4 Ways to Include Patient Engagement in Your Healthcare Marketing

As a healthcare provider, your success depends on the satisfaction of your patients. Providing current patients with the best experience possible, then, should be any provider’s primary goal. But why is patient engagement important in this equation?

The more engaged patients are with you as their healthcare provider, the more likely they are to remain loyal and refer you to others. This increased patient engagement helps build your brand’s reputation and online presence. It also gives you valuable insights into the patient experience. Ultimately, this engagement helps providers acquire and retain more patients while providing them all with a better experience.

With that in mind, all healthcare providers and marketers should focus intently on patient engagement this year and beyond. Here are four ways to include patient engagement in your healthcare marketing.

Create Health and Wellness Campaigns

As health information becomes more accessible online, consumers are taking their health into their own hands. Healthcare marketers are in the perfect position to provide useful guidance for this audience.

Consider creating both short- and long-term health and wellness campaigns to increase patient engagement and loyalty. For instance, a campaign might suggest daily, weekly, or monthly nutrition and exercise regimens to help lower blood pressure and cholesterol. Many participants will remain actively engaged with your campaign through its duration, giving you the opportunity to convert them into new patients.

These health and wellness campaigns may be generalized or catered more specifically to target audiences, such as middle-aged women, elderly men or millennials. You can distribute and boost these campaigns on your website and social media pages, providing additional links to relevant resources.

Develop a Reputation Management Strategy

Increasing patient engagement relies heavily on improving patient experience. Potential patients care about a healthcare provider’s reputation, seeking out online reviews and ratings. And current patients will leave one provider for another if they are unsatisfied with the care they are receiving.

Healthcare marketers need to pay close attention to all the feedback their brand receives. You must also open a line of communication with your patients to address their concerns and gain valuable insights that will drive operational change and improve brand reputation.

Online reputation management services will allow you to access all reviews and ratings across multiple platforms. Natural language processing (NLP) algorithms can quickly analyze data from text-based forms to uncover common issues that require attention. By having these reviews and insights in one centralized location, you can effectively respond to all reviews, increasing patient engagement and loyalty while also building brand awareness.

Focus on Content Marketing

Informative, optimized content has become a valuable currency for all online marketers, boosting a brand’s online presence and encouraging consumer engagement. Therefore, you should focus on developing different kinds of content for all channels, including featured news articles, blog posts, infographics, case studies, patient stories, and more.

This optimized content should include some kind of call to action to encourage users to follow a link, join a mailing list, or simply share the post to their social media page or blog. Content marketing also plays a part in reputation management, helping your brand become more of an authority in the industry. The more useful and targeted your content is, the more people it will reach, building patient trust and loyalty.

Do Social Media Right

Many healthcare providers still struggle to fully leverage social media to increase patient engagement. To take full advantage of these platforms and their algorithms, you should create posts on a regular basis and actively engage with your community by replying to and liking comments, creating surveys, and asking questions.

Additionally, invest in targeted advertising campaigns, with content specifically aimed at key demographics. The more personalized this outreach, the better. Users will more likely engage with your content and website if your social media ads are relevant to their interests, concerns and age group.

These four strategies will help you engage with your current patients and acquire new ones. People will continue to look for health advice online from reputable sources. Meet them where they are by providing informational, authoritative, engaging content on all channels, and be a part of their lives.