Table of Contents: 1. Get found 2. Convert web visitors to patients 3. Analyze what works

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2 Table of Contents: 1. Get found a. Your website b. Your blog c. Social media 2. Convert web visitors to patients a. Creating landing pages b. Choosing a marketing firm specializing in inbound marketing 3. Analyze what works a. Measure what types of traffic convert b.

3 How to attract medical tourists to your hospital Over the past several years, a new trend in the healthcare industry known as medical tourism has become popular. Patients from the United States and Europe travel to countries like India, Singapore, Costa Rica and many others to get affordable yet first-class medical treatment rather than getting their medical treatment at home. These medical tourists use the Internet as their main resource for finding information about medical care abroad. Statistics show that 55-76% of Americans between the ages of 45 and 65 years go online regularly, and so, it is important for your hospital to have an effective inbound marketing strategy in place. Inbound marketing is a combination of remarkable content, website engagement and online brand management that leads customers to you rather than you following them. It focuses on generating traffic to your website through SEO (Search Engine Optimization), blogging and social media marketing. As an institution of international standards, your hospital may be short on the time and internal resources needed to implement and execute an effective strategy for inbound marketing for your hospital. There are three main steps that we at 9 Clouds recommend you focus on to conduct a successful inbound marketing strategy for your hospital. First, you need to get found on the Internet;; then, you need to convert your web visitors to patients;; and finally, you need to analyze what works for you.

4 I. Get Found 1. Your Website Your website is the most important way you can attract potential patients to your hospital. An excellent website is one that is able to attract increasing number of visitors from your target market and is able to transform them into effective leads. Your website should allow visitors to navigate easily, so the layout and design of the website is important. But before that, you need to make your website easily visible on the Internet because that is how you will be able to start a flow of organic visits to your website. The key to improving the online visibility of your website is creative and effective content. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is therefore essential to your visibility on Google and other search engines, and so keyword optimization is needed for your URL, your web pages, and all the content on your website. Tools like Google Analytics can be used for free while other marketing software such as HubSpot provide tools for measuring the effectiveness of keywords that you are using on your website. difficulty ratings for keywords related to medical tourism:

5 Based on these results, keywords such as health tourism and medical tour are your most effective keywords. You can find out keywords that are searched the most, as well as the level of difficulty you will face in breaking into the front page of search results for the keywords. This enables you to target keywords with the maximum searches while simultaneously allowing you to use keywords that have a low level of difficulty. You can also track the number of visits each keyword receives from organic searches and the number of leads it generates. You will also get an approximate cost per click (CPC) from Google AdWords, which is the amount you would actually pay Google for a click on your ad on Google of you had one. In this way, you can plan and track your organic searches by managing your keywords. You can find more information about how to use keywords to connect to your patients here. Another way to strengthen your online visibility is to get links to your website from other websites and blogs. You can register your website on Yahoo directory and other Internet site resources to boost your search ranking. Even better, however, is to create educational and engaging content that other websites and blogs would want to share with their readers. This builds links and improves your visibility online. 2. Your Blog The blogosphere is another platform that you can use to succeed in your online marketing efforts. As I mentioned already, your blogs need to be captivating or at least interesting enough so that people will link to them. Again, you need to keyword-optimize your blogs, including titles and URLs, using a marketing software, so that you attract visits to your website by using keywords that your potential patients are searching. Choose your blog topics wisely, so that you attract the right crowd to your website. For example, as more and more people are becoming health conscious, they are searching for more information on topics related to health and fitness. You can use that to your benefit by having blogs about current health-related topics and thus, attracting people to a specific landing page with that blog, and then direct them to your homepage or other blogs. Some of these visitors could transform into your potential patients or they may know someone who is interested in medical tourism. You can also target your viewers by writing blogs that are very specific to your target market. So, instead of covering a broad topic like health, you can write blogs that only people interested in medical tourism would look for. Your blogs could be about special medical treatments that your

6 hospital offers, the facilities and technology that the hospital has, personal blogs of doctors, and special travel packages offered by the hospital that would interest potential patients. Such blogs and also videos on similar topics would definitely attract potential medical tourists to your hospital website. 3. Social Media It is crucial for your hospital to maintain a strong presence on social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn because most of your medical tourist patients are on these sites. You need an active profile on at least these two sites so that you can connect with your past and future patients easily, as well as monitor what they are saying about your hospital. By creating events, pages, posting videos, updating posts, and linking your web pages on your Facebook and LinkedIn pages, you will also improve your online visibility. You can also connect with patients through Facebook Ads, where you can target users on a number of categories including: location, demographics, interests, language, education, workplace information and so on. For further assistance on how market your hospital using Facebook, you can download your FREE Facebook guide at LinkedIn is a useful platform for B2B marketing. Your hospital might be able to strike a deal with US based insurance companies or businesses that might be willing to offer their employees medical tour options to your hospital. Uploading videos on YouTube is another excellent way of improving your online visibility as well as marketing your hospital effectively. Learn more about YouTube and video marketing here. Through social media, you can direct followers to your website. If you have the information that they are looking for, or if you have interesting content that they would want to read and share with their friends, they will visit and share your site with their contacts. Through likes, shares and links on these social media sites, you can create a greater awareness about your hospital on the Internet. You can encourage your employees to have a strong presence on social media sites to share your ho page or links to your blogs to increase visits to your website. You can download a FREE social media handbook from 9 Clouds and learn much more about using social media effectively at:

