Hospitals are complex organizations providing vital care to their patients. Whether offering preventative services, addressing a chronic issue, or supporting through difficult diagnoses and complex procedures, the medical staff is doing important work to keep patients safe and healthy.
At the facility level, executives are watching out for patients while also monitoring the business’s health. It’s a tricky juggling act, and with so much going on, it’s understandable if marketing feels like a secondary concern.
But a healthy hospital marketing strategy can contribute significantly to your facility’s success. So, we’ve detailed a dozen strategies you can use to build and strengthen relationships with new and existing patients.
Contents
- What is a hospital marketing strategy?
- 12 essential hospital marketing ideas
- Define your marketing objectives
- Audit your current marketing approach
- Design a user-friendly website
- Incorporate an SEO strategy
- Build a content strategy for your blog
- Create a newsletter strategy
- Incorporate social media marketing
- Develop a physician referral program
- Gather patient reviews
- Engage in paid advertising
- Court third-party accolades
- Engage your team
What is a hospital marketing strategy?
Let’s start by defining marketing strategy. A marketing strategy is an overarching plan for connecting with prospective patients, nurturing their interest in your facility, and encouraging them to become patients.
Within the overall strategy sit the specific tactics you’ll use to achieve your goals. These may be paid approaches, like advertising, or organic marketing tactics, like SEO or social media.
For your hospital marketing strategy, you must also consider industry regulations and restrictions, most notably HIPAA and its rules regarding patient confidentiality.
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12 most effective hospital marketing ideas
As you consider your approach, these 12 ideas can help you craft a hospital marketing strategy worthy of your team’s great work.
1. Define your marketing objectives
Any solid marketing strategy begins with defining your goals. Understanding what you wish to accomplish will inform your choice of tactics and how you employ them.
The best strategic goals are created using the SMART framework. That means they are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound.
When you put metrics and KPIs against your objectives and define a timeline in which you expect to reach them, you can work backward to create a strategy that gets you there.
2. Audit your current marketing approach
Once you know where you want to go, refine your understanding of where you are today.
This starts with an audit of your current marketing efforts (try this PPC audit and this content marketing audit for starters). Take an inventory of all of your work across all channels—paid and organic.
Understand your costs for each and take stock of the results of your efforts. What’s working, and what’s not? Which areas are delivering the greatest impact with the lightest lift (i.e., the highest marketing ROI)? And does your current approach still align with your new goals, or is tweaking in order?
As part of your audit and self-assessment, run a SWOT analysis. By evaluating the impact of forces inside and outside your organization, you see how your future approach can take advantage of your strengths and opportunities while guarding against weaknesses and threats.
The audit phase is also a great time to see what your competitors are up to. What do their marketing efforts look like, and are they paying off? Understanding more about their successes and struggles can help you define the best way to move forward yourself.
3. Design a user-friendly website
Regardless of your specific hospital marketing strategy, a user-friendly website is a must-have for any healthcare facility.
A user-friendly website is one piece of a successful hospital marketing strategy.
A functional website is one that has considered all its potential target audiences. Hospitals serve several constituents: current patients, prospective patients, their families, referring clinicians, prospective employees—the list goes on.
Start by defining each of the audience personas you expect will visit your website. Then, build out your top-line navigation to serve each of their distinct needs.
For example, you may have a dropdown menu highlighting all of your facility’s areas of focus. Within each, you will have background information for prospective patients looking to learn more about your facility and expertise. Each subsection can also contain “Book an appointment” calls to action that encourage visitors to take the next step with your care team.
For existing patients, you’ll create a path that drives them to log into their patient portal. There, they can take their own actions, like booking a follow-up visit or reviewing test results.
Making it easy for each distinct audience to navigate to relevant information reduces confusion, keeps people on your site, and increases your overall conversion rate.
4. Incorporate an SEO strategy
An SEO strategy undergirds any truly functional website. Investing in your on-page and off-page SEO helps your functional, user-friendly website get discovered in search results.
And for hospitals, which predominantly serve specific geographic areas, local SEO is a crucial part of your work.
An SEO strategy helps you show up in the results on Google.
Increasingly, the best SEO strategies also consider AI search results. With Google and Bing placing AI results at the top of SERPs, crafting your content to get it featured in the AI summary is a cutting-edge strategy. While marketers are still learning how to optimize for AI, these approaches are driving early success.
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5. Build a content strategy for your blog
Creating a steady stream of content for your blog is another way to keep your website healthy and improve your standing in search.
Regularly sharing health-related information that applies to your audience allows you to connect with new readers, showcase your expertise, build trust, and hopefully nurture prospective patients until they become current patients.
Designing a content strategy is its own art form, but one that falls under the broader hospital marketing strategy umbrella.
At their core, the best content strategies prioritize creating blogs that fit within defined content clusters. What are the topics your audience is most interested in hearing about? If your facility specializes in cancer care, your topic clusters might break down into categories like:
- A closer look at specific types of cancers.
- The treatment process, including emerging treatments and clinical trials.
- Guidance for family members and caretakers.
- Holistic advice for keeping your mind, body, and spirit healthy while navigating a cancer diagnosis.
- What follow-up care looks like for patients in remission.
Once you’ve defined your content clusters, you can brainstorm specific posts that fit into each, build out your content calendar, and establish a regular publishing cadence.
