A survey conducted by National Research Corp. reported that over 40% of people who responded to the survey rely on social networking for health-related information, and 94% of people turn to Facebook. They look for health education videos from hospitals, medical practices, and various healthcare providers, healthy living ideas, such as diet and exercise, and other health events.

Facebook acts as a two-way communications channel for healthcare marketing. People can connect with those who share similar interests as theirs, like medical-related topics, and on some occasions give and get feedback from health facilities.

Medical practices need to master Facebook marketing strategies since several people are looking for and trust those reviews and recommendations of local services shared by the peer groups.

Tips to master Facebook for Medical Practices

1) Analyze Your Medical Practice’s Facebook Page

As a healthcare professional, you might have already created a Facebook page for your medical practice. Analyze the page for professionalism and build it as a business page representing your medical practice or brand. This official page acts as a primary channel for interaction and engagement with your target audience.

Add every possible contact information like phone number, email address, website link, services you offer, and hours of operation, thus making it easy for your followers to connect with you. Include clearly visible call-to-action buttons that allow your followers to book an appointment or get in touch with you easily.

2) Prefer to Use Authentic Photos

When people turn up to your Facebook page to know your contact information to visit your clinic, they analyze your page for credibility. The best way to build trust in people is to include authentic photos of your clinic, medical practice, physicians, and other staff. 

Avoid using stock photos and use actual pictures that represent patients. Your potent patient’s response to such images will be high as they help establish your authenticity.

3) Use Facebook Analytics to Know Your Audience’s Interests

Take a look at all the Facebook posts n your medical practice’s page and look for those posts that resonate with your current and potential patients. To perform this analysis, use Facebook Analytics to provide you with two major pieces of information that help you to create better content for your followers.

• Facebook Page Insights that says what people are looking for on your page and how they interact with your content.
• Facebook Audience Insights that say who is looking at your page.

4) Create Different Types of Posts

It’s not a rule to include text-only posts as you are a medical health provider. You can convey your information to your audience through different post ideas that engage them. Some of them include videos, GIFs, infographics, giveaways, polls, and surveys. 

Make sure to use high-quality images, gifs, or videos that help you deliver your message accurately. Use Canva or Ribbet to create the correct sizes of images for your Facebook page, with drag-and-drop tools.

5) Be Consistent to Post on your Facebook Page

Consistency is the key to bring more followers to your page. Follow a schedule to post different types of posts on your page and use tools like Hootsuite to schedule your posts. Social media tools like Hootsuite help you achieve consistency through automation. Be consistent in posting on your page, analyzing what is working and what is not, and updating accordingly.

6) Post about Cause Awareness Events

Help your audience to know about the important dates and health events. Whether it is Alzheimer’s Disease Awareness Month, Breast Cancer Awareness Month, or Healthy Weight Week, announce these notable dates and other health fairs so that interested followers attend those events.

7) Follows Patient Privacy Regulations 

The main difficulty with Facebook for medical practices is privacy. Study and understand thoroughly how HIPAA applies to medical Facebook posts. Some of the rules include not sharing client testimonials unless expressly approved, hiding patient information when taking photos of the office and team, hiding or deleting comments or reviews that share personal information.

8) Post Updates Related to your Medical Practice

Are you ready to introduce a new program, product, or service? Introduce it to your followers in the form of an announcement post. Your followers will love to hear about it and may appreciate you for taking the time to announce it.

9) Go Live on Facebook

A study says that Facebook live videos receive more engagement compared to other traditional videos, and it draws ten times as many comments as regular videos. Facebook’s algorithm is designed to prioritize live video by placing it at the top of the News Feed. In addition to that, it sends notifications to potentially interested audiences and allows live videos to be archived on Facebook that can be viewed and shared after the live broadcast.

10) Advertise Through Facebook

Facebook ads help you target a wider audience and offer a great return on investment. It is one of the most affordable paid options for medical practices to connect with their patients for just a few hundred dollars a month.

