time, resources nor know-how to make the most of their digital marketing efforts. To perfect your online presence in the commercial healthcare sphere—and potentially boost profits in the meantime—remember that outsourcing your digital marketing needs is always an option.
