77% of patients use search engines to research healthcare. 32% of patients use TV. 20% of patients use magazines. 18% use newspapers. Where do you spend your marketing dollars?
Companies allot 25% of their marketing budget for digital activities, up 9% since 2012 (Source: Gartner). During 2013, $1.18 billion healthcare and pharmaceutical companies spent on paid advertising online, and the number is slightly higher for non-regulated healthcare companies. The steadily rising spend is expected to increase to $1.47 billion by 2017 (Source: eMarketer).
It’s time to review your healthcare marketing strategy.
You seek to find the right mix of marketing activities that yield results, revenue and brand value. How much of your healthcare marketing budget do you allot to digital pursuits? How do you best leverage dollars for digital?
What are healthcare-focused marketers already achieving on the Web?
They’re launching responsive websites and other robust, dynamic and flexible mobile digital assets, such as tele-medicine apps, remote diagnostic tools and health tracking solutions for smartphones, such as Apple’s rumored Healthbook app, which may help patients track multiple health and fitness data points, perhaps using the soon-to-launch wearable iWatch. They’re managing SEO and SEM. They’re finding new ways to succeed with paid ads. And they’re using analytics to connect the dots. Plus they’re joining caregivers and patients online to build health-conscious communities.
Why is this the year for all healthcare businesses to take a closer look at digital marketing?
The latest technology offers the ability to market effectively and efficiently. Even in a regulated and privacy-mandated industries, especially healthcare and pharma, new opportunities in website design and development make it possible to create safe, secure and sustainable online presence. Healthcare business marketers can not only champion the responsive websites and the mobile application, but they have more ways in which to quickly adapt in an evolving landscape. Web developers now see this landscape as limitless because they can build virtually anything, including complex content distribution tools and easy-to-use tele-medicine solutions.
Responsive sites. Web apps. Paid ads. Social media. Where does your health business start?
Before you free caregivers from workstations with a game-changing medical imaging app, assess your site. This is a hub and it should be the cornerstone of all your digital marketing activities. Seek to make better sense of caregiver, patient and community engagement with your healthcare organization online. Study analytics. Survey caregivers. Reach out to patients.
At Inflexion Interactive, we help you make sense of emerging needs of caregivers and patients on the Web. We use their insights to build responsive websites and mobile apps for advanced medicine. We’re an award-winning full-service digital marketing company that understands the unique regulatory requirements and changing needs of your rapidly immersing online market.
Let’s discuss digital marketing for healthcare. Tweet, contact us.