Like a nutritious diet, regular exercise, or good hygiene, inbound marketing is essential for maintaining a healthy online presence as a medical provider. Not only does it improve your visibility and draw a larger web audience, but it also establishes a long-term, trusting relationship with your prospective buyers, increasing your leads and eventually turning them into customers.
So what are you waiting for? With the help of our inbound marketing tips below, your company will get noticed in the medical industry’s competitive, oversaturated digital arena.
Let’s get started. On your mark, get set, go inbound!
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Establish Your Buyer Personas
Any healthy inbound marketing campaign uses quality content to generate the right traffic and nurture the right leads at the exactly right time. Content that targets your buyer personas during specific points in the sales funnel draws in your ideal audience and is a fundamental component to your healthcare company’s digital marketing endeavors.
Buyer personas are general, semi-fictional depictions of your customer base and a great tool for understanding your audience’s wants and needs and how they pertain to you as a healthcare provider. Building buyer personas is easier than you might think and will help you craft compelling, engaging content that directly addresses your audience.
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Start Blogging
Seventy-two percent of internet users searched for health information online within the last year, according to the Pew Research Center. So once you’ve established your buyer personas, build content anticipating their questions about symptoms, prescriptions, or medical treatments to increase the chances that they’ll find your website.
For example, a pediatrician targeting busy first-time parents could write a blog post outlining the recommended vaccination schedule for infants. A nutritionist targeting dieters could blog about organic dinner recipes, heart-healthy holiday desserts, or quick, wholesome breakfast ideas.
Whoever you’re trying to reach, your blog is a great tool for attracting your audience, building a relationship with them, and generating online leads for your healthcare company.
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Use SEO to Your Advantage
People turn to Google to get answers about everything from stuffy noses to sore backs, and reaching that audience through search engine optimization (SEO) is critical to your presence in healthcare’s ultra-competitive digital environment.
Here’s how SEO works. Search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing have a crawler that collects all of the information available on the internet. The crawler brings that content back to the search engine to generate an index, which is fed through an algorithm to organize results based on relevance to your search.
SEO includes link building, content creation, and the use of relevant keywords to increase your rankings in search engines. The more relevant your website or blog post is, the higher it ranks in these search results. The higher it ranks, the more people see, and hopefully visit, your company’s website.
SEO and blogging go hand-in-hand, and when paired together, are a force to be reckoned with for any inbound marketing campaign.
Stream’s Kick-Start Step:
Before you write a blog, enter your topic into a keyword generator and embed its suggestions in your title, URL, and metadata and throughout your copy to make your post more relevant. For example, a dentist office in Philadelphia might make their site SEO compatible by including long-tail keywords like “toothache remedies” or locational keywords like “Philadelphia toothache relief.”
For more information, check out our article “How to Make Your Blog Post SEO Friendly.”
Inbound Is the Cure Your Marketing Campaign Has Been Waiting For
As a healthcare marketer, you can reach new audiences, generate more leads, and unlock your company’s full potential when you start using inbound. If you’re ready to kick-start an inbound campaign, check out our free e-book Inbound Marketing 101 to learn more.
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Cheers!
Meghan
—Meghan Garrity is an Inbound Marketing Copywriter at Stream Companies, a full-service Philadelphia-area advertising agency.