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Marketing for Telemedicine: Innovative Approaches for Modern Healthcare
October 22, 2024
10 mins.
Virtual medical consultations are on the hype. Once you are in the telemedicine niche, it’s high time you fully leveraged telemedicine marketing opportunities. Promoting your telemedicine services online is about winning quality leads and loyal patients.
Statista reports that the online doctor consultations market will reach USD 9.46 billion in 2024.
Telemedicine (telehealth) deploys telecommunications technology to deliver healthcare services. Virtual visits skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Rising healthcare costs made businesses invest in telemedicine software.
In the United States, patients opt for a vast array of virtual care services ranging from prescription refills and minor illnesses to coping with mental health issues and chronic conditions.
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In today’s blog post, Promodo healthcare marketers are exploring proven ways of marketing for telemedicine. Make the best use of our marketing ideas for telemedicine regardless of whether you are a startup venture or a seasoned healthcare provider.
While telemedicine services are shaping the healthcare industry, there’s red ocean competition around the corner. And getting the word out there comes as a huge challenge. Patients require top-notch service quality, utter convenience, and trust when grappling with which provider to choose. To get atop the league, you are to reach your target market and retain it as far as possible.
Telemedicine (telehealth) marketing is a strategic approach to promoting telemedicine services online. That’s how healthcare providers reach out to patients who need medical consultations through digital platforms.
Your ultimate goal in marketing telemedicine services is to get internet users to schedule a telemedicine visit at the lowest CPL (cost per lead) rate.
Now, there’s more to that. Converting quality telemedicine leads is about a broader digital marketing approach embracing search engine optimization (SEO), social media presence, and effective paid advertising across multiple platforms.
While there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to telemedicine marketing, your task is to explore all crucial aspects and customize your strategy to scale your services and win loyal patients. A single strategy may reap fruit for a while, though over time you’ll need to shape and enhance it in response to the new market realms.
That is to say, a strategic pursuit of telemedicine marketing is a long-haul journey that requires persistence, perseverance, and flexibility given market fluctuations and upcoming trends.
Start your telemedicine marketing journey with a well-thought-out plan. Given the rising competition across the healthcare market, this primary step is pivotal for promoting your telemedicine services. With a comprehensive plan, you’ll safeguard a clear roadmap that will guide you through critical points like:
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Once you know where you are moving, it’s high time you identify your telemedicine marketing strategy. Take your telemedicine strategy as a clear set of milestones you should achieve over time. The power of a strategic approach is that it will help you measure the effectiveness of your telemedicine marketing efforts. The proven way to shape your strategy is to benefit from the SMART model that assumes specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound goals.
Here are our time-tested SMART suggestions for your telemedicine business:
While SMART goals will help you direct your marketing efforts in the right direction, you should persistently challenge your telemedicine marketing with new challenges to overshadow competitors and win more loyal patients.
Competitive analysis is beneath your successful marketing campaign. Your strategic task here is to deploy digital marketing tools like Ahrefs and Similarweb among many others to study your closest rivals.
Examining the websites of 5-10 of your closest telemedicine competitors will help you spot their major online marketing strengths and weaknesses. On this solid basis, you’ll develop and shape your telemedicine marketing strategy as a win-win approach.
It is vital to explore what digital health marketing strategies, tactics, and tools they are applying to promote telemedicine services. The estimation of their marketing budgets and investment capacity is crucial to know how far you can compete with the top 10 telemedicine providers in your immediate locale or on a statewide level.
It’s also vital to read customer reviews to know what people are saying about your competitors and why they choose their telemedicine services.
Competitor analysis will empower you with in-depth knowledge that will help you identify crucial gaps underway your telemedicine marketing success and explore wider opportunities across the niche.
Now, that’s time to think about why you are unique in the telemedicine marketing landscape. Setting a unique selling proposition (USP) is what you need to stand out from the crowd.
Say, some of your closest rivals do not provide 24/7 support. Some may not provide specialized medical consultations, while others may lack compelling telemedicine messages or unique patient engagement.
Your strategic legwork here is to understand what USPs you may leverage to customize your telemedicine services.
First things first, at Promodo we launch our healthcare SEO services with a thorough one-month SEO audit for the client’s website.
That’s of crucial importance as you’ll provide your telemedicine and virtual health services through your website. A total on-site audit is important to make sure all pages are loading and working.
The consistency and holistic approach is decisive here while many patients will search your telemedicine services directly or go directly to the website pages that are most relevant to their needs. For this purpose, we advise healthcare providers to set up customized telemedicine service landing pages with agile user interfaces (UI) and convincing call-to-action (CTA) buttons user-friendly on desktops and mobile devices.
By prioritizing buttons like “Doctor Available 24/7,” you’ll serve more emergencies and consult on-the-go patients.
It’s vital to make your website answer ultimate patient questions. In a click or two, your first-time website user should find what they are looking for exactly. In this vein, the win-win solution is to resonate with your target patient search queries. Insert the same questions and keywords people are inserting on Google while seeking telemedicine services.
Make a FAQ section on every page compiled of common questions and answers:
🏥 What health issues do you resolve via telemedicine?
🏥 Is urgent care available?
