Although many individuals believe that marketing and SEO services are only utilized by the retail sector and businesses that provide services to clients, this is not true.
In fact, SEO and marketing are extremely important to healthcare in ensuring that they can find their target audience and increase their number of loyal customers.
To enable you to get a career in healthcare marketing, there are a few steps that you need to be ready to take to achieve this, including finding the right qualifications and experience as well as curating the knowledge you need to succeed.
What qualifications do you need for healthcare marketing?
If you are considering going into the more administrative side of healthcare, which includes aspects such as management and marketing, you may want to consider gaining a qualification to increase your chances of promotion and show that you have the necessary skills for a leadership role. Spring Arbor provides a health administration MBA for those interested in a related career.
This helps you prepare for a management and leadership role by teaching you business strategy as well as the skills that you need in terms of healthcare finance and quality checks. A degree in related subjects such as healthcare administration is necessary for most healthcare jobs and will allow you into potential careers such as a hospital CEO, CFO, or department manager.
However, this article will focus on is the ability to use this degree to get a healthcare marketing position, as it will provide all of the skills you need to understand the office-based roles in hospitals and the duties you may have to perform.
What marketing roles are available in healthcare?
The most common type of marketing position available in healthcare is a general marketer, who will run campaigns to show how your hospital can treat patients and show the quality of care that you provide. They may also promote the different services that the hospital provides as well as the skills of its physicians and surgeons.
You may also be on the communications team, which focuses on creating materials that can promote the hospital’s services, and this includes digital marketing techniques like SEO and physical marketing campaigns such as flyering.
There is also the option of becoming a marketing analyst, where you will focus on adapting the hospital’s campaigns to suit the success of previous campaigns, keeping in the material that has been successful and excluding the material that has drawn no further clients to the business. You will be able to isolate issues with the marketing campaigns as well as establish what the next steps should be in reference to your targets and campaigns.
If you have a degree or other qualification, you will also be able to eventually be promoted to a managerial or executive marketing role, where you will be able to control many of the hospital’s different processes and develop the business’s ongoing targets and strategies, working with and delegating to a team of marketers who can help to implement and put your plans into action.
As a healthcare marketer, you can expect to earn around $60,000, and your work prospects are set to grow with more and more medical companies relying on marketing efforts to enable their organizations to grow. There are also many specific job roles that you may be able to find available, and these include content writing and graphic design, which are all currently large components of healthcare marketing.
What else do you need?
As well as earning a degree, to begin a career in healthcare marketing, you may also want to look into gaining a range of healthcare certifications to show your aptness for the industry that you are aiming to work in. These may be focused on practical skills, such as finance and analysis, and can be given by professional organizations focused on training individuals to achieve certifications.
Not only will you need practical experience in the healthcare industry, but it is also paramount that you are able to gain experience in marketing. To do this, you may look at marketing roles in other industries in order to gain the keen marketing insight that propels some of the much larger businesses. This first-hand experience will allow you to learn of the newest and most innovative marketing techniques as well as hone your skills as a marketing professional. This will prepare you for when you decide to advance your career into the healthcare industry.
What are the best healthcare marketing strategies?
SEO and marketing strategies are vital to the success of healthcare firms in order to draw more clients to their website and showcase the services that they provide to a larger audience.
Many healthcare companies have blogs that they use to share their knowledge with customers, give useful health tips to clients, and help customers self-diagnose their illnesses.
However, in order to make sure that as many people as possible see your content, you should ensure that this blog is optimized for SEO by finding the keywords that people are likely to use when searching for your blog and implementing these on your website’s pages. You should also make sure that all of your content is unique.
Healthcare companies are also partial to creating videos that visually show conditions and the treatments that you use. However, drawing more potential customers to your videos can be difficult. You can increase the SEO of your video marketing campaigns by using the aforementioned keywords in the title of your Youtube video and in its description, sharing the video on social media platforms, and considering making videos on trending topics.
Additionally, many people will want to search for healthcare businesses when out and about due to suddenly falling ill or needing urgent medical assistance. So, you should make sure that your healthcare company’s website is mobile-optimized to ensure that the website is easily accessible no matter what device it is opened on. Marketers can do this by speeding up site loading times and allowing the website design to be responsive.
