Your mental health plays a significant role in your overall quality of life, and life can throw challenges your way that can impact that. When you own a mental health brand, you’re able to help people gain the insight and support they need during a hard time. But you don’t want people to give your digital marketing efforts a quick glance. You want them to actually engage with the content and further their relationship with you.
Digital patient engagement refers to the actions that people take to deepen their connection with you and lead them toward completing a conversion, such as filling out a contact form or booking an appointment. For mental health brands, digital patient engagement shows that you’re making a difference for people who may feel like their conditions and challenges are impacting their overall quality of life.
If you’re ready to boost your digital patient engagement rate, we’re here to help by guiding you through some of the best practices that are worth testing out.
Best practice 1: Creating a user-centric digital patient engagement platform
A digital patient engagement platform refers to the software that you use to distribute and track patient connections with your marketing efforts. Some popular ones include Hubspot and Salesforce.
Every digital marketing effort that you create should focus solely on the user. You should consider what they’re looking for, how you can reach them and what value you can provide through this particular effort. Your digital engagement platform should do the same thing. It should be focused on making sure that the user gets the most out of every marketing effort so that they know who to turn to when they need you.
Your platform should include:
- Tailored messages to your target audience, both current and potential patients
- Connections all distribution channels
- Immediate communication to discuss concerns with users in their time of need
- Thorough data analysis
User experience should be prioritized in every industry, but it’s essential in the mental health care space because the users are at their most vulnerable state. If they don’t feel like a mental health brand is making the effort to support them, it can interfere with them getting the care they need.
Best practice 2: Leveraging digital patient engagement tools
Getting the digital patient engagement you want takes a bit more than just a few eye-catching visuals and crossed fingers. Be sure to take advantage of the tools that you have at your disposal that can help you draw in your target patients.
A digital patient engagement tool refers to ways that you’re able to encourage users to become retained patients by providing features that improve their overall experience. A few of the most common engagement tools for mental health care providers are:
- Phone applications — Accessibility is a key component to effective health care. Try creating a mobile app for your brand so that people can feel like they always have support in their back pocket. It can include upcoming appointment reminders, mood tracking and journaling features, just to name a few.
- Patient portals — When a patient stays informed about their progress every step along the way of their journey, they can gain a sense of control and advocate for themselves. Create a patient portal that allows patients to access all of their medical information, appointment history and test results. They should also be able to contact your brand directly through the portal.
- Online booking — Even with something as important as mental health care, lack of convenient appointment booking can interfere with someone getting the help they need. Try to integrate online booking into your site to streamline the process to make it easier for anyone to start or continue their mental health journey.
Best practice 3: Personalizing patient experience
Every patient is unique, and they deserve to feel special from the moment they start their patient journey with you. By honing in on the preferences of your target audience and what they gravitate toward in your marketing efforts, you can personalize their patient experience. It can establish a sense of trust and validation when they’re experiencing internal struggles.
You can use data from your digital marketing efforts to tailor your interactions with your patients. An example can include mentioning a blog post in an email that’s relevant to the challenges they’ve explored on your site. These interactions can encourage them to engage further with your site and book an appointment.
Empathy is an important value for any brand, especially a mental health care provider. Be sure that you always use compassion and understanding to guide people along their patient experience.
Best practice 4: Building a community through digital strategies
Having a support system can help people feel motivated and seen as they navigate their mental health journeys and the challenges they may be facing. As a mental health brand, you can work to be part of that support system that helps people become the best version of themselves.
You can build a community of support for people going through hard times by utilizing your social media marketing. With valuable posts, creative videos and even livestreams, you can connect with patients while giving them a space to connect with one another. You can engage with them by replying to their comments and providing insight that will encourage them to complete conversions.
You can also create supportive spaces online for people to find comfort in others who have similar experiences. Besides social media, you can also create a forum on your site for people to ask questions or have an online support group.
Best practice 5: Measuring success in digital engagement
Understanding your engagement goes beyond receiving a contact form on your site or a share on Instagram. It’s important that you track your performance using analytics tools to see what’s working and what isn’t.
The key digital marketing performance indicator that you should track as a mental health brand include:
- Bounce rate
- Conversion
- Social media engagement
- Patient retention
- Customer lifetime value
By tracking how these KPIs evolve over time, you can see where there are gaps in your digital performance and the strong areas that need to be capitalized. You can also use the data to back your future marketing decisions.
You should never stop improving, and that’s the benefit of measuring your engagement metrics. They can shine a light on aspects that require more attention, such as creating compelling calls to action for more conversions.
Want to attract new patients to your mental health website using digital patient engagement? BURG+CO. can help
Engaging with current and potential mental health patients helps your brand to grow while providing users with the information that can help their own personal goals. But it’s not always easy to get the engagement you need to increase your patient load. If you need help personalizing your patient experience or creating a user-centric digital patient engagement platform, BURG+CO. is here to help. With our SEO, conversion strategy and content marketing services, we can help you get the engagement you’re looking for.
Our team has years of experience in helping healthcare brands improve their digital presence to attract new patients and retain existing ones. If you’re looking to perform better in search engine results and attract more potential patients to your site, we’re ready to talk to you to see how we can help.
Contact our team today for more information about digital marketing or to schedule a complimentary consultation.
