When VirtaMed aligned its sales and marketing with HubSpot and streamlined its lead nurturing process, it saw a 39% increase in traffic. Avella Specialty Pharmacy increased traffic 4x with HubSpot for content optimization and increase conversions to their landing pages by 38%. Conversant Bio is a leader in tissue procurement for pharmaceutical research. When they moved to HubSpot, they increase the overall leads by 2.5x, qualified leads by 7x, and marketing ROI by a staggering 3,558%.
These are just a few stories about how HubSpot can be a game-changer for healthcare marketing.
Healthcare Marketing Today
It wasn’t that long ago that we thought advertising in healthcare was unseemly. Oh, how things have changed. Marketing – and especially digital marketing – is no longer optional for hospitals, practices, healthcare providers, manufacturers, or anyone else in the healthcare space.
There are still precautions that have to be taken. HIPAA compliance regulations create tight controls over how patient information can be used for marketing. You also have to protect your reputation and engender trust in the people you’re marketing to. Still, it’s a fact. You need to be aggressive with your digital marketing whether you’re in the patient, procurement, or supply business.
Why Healthcare Organizations Need Digital Marketing
Consumers are increasingly going online to find and research health providers before scheduling appointments. Looking at these two statistics shows the appetite for health information and what consumers are doing.
- 5% of all searches on Google, the world’s dominant search engine, are for health-related queries.
- 90% of patients are searching online before booking an appointment.
For B2B companies, healthcare marketing is just as important. 72% of B2B medical buyers start with an online search. Buyers can be well on their way to purchase decisions before sales reps have an initial contact.
These trends are why more than 83% of healthcare organizations are using digital marketing. A great website is important, but you have to get them there first. That means marketing to people where they are looking for health information. If you’re not where they’re searching, they may never make it to your website.
How do you do that? By creating content that answers the questions they have and establishes your authority as an expert. It’s called content marketing and HubSpot excels at driving – and simplifying – your content marketing strategy.
Think of it like this. Let’s say you think you might be developing tinnitus – a ringing in your ears. You’re looking for an ENT. It’s the first time you’ve looked and you don’t know any of the names you find searching online. Which one do you think you’d be more likely to call for an appointment? The one that’s published dozens of articles on tinnitus with helpful tips, self-evaluation tools, and advice on when to see a doctor? Or would call the other one that’s just a name and number?
Maybe you’re a medical supply company and you’re trying to sell sickle knives, sinonasal suction and irrigation systems, or sinus seekers/freers to that same ENT. A company that has established itself as an authority on the use of these products with relevant and valuable content is more likely to earn the doctor’s business.
What is HubSpot for Healthcare Marketing?
HubSpot is an all-in-one collection of inbound marketing tools designed to help attract, acquire, and retain patients or customers. For healthcare organizations, HubSpot can manage content strategy, marketing automation, and reporting.
While HubSpot has an array of tools within its platform, healthcare marketers will use it mainly as a way to develop a robust inbound marketing strategy using three core components:
- Content Marketing Strategy
- Marketing Automation
- Tracking and Measurement
HubSpot for Healthcare Marketing Strategy
Content Marketing is the creation of valuable and relevant content that’s designed to reach prospective customers at the right time with the right message. Developing an efficient and productive content strategy for healthcare can drive down patient or customer acquisition costs and help with retention.
Content marketing in healthcare can involve several different strategies, including:
- Content generation
- Social media marketing
- Search engine optimization (SEO)
- Public relations
- Pay-per-click advertising
- Landing page development
- Email marketing
- Lead nurturing
HubSpot can be the central core to plan and execute your content strategy, generate more qualified traffic, and improve your SEO. Besides helping you plan and optimize your content, HubSpot will also analyze your website to suggest related topics that might engage visitors and offer helpful suggestions to improve SEO for every page.
Costs per lead can be expensive. In the healthcare and medical industry, leads can run from a low of $37 to a high of $286 (an average of $162). Yet, those numbers are far more efficient than what you’d see in traditional advertising, such as TV, radio, or print. Content marketing in healthcare has an even better ROI, dropping average lead costs by nearly half.
HubSpot for Healthcare Marketing Automation
HubSpot’s marketing automation can manage the distribution of your content and healthcare marketing messages at every stage of the sales funnel. HubSpot’s Workflows tool guides you in building personalized and automated emails that are triggered when visitors take specific actions. If they fill out a form, visit a web page, click on an email link or engage with social media, HubSpot can send relevant content designed to move patients or buyers to the next stage of interaction.
