A healthcare practitioner will never tell you they look at their practice as a business. They have a noble profession and they thrive by helping other people. However, in its essence, your practice is a business. You want to attract more patients, and you’re competing against other practices.
That’s why we’ve been seeing so many websites for healthcare professionals being launched lately. Healthcare practitioners realize that they have to boost their practices, and building an online presence is part of the process.
Is Healthcare Marketing Ethical?
We can’t deny the fact that there’s some controversy behind healthcare marketing. You must never promote your services through an exaggerated campaign.
You have to respect the principles of bioethics. Advertising is okay, as long as it is 100% truthful and you don’t promise anything that you can’t deliver. Developing and maintaining a relationship with the audience should be the main goal of healthcare websites. The website serves to inform visitors about the services, procedures, staff, and prices.
When you want to increase the conversion rate, you mustn’t create unjustified expectations. You’ll keep your promotions as realistic as possible. The ultimate goal is to make your practice better than the competition and explain why that’s the case. We’ll tell you how to do that.
How to Boost Website Conversions for a Healthcare Practice through Ethical Marketing
Use Testimonials
When talking about truthful marketing, testimonials are the first thing that comes to mind. You should allow the users of your practice to post transparent testimonials on Facebook and other platforms. Don’t delete any of them, even if they are extremely negative. If someone had an unpleasant experience in your practice, try to repair the damage as much as possible. Make sure you’ve done everything possible to help that person. Respond to the comment, offering further assistance in your practice.
Where does your website come into this picture? You’ll feature some of the best testimonials there. Don’t go for the fake, inflated testimonials that we usually see across sites. Your audience can see right through them. If your patients agree, use their real names. You can feature screenshots of the feedback you received on social media, too.
To make the testimonials more relevant, you can include more information about the specific cases. If your patients agree, you can share documents that showcase the case and the treatment they received. You will hide all sensitive information, and you’ll turn the feedback into a case study supported by facts.
Before people use a particular service, they check their online reputation. They will search for reviews on Reddit and Quora, and they will look into personal experiences shared by bloggers. They want to know more about the doctor and the practice. When they conduct research, you want them to find the testimonials at your site. That’s why your marketing team will use specific techniques that list that page in Google’s results.
Enable a Live Chat Feature at the Website
No matter how many reviews and testimonials they read, your audience will still have questions. You may feature the most informative content at your blog and website, but they will still have underlying questions. If they have any questions or doubts, they will want to contact your practice.
The traditional way to do this is over the phone. Healthcare practices are in-office businesses, which might not even have an online presence. People are used to calling. But if they see a convenient website that features an instant communication tool, the practice gets bonus points in their eyes.
Who represents your practice when people call? The same employees can take care of the live chat. Hopefully, they are not constantly on the phone during their work hours. Some people will choose to contact them through instant form or live chat, and your representatives will answer ASAP.
Many websites use chatbots. This type of software is programmed to answer the most commonly asked questions. It can provide information about prices or available appointment dates. However, a representative is still needed to provide support for complex issues. Some patients will ask about their treatment, so the representative will have to ask a doctor and respond.
If someone is interested in the practice and uses live chat to get information, you have a big chance to convert them into actual users.
Analyze Your Results
When you want to boost the results that your website achieves, you’ll have to analyze the results and compare them to the goals you set.
Attract more unique visitors on the website. For this, your marketing team will rely on search engine optimization strategies. They will use keywords that people usually use when searching for the services you provide. They will develop high-quality content that includes those keywords. But to know how many unique monthly visitors this campaign attracts on a monthly basis, you’ll have to check the analytics for your site.
Compare how web traffic rises and declines. Did you post a very special piece of content that attracted many visitors? How did it help you improve the site’s position in the search engine results? You can use a site ranking tool to see that. If you notice that your positions are declining, analyze why that happens. Are your competitors publishing better content? Maybe you failed to share new content for a longer period of time?
In addition to unique visitor numbers and search engine rankings, you should also analyze the clicks you get from ads. Do you promote your practice through Google, Facebook, or Instagram ads? How many visitors do these ads bring to your website? How many of them do you manage to convert? Is an investment in paid advertising worth the results?
You should also analyze the number of times a particular video has been viewed. The theme of the video says a lot: if it received many views, you should focus on publishing that kind of content. It’s what your audience needs, so you have to make the website useful for them.
Add Different Call-to-Action Buttons
Calls to action are a common marketing strategy across industry. However, in terms of healthcare marketing, they can be controversial. “Buy now,” “Get a discount” or “Get a free trial version” are calls to action that work for websites that sell things. But you’ll have to think of something different; something that won’t make your visitors feel like you’re selling something to them.
Here are a few call-to-action buttons that work for healthcare websites:
Book your appointment
Download the case stud
Download recommendations
When you’re sure that the text for your call-to-action buttons is adequate, you have to think about the design. These calls to action must be visible. They should catch the viewer’s attention as soon as they land on the website. You can position them at the top of each page, but at the bottom as well. No one likes scrolling back up after they read the text on the page and decided to book an appointment.
Don’t get too fancy with the graphics. Stay simple; it’s a healthcare website after all. Still, these buttons should vary in color from the rest of the website, so they will be easily noticeable.
Rely on Visual Content
What’s your target audience? If you target women in their reproductive years, you can use “feminine” colors that would add a softer appeal to the entire site. If this is an IVF clinic, you can use visuals of parents with babies. You can also share videos of doctors talking about the procedures, photographs of happy couples who achieved success at your clinic, or animated videos explaining the process of conception.
Infographics are highly useful, too. This format is great for compressing a lot of statistical data in a single publication without overwhelming the reader.
Figure out the “vibe” of your audience and use visuals that convey the goals they want to achieve through the treatment they get at your practice.
Don’t Waste Time!
The idea that a healthcare website is there solely to inform potential patients should be abandoned. It’s there to serve as the face of your practice to a broader audience. It’s where people get all the information they need, but it’s also the place where you have a chance to convert visitors into real users.
Boosting the conversion rates isn’t difficult if you know what you’re doing. Even if you don’t have a highly professional marketing team, you can use a few strategies that will have a positive effect. Featuring testimonials, visuals, and call-to-action buttons shouldn’t be that hard. You don’t need a technical team to install a live chat at your site; you can easily find the tool and add it as an extension. As for website analytics, they come with a learning curve. But no matter how experienced or inexperienced you are, website maintenance is something that you can learn.
That being said, it’s always better to have a team taking care of online marketing. They will convey the goals and values of your practice, and they will make it attractive to potential patients.