🏥 What’s the cost?
🏥 Do I need an insurance?
🏥 What is the process?
🏥 Is your service immediately connected with a provider?
🏥 Should I fill out any forms?
🏥 When can I hear back from you?
🏥 What are your working hours?
The answers to these vital questions will help you customize your telemedicine services to the immediate patient needs.
Setting 24/7 live chat on your website will ensure immediate touch with your patients.
Once setting up a live chat on your website, make it compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).
Establishing a patient-friendly online platform with the help of live chat tools and codes is part of your homework to ensure a seamless patient experience.
Resonating with search results pages is strategically important because you’ll get an overwhelming majority of site visits from Google rather than on-site clicks.
Updating your business description and telemedicine services in Google, Google Maps, Bing, Yahoo, and third-party listings like Yelp and ZocDoc will help more people find your online care.
Setting a Google Business profile will add to your brand awareness and online reputation with links to local listings.
Adjusting meta information will also affect your appearance in the search results pages. Potential patients see these pages whenever they search for services like yours.
Adding meta tags to your homepage, provider pages, and location pages will encourage more direct patient visits.
So far, search ads on Google are among the most effective paid channels with a high potential to generate sufficient patient volume. Google Search ads appear in front of your target patient audience whenever they need your services most:
There are proven types of Google Search campaigns:
Branded advertising based on a keyword list with the name of your telemedicine practice and your doctors’ names to resonate with your existing patients seeking your practice.
Wider geotarget campaigns based on broad-term keywords like telemedicine doctor or virtual clinic without mentioning exact titles or certifications.
Local campaigns to promote your telemedicine services within your immediate physical locale.
Google Display Network (GDN) ads based on web content like local and national websites and blogs, mobile apps, YouTube videos, and games.
Unlock the power of Google Search Ads to connect with highly targeted patient audiences actively seeking your telemedicine solutions. By leveraging this advertising solution, you’ll enhance online visibility for your telehealth venture, engage potential patients at pivotal moments, and boost traffic and sales to your website.
Once you’ve got a patient email database, automate and customize notifications to keep your patients informed and updated about your virtual care services. Email marketing is among the most popular communication channels that will drive patients to your telehealth website.
The magic of email marketing is about personalization:
🏥 Address your patients by name
🏥 Resonate with their health needs and concerns
🏥 Use emails to offer one-time discounts, get referrals, and promote loyalty programs
🏥 Share your best telemedicine initiatives through weekly email updates
🏥 Leverage your telemedicine database to ask your patients to send feedback and reviews on your telemedicine services.
Email marketing is a perfect way to retain your patients and aggregate a loyal client base. With every email sent, your patients will feel you care about them. And that’s a great part of accumulating a patient’s lifetime value (LTV) with your telemedicine business.
Finally, setting up direct email campaigns will help you effectively market and customize your virtual healthcare services among your current patients. Direct mail campaigns are also good for reaching a broader patient audience within your local community.
Boost your telehealth marketing ROI by fostering deeper connections with your customers. Transform your retention strategy with a personalized approach that keeps your audience engaged and loyal. Elevate your brand’s relationship with its customers and watch your results soar!
While social media is not your ultimate outreach strategy, sustaining an active presence through networking is your competitive advantage. That is because many of your target patient audience are active social media users who may spot your service on the go or whenever they need it most.
Targeting social media marketing, try not to dissolve through too many SMM channels. Over time, you’ll not be able to sustain all of them equally. Your active presence on up to three platforms is just enough to maintain daily communication and accumulate an active patient base.
Beware that social media like Facebook or Instagram are intermediary platforms of social communication rather than sales channels. On a Facebook business page, an average post reaches a mere 6.4% of subscribers among all those who like it.
Facebook and Instagram are trending platforms for sharing “Stories” to reach more patients. However, before investing in paid social media campaigns, explore the healthcare digital benchmarks for the telemedicine niche and weigh up your chances vs. Google ads.
We’ll elevate your brand by crafting a comprehensive communication strategy for social media and compelling content that truly connects with your target audience. Let’s transform your online presence and drive meaningful engagement!
At Promodo, we do our best to customize digital marketing strategies for our clients. In telemedicine marketing, you may choose multiple options from running targeted ads to betting on social media strategy.
We always start our client journey with a robust website audit to determine major gaps and outline wider opportunities.
Further, we’ll promote your telemedicine services online with our hands-on expertise and tailored solutions.
As for your target telemedicine audience, our marketers will reach out to online users who follow health-related accounts.
Establishing and sustaining an effective marketing strategy for telemedicine is at the heart of winning new loyal patients and expanding your business. Your ultimate task is to convert more website visitors into quality leads and lifetime patients. Behind this strategic goal is growing the number of virtual appointments.
Promodo telemedicine marketers are here to assist you through all stages of your telehealth marketing journey.
Content Marketing Manager at Promodo
Taras has 16 years of hands-on copywriting experience overseas with 3000+ unique copies.
Accredited with Certificate of Proficiency in English (C2 level) by Cambridge University. Studied at Writing Launch Academy (United States) and owns an Academic Writing Certificate from Oregon University. Author of 12 dictionaries with Apriori Publishers.
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