Save Time Marketing to Healthcare Professionals: How to Do More With Less

Marketing and generating leads are essential parts of standing out in any industry. Unfortunately, many healthcare support businesses and specialized advisors have found that they spend too many hours marketing to healthcare professionals and entities with few qualified leads coming through. 

There is absolutely no shortage of marketing content on the internet when it comes to the healthcare industry, but the problem is that most of it is only patient-facing. 

Here’s how it could shake out—and likely how it has before for your business. For example, you put out digital ads to promote your legal firm that represents hospital systems, but you receive leads from patients who want help with their legal troubles. You’re aiming in the right direction, but not receiving the leads you’d hoped for. 

Here’s another example. You place ads in industry trade publications with the goal of growing your firm to serve medical practice business accounting clients, but you continue to receive leads from non-healthcare or individual healthcare practitioners. 

These questions still remain: How do you stand out in an oversaturated digital landscape? How do you cut through the noise to talk to people who will actually be receptive to your message? How do you increase the accuracy of your marketing efforts?

Fortunately, answering these questions and overcoming these problems can be streamlined greatly with better marketing practices and networking platforms that are actually effective. Keep reading to learn more. 

Make Your Website a Foundation of Your Marketing

Your website is a representation of your business. It’s the cornerstone of all your marketing efforts. Your website is one of the best ways in which your potential leads and clients will know more about you, your skills, products, services, etc. Plus, it acts as a place for marketing funnels to move towards. 

Prospects can see an ad, click a button that takes them to your website, where they can submit a form or contact you to enter your sales process. 

Here are some key areas of functionality that your website needs to fulfill. 

Your website must effectively communicate exactly what your business does. Your prospects should be able to tell if you’re a good fit for their needs right away. This will help reduce the chance of inbound leads searching for something you don’t offer. 

Plus, it will help qualified leads know that they’re in the right place. How do you do this? Feature homepage and landing page copy and content hierarchies that are skimmable, clear, and that explicitly state who you are and how you can solve your clients’ problems. 

Your services should be described broadly enough to convey a general sense of your capabilities, but detailed enough to answer a few questions potential customers might have. You want to tell your story of how you help solve clients’ problems quickly, without showing your full hand. 

Prospects should be able to get just enough information to know that you’re a good fit and should want to click through other pages to learn more before contacting you. You should try to address the problems your clients have and position your business as the authority that can make the pain go away. Don’t just list your services like a brochure, give them context. 

When possible, include impressive, past examples of work in a portfolio section. Remember, this is often a lead’s first place for researching a sales prospect. 

You need to build your authority so that prospects will trust you. They want to see that you have a proven track record so they don’t feel like they’re taking a gamble on you. Plus, in an industry as specialized as healthcare, it’s massively important to show that you have experience handling their unique problems. 

The more time you spend optimizing your website, the less you have to worry about spending time explaining your business and services further down the line in your sales cycle. Plus, the prospects entering your sales cycle will be more aligned with what you do, making them more likely to convert into a client.

When your website is optimized in these ways, you’ll look better to search engines like Google, making you easier to find and more accessible to prospects. 

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) 

Search engine optimization, as previously mentioned, is the delicate art of making search engines like Google happy. When you do so, your business will be easier to find on the internet, saving you lots of time and effort in regard to your marketing efforts. 

Here’s how it works: when someone searches for your business or for keywords related to your business, you’ll appear closer to the top of the search results if you’re doing well with SEO. You’ll appear more legitimate and trustworthy, not to mention the fact that little to no people really look beyond the first page of Google results. 

According to Moz.com, 71% of all Google traffic stays on the first page, and the first 5 results receive almost 67% of all the clicks. This means that being a top performer on Google is essential to build authority and generate traffic to your website. 

Researching effective keywords that are relevant to your industry, writing relevant content with these keywords, and building a network of links to increase the ranking of your website is crucial for SEO success. 

For example, an accounting firm that represents oncology group practices would want to find words that people search when looking for their services, then create blogs and website content containing those words—such as “10 bookkeeping things for oncology practices to be aware of”—then link to external sources and pages on their own website that supports the content. 

Keyword research can uncover valuable yet “unclaimed” search words and phrases that can create a new avenue of how you describe your company and services on your website. It can also inspire new opportunities for blogs, videos, and podcasts to expand thought leadership.

While you might not see the results right away, taking your time and building out these content ideas and links will help you generate leads and assert your authority in your industry in the long run. 

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) 

SEO is a more organic approach to funneling traffic towards your website. It takes time to nail down these keywords, write blogs with them, and build link networks to support them. However, there’s a quick way to boost your business’s ranking on Google and other search engines to get you on the top of the page—it’s called Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising. 

PPC is a great way to start “buying” keywords, helping you generate traffic through specific searches relevant to your business. 

This practice of “buying” keywords is called Keyword Bidding. A bid represents the amount of money your business is willing to spend for a single click on a given keyword in Google Ads. Those bids will dictate where your ads show up in search results. 

Every time someone searches for something in Google, Google will run the results through their algorithm and give them rankings according to how much people are bidding for that term as well as your account’s quality score for that term. Essentially, the price you pay is affected by your authority and how many other people are paying for that keyword or set of keywords. 

All of your keywords, bids, and ads live inside an “ad group”, which exists within a campaign. A campaign can contain multiples of these ad groups, each with different keywords and ads. Campaigns also allow you to adjust your daily budget as well as how much money you’re willing to spend in total for that given day on different keywords. 

Overall, PPC is a relatively low-cost method of advertising that allows you to have pretty tight control over who your messaging goes to.

Social Media Marketing

Social media marketing acts as a beacon that sends important signals to your prospects. It gives them information about who you are, what you do, where to find you, alongside content that’s meant to help them and give them value. For these reasons, social media marketing is especially important for building brand recognition and authority.

In the healthcare industry, you might not think of yourself as a “brand”, but the reality is that the nature of the business you are hoping to roll out goes hand in hand with that of a small business. Therefore, generating a brand image and a cohesive identity is a great way to stand out from other consultants. You’ll help prospects quickly understand who you are, what you do, and if your business’s “personalities” will merge harmoniously.

Social media has a unique benefit over traditional media (like TV or radio) because it can get your brand in front of people much more quickly and easily. You don’t have to pay high fees to buy media space, you can just post organically and build a following on your own. 

You can speak and interact directly with your prospects and create a community around your business. Again, this helps massively with communicating your brand identity and setting yourself apart as an authority. 

Expedite the Whole Marketing Process With Perla—a Private, Specialized Healthcare Marketing Platform  

While all these different marketing strategies are beneficial for healthcare consultants seeking leads from healthcare professionals and entities, there is a new and better way forward—Perla. 

Founded to correct the inefficiencies of traditional healthcare sales and marketing, Perla is a private networking platform that enables you to market DIRECTLY to healthcare entities and professionals in the segment your organization specializes in. 

Powered by intelligent matching, Perla allows you to reduce the length of your marketing efforts by ensuring you’ll only receive leads from healthcare entities and professionals that are searching for your exact offerings. 

Add Perla into your sales and marketing process to make the most out of your investment while speeding up your marketing timelines. 

Visit our website to learn more about Perla, see how it works, and request a demo.