Not only can HubSpot help improve the number of leads you’ll get, but it can also improve the quality of the leads by enabling you to nurture them with content until they’re ready to act. HubSpot can also help you keep in touch with current patients and buyers to ensure your practice or healthcare business stays top of mind for when they need you.
HubSpot integrates with other programs, such as your CRM, to tap into contact information, past interactions, behavioral and contextual information to help personalize your marketing messages – without compromising PII or ePHI.
HubSpot for Healthcare Tracking and Measurement
One of the most important things healthcare organizations need to do is optimize their marketing for the most efficient ROI. With all the healthcare marketing activities practices and businesses undertake, it’s essential to understand what’s working and what’s not.
HubSpot can track ROI at a macro and micro level, down to individual pieces of content. Using the platform’s reporting tools well is key to reducing acquisition costs. When you know what converts and what doesn’t, it can help you at every step of planning. Reporting can be overwhelming, especially when starting out on a new system as powerful as HubSpot, let us handle the task, and show you only the most important results!
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You can measure almost anything with HubSpot’s reporting tools from website visitors to new patients to qualified leads. You customize what you want HubSpot to measure and it delivers automated reports. This helps you monitor your sales funnel and monitor engagement with your content marketing – automatically!
Here are some of the key metrics you’ll want to track:
- Patient (or Buyer) acquisition costs
- Patient (or Customer) retention
- Response Time to inquiries
- Engagement and Lead Scoring
- Content Effectiveness
- Search Engine Rankings
- Campaign Evaluation
HubSpot does it for you, so you’ll know exactly what’s working and how to eliminate wasteful spending that doesn’t lead to results.
How to Win at Search in Healthcare
We’ve established how important search is in your marketing. When people are looking for the services you have to offer, you need to be at or near the top of the search results to get noticed.
Achieving a high rank on the first page of Google (or any other search engine) is essential. 88% of clicks belong to the first 10 results. Search for just about anything healthcare-related and you’re likely to get millions of results. Yet, people rarely look at, let alone click, on anything past the first page.
Your content marketing strategy should involve creating content for your website that can help move you higher in Google searches in several ways. First, when you can directly answer questions people are asking, you can rank higher for specific topics. Secondly, the more topics you rank well on, the higher your overall website can rank.
Clickthrough Rate Per Position on Google
- 28.5%
- 15.7%
- 11%
- 8%
- 7.2%
- 5.1%
- 4%
- 3.2%
- 2.8%
- 2.5%
As you can see, clicks fall off quickly after you get past the first three positions.
How Inbound Marketing Works in Healthcare
Content marketing helps drive better search results and attract visitors to you. Once you’ve had that first interaction, however, it’s time to nurture the relationship.
Remember our tinnitus example? Let’s say someone found a blog post on your website about what causes tinnitus and whether you should see a doctor. You can bet they or a loved one is worried about whether the ringing in their ears is a problem. Once you’ve “captured” their lead, HubSpot automation can provide them with additional material overtime to help motivate them to schedule an appointment.
If you’re also using HubSpot’s CMS (Content Management System) for your website, you can even personalize the content on your site based on their past interaction. If they return to your website, you might display a form to book an appointment online or offer a free hearing test to evaluate their condition.
When they book an appointment, HubSpot marketing automation can trigger reminder emails or deliver additional relevant information to help cut down on no-shows.
Why You Need a HubSpot Certified Agency Partner
HubSpot can do amazing things. It’s easy to use once it’s been properly set-up and your team has been trained on it. It takes experience, though, to know how to set it up and the best practices for optimal performance. As a HubSpot Certified Agency Partner, we work with healthcare organizations to implement a strategic inbound marketing campaign using the powerful tools of HubSpot. We can help you set up HubSpot to manage your healthcare marketing, provide the training you need, and help power your marketing automation.
If you don’t have a team, we can handle it all for you.
We’ve seen amazing results when HubSpot is deployed and used efficiently. For example, a 67% increase in leads from adding content through blogs and a 60% decrease in cost-per-lead using B2B inbound marketing strategies. While we can’t guarantee everyone will see these same results, we can help you build a robust online strategy to grow your practice or business. Using HubSpot’s powerful tools, we can help align your entire team with an effective and proven strategy to help you grow.
Get in touch with the HubSpot pros at Riverbed Marketing. We’ll be happy to take a look at your current marketing efforts and provide a free assessment of how you can improve your marketing strategy.