7 II. Convert web visitors to patients Once you start getting a decent number of visits to your website, the next important step is to convert those web visitors to your patients. You can go about transforming your web visitors into leads and then your patients by doing the following: 1. Create landing pages A landing page is a specialized webpage that has a form that generate leads. By offering something of interest such as information on a medical tourism package, visitors will provide their address in exchange for the information. These contacts are then your first targets for marketing efforts. Landing pages are also important tools for reconverting your existing leads and gradually leading them further down the sales funnel to finally come to your hospital. There are three main things that should stand out to the viewer as soon as they click on a landing page: The offer and its benefits to the viewer The reason why the viewer needs it NOW How the viewer can get the offer Once you have your landing pages set up, you need to build and launch targeted lead-nurturing campaigns to convert the leads into future patients. A lead nurturing campaign is a series of s that you create to automatically send to your leads once they fill out a form on your landing page. You can customize the timings of s as to how many days after the lead fills out the form that they should receive the first, second, and third s. By sending them s with links to additional information that may be of interest to them, you can identify and pursue your potential patients from the pool of leads that you collect. In order to create landing pages and launching lead generation and nurturing campaigns, you can use a marketing software like HubSpot or a free marketing program like MailChimp. These softwares provide you free tutorials on how to use each of their tools.

8 2. Choose a marketing firm that specializes in inbound marketing Converting your prospects into your patients requires a lot of time, effort and creativity. If you are short on time and internal resources in terms of employees with experience in digital media, then you should hire a marketing firm or collaborate with one. A digital marketing company would design a digital and social media marketing strategy keeping your hospital, the medical tourism industry, your competitors and your target market in focus. It may even train members of your marketing team so success. Online marketing companies keep up-to-date with the latest technological and digital advances, and have assisted clients who have faced challenges similar to you to reach their business goals. Our firm, 9 Clouds, can help you with all of these efforts. We understand the value of your time and benchmarks that are most important to you, and will recommend the best marketing strategy to you. Please contact us at: info@9clouds.com to get started. III. Analyze what works In the entire process of inbounding marketing, from getting found online to converting prospects to patients, the most crucial step is to measure and analyze whether or not your marketing efforts are giving you results. Finding out what works is essential at every step of inbound marketing because you can plan your next step accordingly. We have already learned how to measure the effectiveness of your keywords, but we can also: 1. Measure what types of traffic convert You can measure what sites drive the most traffic to your website and what types of traffic generate most leads. For example, using HubSpot, we can find out the conversion rate for 9 Clouds from different sources. The bar graph and the table below show that social media and marketing are the sources that convert the most number of visitors to leads for 9 Clouds. And amongst all social media sites, it is Facebook that has the highest conversion rate of 8.3%. So, based on this data, we focus more on the sources with high conversion rates.

9 Measurement of your marketing endeavors on a regular basis is not only important for you to track your success, it is also important for you to be able to report to your colleagues and supervisors so that you can improve your marketing efforts. With the help of a company such as 9 Clouds, you can measure and analyze every aspect of your inbound marketing strategy, such as tracking success of your web pages, your blog, your competitors, your social media profiles, and many more.

10 Measurement of conversion for a few 9 Clouds landing pages using HubSpot: 2. Since most of your potential patients are active social media users, it is important that you maintain a strong and positive social media presence. By connecting with your past and current patients through social media sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter, you can get them to talk about you to their friends and followers. However, you want to keep a check on what they are saying about your hospital. Active monitoring of your brand on social media is important because negative or incorrect information about your hospital can harm your reputation and business. Through your social media profiles, you can respond to queries from potential patients, as well as receive feedback from former and current patients so that you can find out what they are looking for in a medical tourism hospital. You can use all this information to improve your hospital as well as its online image. Marketing software allows you to track your reach through different social media profiles as well as autopublish blog articles and such. In conclusion, we suggest that you follow the above three steps of inbound marketing get found, convert web visitors to patients, and analyze what works- to attract more medical tourists to your hospital. You can learn more about inbound marketing and get starting marketing your hospital at