The Whys and Hows of Marketing Telemedicine

Telemedicine adoption was proceeding slowly before the COVID-19 outbreak. At the moment, we’re witnessing how drastically the healthcare industry is transforming. It’s vital that healthcare providers quickly adapt to patients’ changing needs and deliver care virtually using telehealth services.

If you’re unsure how to promote telemedicine and encourage the use of telehealth services to your patients, here are eight helpful telehealth marketing tips and strategies.

#1 Update your website

It’s important that you have a website with relevant information about your services, prices, location, etc. If you don’t already have a website, we highly recommend you create one and fill it with up-to-date content. A professional and inviting website is at the heart of your digital marketing efforts. 

Check out this guide to learn what makes for a good clinic website.

Ensure you include information about the virtual care services you provide and make it easily accessible for your patients. Apart from adding telehealth to your list of services, you can announce that you provide remote care on your website’s home page. Make sure you include a corresponding button that lets visitors either learn more or make an appointment directly from your website. This will significantly increase conversions and contribute to the overall patient experience.

It’s also an excellent idea to expand your FAQ page. No matter how clearly information about your services is provided, your potential patients may still have questions. If you already have patients who you treat remotely, consider the questions they’ve most commonly asked you concerning virtual care. Also, try to anticipate other questions about how you deliver telehealth services and add them to your FAQ section.

Below is a list of questions you may want to address:

• Is telehealth only available for new patients, for existing ones, or both?
• What health issues can you treat virtually? 
• Will the cost of telehealth appointments differ from traditional appointments?
• What is the process of providing telehealth services? 
• When and how can patients connect with a provider?

#2 Update your Meta information

When patients search for your services or clinic, Meta information is displayed directly on the search results page, much like local listings. Adding extra information to your Metadata is recommended to enhance your visibility, particularly on your homepage, provider pages, and location pages.

#3 Notify your patients via email

You can inform your patients about telehealth options via email. This will help your current patients learn about your new services and also encourage your past patients to return. You can also announce that telehealth services are now available at your facility by updating your appointment reminders. Ensure that you include not only information about the updated services but also about how your patients can benefit from them. Finally, invite people to visit your website or social media page for more details.

Depending on the number of your patients, sending a lot of emails can be time-consuming and complicated. Moreover, hosting providers often limit the number of emails you can send. Therefore, it’s handy to use email marketing services.

#4 Promote on social media

With over 3 billion active social media users, you can’t ignore a perfect opportunity to promote your telehealth services on the most popular social networks. When posting valuable health-related content for your patients, don’t forget to tell them about your telehealth services. 

If you already have an FAQ page addressing telehealth-associated questions or content (an article, guide, video, etc.) demonstrating to your patients how to use telehealth services, share this information with your audience in your feed and stories. You can also launch a social media ad to reach more people and bring new patients to your facility.

#5 Consider launching ads

Search ads are an effective way to promote your telehealth services, as they can quickly connect you with potential patients looking for services like the ones you offer. With PPC (pay-per-click) advertising on Google (example below), your ad will be on top of the list in search engine results.

Paid advertisements enable you to bring qualified traffic to your website, as they are targeted toward people who are ready to choose their provider. According to WebFX, 46% of clicks go to the top three ads. With this in mind, launching ads on Google is a great opportunity to acquire new patients.

Here are some tips for a successful PPC marketing campaign:

1. Pick the right keywords. To help people discover your telehealth options, you need to use proper keywords for your ad. You can use Google Keyword Planner to see how people formulate their search queries when looking for telehealth services. We don’t recommend relying on your assumptions and picking the words and phrases you think are relevant. Using keyword research tools will ensure more accurate results and therefore a greater chance of your ad campaign’s success.

2. Develop compelling ad copy to encourage people to click your link to learn more and choose you as a provider. For your ad copy to be persuasive, follow these recommendations:

• Address your target audience directly
• Reduce potential barriers to the desired action
• Use emotional triggers
• Keep your ad succinct
• Use powerful action-focused CTAs

3. Prepare an ad-related web page. Make sure your ad links go to the corresponding web page where potential patients can find information on what telehealth services you provide. 

4. Use ad extensions. Ad extensions are additional information about a company that can be added to the ad. These include location, phone number, rating, links to different sections of the site, etc. According to Google Ads Help, ad extensions ensure greater visibility of your ad and help increase the number of clicks.

Invest in PPC to reach more potential patients and bring them to your clinic.

#6 Update your listings

Taking into consideration changes in patient behavior, providing patients with essential information right on the search engine results page is more significant than ever. People want to make their decisions quickly. Update your listings in various online directories to ensure patients are aware that you have started providing telehealth services. 

Get listed or update your listings in both general and industry-related directories — Google My Business, Apple Maps, Bing, Healthgrades, WebMD, ZocDoc, etc. 

#7 Create and share educational content

Help your patients choose you as a provider by developing and sharing content that anticipates their concerns and questions. This will also enable you to establish yourself as a trusted expert and build credibility with your potential patients. 

You can share content in various formats to promote telehealth services:

• Blog posts
• Social media posts
• Video tutorials
• Webinars
• Q&A sessions

Here are some of the questions you may want to address:

• Is telehealth worth the money?
• Will I receive the same quality of care as with in-person appointments?
• How do in-person care and telehealth work together?

The main tip is to leave nothing in doubt. The more information you can provide about your telehealth services, the higher the patient satisfaction.

#8 Share telehealth success stories

Nothing can bolster patient confidence more than learning about other patients’ telehealth success stories. Ask your current telehealth patients to share their feedback either alongside their names or anonymously.

You can look at other organizations’ case studies, like this one by Millennium Physician Group, for inspiration.

#9 Create a seamless digital patient experience

By ensuring your patients’ seamless digital experience, you can significantly increase conversions, thus bringing more new patients to your facility. Satisfaction with the quality of your telehealth services and the way these services are delivered will ensure a steady flow of referrals. To deliver an excellent patient experience, you first need to think about providing easy online booking options.

By enabling patients to book an appointment with you online from any device 24/7, you ensure convenience and a higher level of patient satisfaction. Patients can schedule appointments outside business hours from the comfort of their home, office, or even car.

You can also go one step further and leverage the power of all-in-one solutions like ExpertBox, which helps you automate time-consuming administrative activities and thus allows you to devote more time to supporting your patients when they need it. With such a solution, your patients will be able to book, reschedule, and cancel their visits online, provide information up front, make online payments, chat with you on the go and meet virtually via video, and do a lot more.

Technology can help you enhance each stage of the patient experience, increasing the number of satisfied patients who bring loyal referrals to your clinic. In doing so, you’ll also encourage word-of-mouth advertising, which is another great way to help you market your telehealth services.

#10 Add a chat feature

Patients may hesitate to try telehealth due to its originality or lack of knowledge. They might be uncertain if telemedicine is the right choice for them or if the cost would differ. To make patients feel more at ease and effectively market your telehealth services, consider integrating chat functionality so patients can constantly get answers to their concerns and questions and become more comfortable with virtual care.

The bottom line

Now you’re equipped with eight proven strategies and know how to market telehealth services. Remember that the best results can be achieved by combining all of them. Spreading the word about your updated services via different communication channels will enable you to reach as large an audience as possible, growing your healthcare business and helping more people get unhindered access to high-quality virtual care.

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