Want to inspire confidence in your healthcare facility? Content management for hospital marketing is a way to provide value to your patients before they even walk through your door. Learn more about content management for hospitals, including the types of content you should be sharing and how a team of experts can make it easy for you.
Website Essentials for Hospitals
Ease of access is absolutely vital to today’s patients. They expect a seamless digital experience across their entire healthcare journey, from Googling their symptoms to finding a provider to paying their bills.
That’s why, first and foremost, your hospital’s website must be well-designed—in both aesthetics and function. If not, it’s just another opportunity for potential patients to look elsewhere for their care.
For optimum patient experience, your healthcare website needs to be:
- Modern. If your website doesn’t keep up with UX (user experience) best practices, you’ll give the impression that you don’t change with the times—which is not what a prospective patient wants to see when they need care.
- Functional. Chances are that people visiting your website are already feeling anxious or stressed. Your healthcare website should make things as easy as possible for them. Broken links and unfriendly navigation will not make them feel more encouraged to contact you.
- Mobile-friendly. Today’s parents are primarily using their phones to search for symptoms, treatments, and care centers near them. Is your website able to accommodate people who find you on their mobile devices?
- Up-to-date. Don’t get caught with outdated information. A website management team can help make sure that your site is kept current with new service info, pricing, and emergency updates.
Now you just have to ensure that prospective patients can actually find your hospital’s website. Fortunately, content management can help make that happen.
Why Your Hospital Should Use Social Media
Want to connect with your patients—and attract new ones? Meet them where they are: on social media.
The best social media posts for hospitals are informative and directly apply to patients’ lives. Updates about your hospital are great, too: let everyone know about awards you’ve won and ways you’ve been recognized for your great service. Be sure to use photos and videos to catch the eye and encourage engagement.
If you host open houses, recruitment days, or volunteer opportunities, create events on Facebook to further engage with your followers. (Don’t forget to post pictures and videos of the event when it’s over!) Events are an opportunity for people to talk about their experience with you, whether they were volunteering, touring the hospital, or entering a giveaway. Word of mouth means a lot in healthcare marketing, so getting conversations started about you is a great way to reach new patients.
Insider Tip: We’ve found that sharing info about specific employees is fantastic for engagement. People love to see their hospitals highlighting people they know and trust!
Digital Advertising for Hospitals
Digital advertising is a very effective way to build awareness of your hospital and help people find you. However, if you’re not sure what you’re doing, it can quickly become a waste of time and money. That’s why you need an experienced team to do it for you.
Healthcare needs vary by location, so you can’t afford to have a generic digital strategy. A key part of digital advertising is local marketing. This helps you be found by the people who are looking for you: prospective patients who live and work near your facility. Having a content management team to handle the search engine optimization (SEO), digital advertising, and geotargeting that goes into local marketing is vital to not wasting your advertising dollars on reaching people who will never come visit you.
How Blogging Helps Patients Find Your Hospital
People are constantly searching the Internet for information about illnesses and symptoms, and you need to be there to provide them with answers. One of the best ways to improve the chances of people finding your hospital from their searches is by regularly blogging.
Blog posts are fantastic for SEO purposes because you can create content focused on what potential patients are searching for. For example, if one of your hospital’s specialties is arthritis, consider writing blog posts about what activities people with arthritis can safely and comfortably do for exercise. This will let a patient know that you are knowledgeable about their condition—and, when you invest in local marketing, it lets them know that you’re in their area and ready to help.
Hire a Content Management Team for Your Hospital’s Marketing
Content management for hospital marketing takes extensive time, knowledge, and skill. It can be tough to know for sure that you’re making the right call with your hospital’s digital marketing. That’s why you need to put your trust in a team that has experience with healthcare content management.
Kirkpatrick Creative has years of experience using data for healthcare marketing purposes. We track everything we do and tweak it until your hospital’s marketing budget is running at peak efficiency. It’s what we call advertising engineered to work. Contact Kirkpatrick Creative today for help with your hospital’s content marketing.