Whatever may be your primary goal, whether to reach more audiences or to promote your medical practice page, Facebook advertising allows you to target the right audience of the right demographics and interests. Facebook ad manager is a user-friendly tool that assists you in managing and analyzing your ad campaigns.

11) Create Facebook Stories

Facebook stories are short pieces of content that can be delivered in the form of slideshows and video collections and are available for up to 24 hours. You can share health tips or behind-the-scenes content or host question-answers sessions.

The post 11 Tips to Master Facebook for Medical Practices appeared first on Healthcare Marketing Tips.

Every healthcare marketer who maintains a website for their medical practice works on a common goal to capture potential visitors and convert those leads into their loyal patients. But the problem with several medical practices is that they fail to convert the visitors.

These days, it is rare to see a medical practice without a website, but the main thing is, are these websites converting their visitors? Do the people who visit these websites take the desired actions?

What is the Conversion Rate?

Conversion Rate is the percentage of people who have visited your website, or landing page are converted to take some desired action. 

Healthcare marketers need to focus more on conversion marketing that is done with the intention of increasing conversions on their website. The process of optimizing your website or landing page experience based on typical visitor behavior to improve the chances of the visitor to take desired actions is called conversion rates optimization.

Here, we have discussed some of the best ways healthcare marketers can adopt to improve the conversion rates of their medical practice.

1) Include additional Lead Generators

As a healthcare marketer, you must understand that a person won’t get converted just because they have visited your website. Hence it is crucial to create multiple lead generators. Think about the possible problems of your potential patients and what solution you could offer them, which is the only intention they have landed on your website. 

For example, you can create a pain assessment survey that allows patients to input their symptoms and effectively take the first step toward finding relief for their pain. This way, you can communicate with your leads too.

Providing these types of additional lead generators allows you to convert more visitors, especially those who might not be ready to make an appointment. It is necessary to create a follow-up process for these leads.

2) Segment your leads

If you send out every possible content to everyone in your contact list, they may get irritated, and there is a chance of losing your patient subscribers easily. Doing such practices affect your lead conversion strategies negatively.

Hence you need to segment your contact list into smaller lists based on their actions and where they are in their customer journey so that you can deliver more targeted content. Segmenting your leads is necessary because each patient visiting your medical website needs different information. 

Your primary responsibility is to analyze whether they are in the awareness stage, consideration stage, or decision stage. Use patient personas to understand your prospective patients’ interests, needs, and pain points and send the right content to different stages in the patient’s journey.

3) Create different types of Valuable Content

A report says that out of the 80% of the health-related searches made online, most searches are about a specific disease or medical problem or a particular medical treatment or procedure. And so many medical websites are trying to answer the queries of people with their content. 

To make your content stand out in this ocean of content, you need to attract more potential patients through valuable content in different forms, including eBooks, infographics, videos, webinars, whitepapers, etc. Your primary goal should be to educate your patients through content that answers their doubts and needs. Keep in mind the slogan “Educate, then promote” so that you gain more credibility.

4) Include strong Call-to-Actions

Call-to-Action is the primary element of your conversion strategy that prompts the visitors to take some action. So, make your call-to-action copy more persuasive. Instead of using the more general CTAs like “Contact Us” and “Sign Up,” you can use more effective words that urge visitors to click on them.

Starting the CTA with the word “Yes” is psychologically more effective that converts the visitors. For example, instead of “Download the eBook,” you can make it more compelling as “Yes, I want my eBook.” These types of influential CTA copies should be incorporated in medical websites to increase the conversion rates.

5) Add Live Chat

Most prospective patients who visit your website would be on the verge of conversion or visiting your clinic but may have a question or concern that keeps them from taking that last step. To avoid losing those patients, you must add live chat to your medical website that would be a great support for them and act as an effective conversion marketing tool for your medical practice.

6) Showcase Reviews and Testimonials

A report says that 62% of patients look for online reviews before scheduling an appointment with a physician. Reviews can impact your conversion rates and are responsible for improving your medical practice’s online reputation. Provide testimonials of past successful patients on your website that make it easy for your visitors to build trust in your medical practice.