6. Create a newsletter strategy
Like blogging, newsletters are another avenue for showcasing your expertise and building a connection with your audience.
The benefit of newsletters is that your audience is opted-in, and your messaging goes straight to their inboxes, so you stay top-of-mind. Even if someone hasn’t visited your site in a while, they’ll still receive your newsletter.
When thinking about your newsletter content, remember that this is a marketing tactic, not a sales one. Keep your newsletter informative, educational, and focused on your audience’s needs.
One way to ensure your audience is receiving only the most relevant newsletter content is to build out several newsletter versions and send a different one to each segment of your audience.
To continue with the example of the hospital focused on cancer care, you might design three separate newsletters: one for current patients, one for families and friends supporting a loved one through cancer, and one for clinicians who turn to your facility for expert guidance on the latest in cancer research.
Each of these audiences will have its own distinct needs and messaging they’d like to hear. The patient may wish to receive tips about dealing with the effects of chemotherapy, while the clinician might want to hear about a new drug’s early results in a specific subset of patients.
7. Incorporate social media marketing into your plan
Did you know that the majority of Americans turn to social media first for health advice? It’s their go-to, even ahead of their actual doctor.
That’s why incorporating social media into your hospital marketing strategy has concrete benefits. Prospective patients are already turning to social media for health-related guidance. If you have a presence there, you can become their trusted source of information.
The value of social media becomes increasingly important as influencers without medical training share inaccurate health information online. People are hungry for legitimate, trustworthy advice. And while they may seek passive guidance at first, once they’re ready to pursue actual care, your name will be top of mind.
8. Develop a physician referral program
Sometimes, the best source of new patients is clinicians at other facilities.
A physician referral program can formalize relationships that already exist and create a clearer path for generating a steady flow of referrals. Comprehensive referral programs regularly engage outside clinicians and make it easy for them to send their patients to you.
For example, you can use technology to streamline the sharing of electronic medical records so patients experience seamless care and the referring physician can easily follow up on the outcomes of your work.
9. Gather patient reviews
Current patients also have a role to play in your hospital’s marketing strategy. Generating a healthy number of positive patient reviews can help establish trust with prospects. A Stanford study found that 75% of patients turn to reviews as part of their decision-making process.
Rules about soliciting reviews will vary from site to site, so understand whether you can explicitly ask for feedback. If you ask for feedback on a platform that allows it—like your Google Business Profile—include a direct link to your hospital’s page so it’s easy for patients to reply.
And remember: while responding to all reviews is a best practice, hospitals must be careful to stay HIPAA compliant. Even if a patient refers to their diagnosis or treatment, you can’t acknowledge it in your response. Doing so amounts to disclosing health information. Keep your responses general, and if there’s an issue that needs to be addressed, move to a secure, direct communication channel.
10. Engage in paid advertising
Organic marketing tactics are great for fueling steady audience growth and building trust. But to expand your reach, paid advertising is the best way to gain the attention of new people quickly.
Your marketing strategy will probably contain a mix of online and offline advertising tactics. You may engage in online advertising via:
- Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns on popular search engines.
- Paid advertising on the social media platform(s) that are most popular with your target audience.
- Display ads on third-party websites, plus retargeting campaigns that re-engage prospects who have previously interacted with your hospital online.
Print and out-of-home remain effective advertising channels, and your hospital may opt to run:
- Print ads in local papers or magazines
- Billboards on the road or posters in public transit
- Direct mail campaigns sent straight to residents in your target geographies
11. Court third-party accolades
While perhaps technically marketing-adjacent, public relations has a role to play in generating positive word-of-mouth for your hospital.
A PR strategy for a hospital might include:
- Pitching stories to the local press about your hospital’s work or a specific, noteworthy member of your team.
- Applying for relevant industry awards for your facility, specialty groups, or individual clinicians.
- Drafting and distributing press releases about any relevant news.
- Pitching and preparing hospital leaders to speak at relevant industry events.
An effective PR play can burnish your reputation as a leader in your space. If prospective patients continue to see your name around as a facility doing good work, that will keep you top of mind when they need care.
12. Engage your team
Your best brand advocates just might be under your own roof. Many clinicians are smart, ambitious individuals with great people skills, making them ideal candidates to become a public face for your facility and build trust with your audience.
Give your team a platform on your hospital’s social media channels. Encourage them to get involved in content creation and share ideas they have based on their real-life patient interactions.
Just remember that HIPAA compliance should always come first. Train your team about what they can and cannot say online. Then, create a clear internal workflow for content approvals, which may include review by members of your marketing, legal, and compliance teams.
Creating a healthy routine for your hospital marketing strategy
Great hospital marketing strategies are iterative. You identify your goals, define your strategy, and set your tactics, but your work is far from done.
As you get into the rhythm with your new strategy, it’s time to measure your results and adjust accordingly. Lean into channels or messaging that are working. Make the tough decision to cut ideas that don’t work as planned. And always watch metrics from each channel, listen to guidance from your team, and gather feedback from your patients.
Finally, set a cadence for reevaluating your goals and strategy. As you achieve your original goals, what new heights will you aim for? If you’d like to know how our solutions can help you get there, contact us, and we’ll show you how.
