The healthcare industry is extremely competitive, which means that medical practices and pharma companies must engage in effective marketing campaigns to stand out from the crowd and engage with their community members and clientele.
If you’re looking for some ideas and inspiration for your latest marketing campaign, this article will provide 5 key examples and some insights into the best healthcare marketing strategies!
What Are Healthcare Marketing Campaigns?
Healthcare marketing campaigns are utilized by hospitals, clinics, pharma companies, and others to reach their target audiences and promote their medications, treatments, and services.
These marketing campaigns can include everything from traditional out-of-home advertising to search engine optimization, so let’s take a look at 5 successful campaigns and the tactics they used.
Healthcare Marketing Campaigns Examples
Carilion Clinic’s #YESMAMM Campaign
The Carilion Clinic noticed that women in the Roanoke Valley area were falling behind on regular mammograms and breast health screenings. To remedy this, they launched their #YesMamm campaign in October, which is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month.
This marketing campaign heavily relied on social media and encouraged women to share their breast cancer stories in posts accompanied by the YesMamm hashtag. What’s great about the Carilion Clinic’s campaign is its simplicity, showing that a quick and memorable social media marketing venture can generate sizable traffic to a healthcare website and high patient conversion rates.
Cleveland Clinic’s Health Essentials Blog
The Cleveland Clinic’s Health Essentials Blog started in 2013 as a way to drive traffic to its non-profit medical and hospital care centers.
However, its content marketing efforts were so successful that the Health Essentials Blog is one of the most visited online healthcare destinations with 3.2M monthly visits!
If you are considering creating online content to boost your online visibility and credibility, it’s a good idea to examine what made the Health Essentials Blog so successful. In its first year, they were publishing 3-5 posts per day. The blog really found success when it turned towards creating high-quality content rather than producing high volume.
New York-Presbyterian Hospital’s Patient Stories
The New York-Presbyterian Hospital rolled out a print and video marketing campaign that showcased how doctors and nurses supported patients through dire circumstances.
The emotional nature of this ad campaign engaged consumers and inspired them to place their trust in the New York Presbyterian Hospital to similarly help them through their times of need. This ad campaign was also paired with a portion of the hospital’s website that featured the entire collection of these patient stories.
UnitedHealthcare’s “We Dare You” Campaign
UnitedHealthcare has received multiple awards for their “We Dare You” campaign– and for good reason. This campaign is an ideal example of how healthcare marketers can reach out to their target audience and get them to engage with their brand.
The We Dare You campaign used monthly “dares”, which involved quizzes and prizes on its websites that encouraged participants to take one more small step towards a healthier lifestyle.
Mayo Clinic’s Sharing Mayo Clinic Blog and Social Media Strategy
The Mayo Clinic is frequented by millions of users around the world for its wealth of informative healthcare articles and blogs. To further boost their online presence and patient engagement, they began the Sharing Mayo Clinic blog.
These Mayo Clinic blogs were different from their usual material. Instead of being written by doctors and medical experts, the content was created by average people discussing their personal medical battles or that of their loved ones. This helped to personalize medical conditions and allowed those suffering from them to provide insights on how to cope and overcome them.
Best Healthcare Marketing Strategies
Patient Testimonials
Consumers connect with good storytelling, and few stories are more compelling than those that showcase individuals struggling with medical conditions. Patient testimonials serve as a powerful hospital advertising solution that humanizes your healthcare practice while simultaneously demonstrating the value of your services.
If you’re looking for a prime example of how to utilize patient testimonials, watch this video of a lung cancer survivor from the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences:
Video marketing in the healthcare industry has always relied heavily on patient testimonials to create an emotional connection and encourage people to place trust in the advertised institution.
Consider creating different ads to appeal to different demographic groups that your healthcare practice serves. For example, a psychiatric hospital could produce one video featuring a senior citizen recovering from depression and another on a teenager who overcame her anxiety disorder. By focusing on unique patient experiences, you’ll have the best chance of winning over different audiences.
Educational Content
As we showed with the Health Essentials blog, creating educational content online can be immensely beneficial to healthcare practices. However, you don’t need to post daily blogs to drive success. Instead, you can create informational articles in your area of expertise that answer common consumer and patient questions.
By publishing high-quality, informative content, you can drive organic traffic to your healthcare practice in two ways.
For one, high-quality content is more likely to be shared among readers. Secondly, search engines favor organizations that show Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness (E-A-T). That means that the more credibility you’ve built up online, the higher your practice will rank in search listings for relevant inquiries.
Multichannel Marketing
Modern healthcare advertising efforts often involve a multichannel marketing approach since there is now a wide variety of advertising mediums to utilize, such as social media, email, online, and physical marketing.
Multichannel marketing refers to the use of multiple advertising channels that operate independently from one another to expand your reach. Also, using multiple advertising channels increases the frequency with which prospective patients and clients will see your brand and thus boosts conversion rates.
Another useful aspect of multichannel marketing is that it can help you execute more efficient campaigns in the future. Since each channel operates independently from one another, you can track varying levels of engagement and conversion and see which mediums are and aren’t worth investing in again.
Wellness Boards
Traditional out-of-home marketing utilizes mediums like highway billboards, street furniture, and posters. While these advertising channels can help general brand awareness, they aren’t very targeted and it’s difficult to track engagement. If you’re looking to add an effective out-of-home advertising medium to your campaign, consider utilizing wellness boards instead.
Wellness boards are one of the best marketing mediums for healthcare brands because they provide an optimal contextual setting and appeal to health-conscious consumers. These in-store boards dispense sanitizing wipes from below a prominently featured advertisement and can be installed in pharmacy wait areas.
Terraboost is an innovator in this advertising medium and independent studies have shown that 66% of shoppers engage with their sanitizing kiosks and that 50% would take a brochure or coupon to learn more. Also, these sanitizing kiosks can come equipped with retargeting and geofencing capabilities that track the anonymized mobile data of nearby shoppers to help reach consumers and analyze engagement.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
In today’s digital landscape, it’s essential to utilize search engine optimization (SEO) to create online visibility. When search engine users type in “best medication for X illness” or “best cardiac clinic in my area” you want your practice to be one of the first to show up in the search listings.
To optimize your healthcare practice’s web page, you’ll need to conduct keyword research on what prospective patients are most likely to search for when seeking medical treatment. Once you have your list of keywords, the next step is to tactically place them throughout your site’s title tags, meta descriptions, and content. If you produce blogs and articles, you’ll want to optimize them as well.
Another important aspect for increasing your online presence is local SEO. A stunning 86% of consumers use Google Maps when looking for local products and services. That means it’s extremely important for healthcare marketers to fully understand and utilize this search platform.
To conduct local SEO, you’ll make a Google My Business account and claim your listing. Google favors up-to-date accounts, so be sure to include your operating hours, address, and contact information. Search engines also rank businesses with the most 4- and 5-star reviews higher in the search listings. You can receive reviews from good service, but it can be quicker and more effective to solicit your client base for reviews after appointments and consultations.
Conducting a successful healthcare marketing campaign can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. We at Terraboost have a track record of working with top healthcare brands and can provide you with key industry insights and a free personalized quote.
Our network of 120,000+ wellness boards are located in the pharmacy wait areas of stores like CVS, Walgreens, and Rite Aid. Your healthcare brand could soon be featured as a part of o
