When it comes to healthcare marketing, serving your patients with digestible information at the opportune time is the key to growing your practice and empowering your patients to take charge of their healthcare.
But to do this, you have to pay attention not only to patient demographics, such as gender, age and location, but also to patient behaviors, such as whether they visit your site from a mobile device or desktop and when their peak hours of online activity occur. This information will allow you to serve the right content to the right patients and the right time.
Understanding your audience is the key to healthcare marketing
There is an age-old story that we tell in the marketing world about the importance of knowing the behavior and interests of your audience. Let’s say I tell you that you will be giving a presentation at the library about the importance of reading. So, you prepare for your presentation and bring in research article after research article about the impact of reading on IQ scores and career achievements; you enter the library to give your presentation, and you are greeted by 20 6-yr olds excited to learn about reading. All of a sudden, your hard work and research goes out the window. It doesn’t matter that your stats were correct, it matters that your audience never would have understood them in the first place.
This same concept is true as it relates to healthcare marketing. You can do all of your research and present all of the right facts about the type of healthcare services you offer, but if you aren’t speaking to the needs and comprehension level of your patients, your marketing strategy won’t gain any traction.
How to determine your audience’s demographics and behaviors
Tools such as Google Analytics are essential to determine the demographics and behaviors of your website visitors. Through Google Analytics, you can view the common age range of your website visitors, their interests and the time of day they often visit your website by creating a custom report.
The key components you should pay attention to when it comes to audience demographics and behavior for your healthcare marketing strategy include:
- The common age of your website visitors
- The time of day that they visit
- The pages they most commonly visit
- Their patient journey, i.e. the flow of pages they visit
This information will help you create healthcare marketing content this is both relevant to their interests and concerns and that is delivered to them at the optimal time when they are actively online and searching for information.
How to use patient demographic and behavior information in your healthcare marketing plan
Once you have determined the common age and gender of your audience, as well as the time of day that they are most active on your website, you can use that information to tailor your healthcare marketing strategy to your audience.
One example of how to do this comes from my days of marketing with a national spine surgery center. After completing extensive behavioral and demographic studies, we determined that our potential patients were often online late at night and the wee hours of the morning due to chronic pain, and that their comprehension level was lowered during that time due to pain medications and sleep deprivation. We also learned that aside from the website pages about the spine surgeries we offered, the most visited pages on our website were travel information and pages related to insurance and cost.
Using this information, you could implement the following strategies into your overall healthcare marketing plan:
- Schedule your social media posts for the afternoon and midnight to make sure you are reaching the night owls who are up due to their medical conditions.
- Add content that relates to the emotional concerns of your patients, which in this example is cost and travel, and serve it on your website and social media platforms.
- Use language that is easily digestible by your audience, not large blocks of text that have long medical words.
Tailor this information to the specific demographics and behaviors you pull from your Google Analytics reports, and you will start to see significant traction in your healthcare marketing plan over the next several months.
Always remember, marketing is not just about making your company look good; the purpose of marketing is to help your audience. By understanding who your audience is and what their online behaviors are, you can help them by serving information that is relevant to their needs in a way that they can understand.
Build your healthcare marketing strategy
If you are ready to build your healthcare marketing strategy to reach more potential patients and to gain their trust before they ever even walk through your doors, contact our digital marketing team at Burg & Co. Marketing today. We are certified in inbound marketing, content creation and social media marketing, and we have experience working with nationally recognized healthcare organizations across the country. Contact us today to schedule a free brainstorming session.