Final Thoughts

Lead conversion is not a one-time process, and the visitors of your website won’t get converted into your potential patients right after they find something useful. As a healthcare marketer, you need to analyze the patient journey based on their behaviors and nurture them slowly and strategically with the correct information at the right time.

The post Strategies for Increasing Conversion Rates for Medical Practices appeared first on Healthcare Marketing Tips.

The world is experiencing lockdown for more than a year, and people are staying in their homes to save their precious lives.

Imagine this situation, when a random young man is living with his elderly parents and at midnight, his grandfather is complaining of slight chest pain. He can’t take his grandfather out as the situation is terrible outside, and he is confused.

This is where mobile applications play an essential role in assisting us. Mobile App Development is undeniably the best innovation of the 21st century.

The increase in mobile users encouraged developers worldwide to build applications that ease users’ routine lives. Every domain that makes the world function has a mobile application, and the healthcare industry also benefited from this innovation.

Such applications developed for the healthcare sector are called mHealth apps (mHealth means Mobile Health). 

“Mobile health (mHealth) is the monitoring and sharing of health information via mobile technology – such as wearables and health tracking apps.” – Business Insider.

Some types of mHealth apps include

• Clinical Diagnostic Apps
• Mental Wellbeing Apps
• Pregnancy Care Apps
• Remote Management Apps
• Chronic Illness Apps

Benefits of mHealth Apps for Doctor-Patient Engagement

Building Trust and Confidence

Some hospitals fail to build a connection between doctors and patients, thus resulting in a lack of trust and confidence. Sometimes patients get irritated due to the lack of communication from the other side, and there arises a chance of losing such patients.

MHealth apps can solve these issues as they establish a consistent connection between doctors and their patients. The reports of each patient are assigned to the respective doctors clearly so that they can review them and contact their patients at their own pace of time.

mHealth apps also take the responsibility of maintaining secure communication between doctors and their patients.

Booking Appointments made easy

The traditional way of waiting in a long queue for hours – those days were gone. One of the most significant advantages of using mHealth apps is the requesting and cancellation of appointments. Patients need not worry if their doctor would be available or not as mHealth apps clearly show the work schedule of their respective doctors. 

Patients can also cancel or reschedule their appointments according to their convenience, which is also the most remarkable advantage of using these apps.

Personal Connection with Elderly People and Pregnant Women

The period of quarantine has turned out to be a nightmare for older people and pregnant women. But these mHealth apps are most effective for these people. They need not visit their respective doctor every time for regular medical checkups. 

They can also ping their doctor whenever they need them. This communication is necessary for older adults during this quarantine as it is also good for their mental health.

Doctors can also set reminders for consultations and medications from various time intervals such as hourly, daily, weekly, and monthly. This would be more helpful for pregnant women as they need the proper care at the right time.

Reducing Errors and thus Preventing Miscommunications

To err is human, and one cannot prevent those spelling mistakes or misunderstandings of the written prescriptions every time. But when they are computerized, those errors can be reduced.

Nowadays, several hospitals provide their medications through computerized medical software. In the same way, through real-time data collection and e-record keeping, these mHealth apps help reduce errors.

Save Time for both the Patients and the Doctors

The record sheets of patients are stored in the profile of the respective patients so that it would be easy for them to view their records at their own pace of time. They are also reminded of their medications at the right time. This helps the patients not disturb their doctors frequently and allows them to take their medicines at the right time without any assistance. This technological development saves time for both the doctors and the patients.

Final Thoughts

Internet users are increasing day by day, and every citizen is using a smartphone. Millions of mobile apps are developed for every domain, and the healthcare sector is no such exception. These mHealth apps are available in app stores for free, and people should use them to their utmost advantage.

The post mHealth Apps for Doctor-Patient Engagement appeared first on Healthcare Marketing Tips.