What Is Healthcare Marketing Automation?

Whether you’re a doctor, a dentist, or the manager of a healthcare facility or company, marketing your offerings is key to attracting customers. The problem is, most in the field of healthcare are understandably short of the skills required to perform that marketing – after all, practitioners require plenty of specialist training on their own. Marketing automation, and liaison with specialist marketing agencies, can help healthcare providers win more customers and boost their profits. This article explains how it all works – and what you can do to engage with experts to get your healthcare marketing campaign off the ground. 

Why Perform Marketing?

Marketing isn’t an essential function of a healthcare agency, but it can certainly help you drum up future business and guarantee you’ll have a full plate in the future. Even if you feel that you don’t need to perform marketing, you can be sure that some of your competitors are spending some of their revenue on increasing their exposure. That means that failing to participate in marketing could see you lose business and opportunities to your rivals.

Marketing can also help you target certain profiles of clients and customers, which is useful if you’re offering a specific form of healthcare that only a small portion of the population is ever likely to require. Instead of hoping that these people key the correct search terms into Google and find your company organically, you can give them a helping hand through marketing. 

Automated Marketing

As you’ll know, marketing is a field that’s designed to win you customers through the active promotion of what it is you do and why your healthcare services are superior to others. It’s long been a field that requires active input from a number of practitioners – but with the rise of automation, it’s become something that you can do virtually without lifting a finger.

Why? Because there are a range of technologies on the market today which are aimed at delivering expert marketing services in an automated fashion. These include:

• Email marketing services, which reach out to your past customers and patients to promote your services and to win back their custom
• Social media posting automation, which will see you posting multiple times per week with pre-scheduled content
• Chatbots and automated customer services software that’ll help you respond to queries from potential customers without having to pay a full-time receptionist or administrator

There’s plenty more to the world of marketing automation for healthcare firms, but those three software products may well be the most valuable to you.

Marketing Agencies

Before exploring these fields of healthcare marketing automation in more detail, it’s worth pointing out that those without any marketing experience will likely find a marketing agency is a useful partner in conducting their marketing. It’s true that a medical SEO agency will charge you for their expert services, but you’ll end up with a far larger return on your marketing investment when you work alongside these professionals.

Marketing experts will help you to frame your value proposition and to target certain rich channels from which you’ll derive new customers. You can name your budget, and they’ll find the most effective way to spend it in order to boost your visibility online. They’ll also give you an idea of the kinds of technologies they’ll be using to perform your marketing – some of which will be listed below. 

Email Marketing

Healthcare services and professionals use email marketing for one very important reason: it’s one of the most effective ways in which to secure repeat custom. As a medical institution, it’s highly likely that your clients and customers are leaving with you their email addresses. A simple request as to whether you can send them marketing emails – which may contain special offers, new treatment courses, or partnerships with other institutions – can give you the chance to get back in touch with them.

Of course, sending emails over and over again to different past customers can take an age. That’s why there’s smart, automated email software out there: to make that whole process seamless, automatic, and something that’s running in the background, and you concentrate on providing the best possible service to your customers. There is a range of options in this space, all of which are designed to free up time while delivering the benefits of email marketing to healthcare firms. 

Social Media Marketing

You may have been using social media marketing techniques for several years. They’re useful because audiences are divided by the social media websites into certain demographics. That means healthcare professionals who tend to serve older populations can target them on the likes of Facebook, ensuring they’re not wasting marketing spending on material that will be viewed by younger demographics.

When you set up a marketing campaign on the likes of Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter, those platforms’ basic interfaces will allow you to program a certain number of posts to be presented to a certain number of users. If you’re interested in further automation – allowing you to line up posts that’ll periodically appear publicly on your profile – there’s also software out there to do just that for you. It’s easy to use and will just require you to create the content in advance before scheduling it to post at regular intervals.

Chatbots

A major innovation to have hit the market in recent years is the rise of the chatbot. It’s now not necessary for firms large and small to hire extra customer services operatives to manage incoming questions or complaints, with chatbots helping to address these before human intervention is required. This saves you and your team time and cash and means that customers receive prompt replies to their questions on a number of different topics.

You can set up a chatbot on your website or on your social media platforms. They’re designed to send users down a decision tree that’ll help the chatbot identify what it is they’re getting in touch about. If the chatbot is programmed to respond automatically, it will do. If the question requires the attention of a member of staff, the chatbot will direct the user to that staff member. It’s a neat, automated solution to the challenge of providing good communication to your customers. 

Start Marketing Automatically

If you’re interested in getting to grips with the above software, there are a number of steps that it’s prudent to take before committing cash to a new marketing strategy. These are to:

• Assign a reasonable budget and set a limit on your marketing spend
• Research what other medical institutions are using for their marketing and what has been successful
• Look into the tools that you feel you can use without the support of experts and professionals
• Reach out to an agency for assistance in any field of marketing that you’re not currently adept in

By following these steps, you’ll ensure that you’re not rushing into a marketing relationship that could end up costing you more than it returns. Plus, you’ll learn which types of automated marketing technology you’re able to harness yourself and which you should instead leave to the experts. 

This guide is all about introducing healthcare professionals and their teams to the benefits of automated marketing, showing you the benefits it can bring and which technologies, in particular, you should consider concentrating on.