Conversational Healthcare Marketing

The days of one-way, one-sided promotional brand messaging are over. In reality, they’ve been over for some time now in the opinions of many expert Quaintise healthcare marketers. With the remarkable and various brand messaging channels available today providing multiple consumer interactions, if you are still adhering to a one-sided conversation you have already fallen light-years behind. Let’s take a look at where your healthcare marketing campaigns should be in 2013.

Conversational Healthcare Marketing

Despite the fact that social media has been practically overly-publicized, many physicians and healthcare providers continue to ignore the obvious. Whether it’s fear of the unknown, an unwillingness to progress with the ebbs and flows of healthcare marketing, or downright stubbornness, conversational marketing is here and many in the healthcare industry are choosing to ignore it.

According to a recent survey by Zeno’s Group, over one-third of CEO’s fail to consider their company’s online reputation when making business decisions. From our experience, it would seem that statistics on physicians probably show a far worse scenario.

Here’s the rub – avoiding conversational marketing and social media brand messaging does not mean that your business becomes invisible to consumers and patients. What many physicians fail to understand is that they are already on social media and already have a very large online presence, however (if we’ve said it once we’ve said it a million times) it’s whether that very large online presence is voiced by your, or by your audience.

Ignoring conversational healthcare marketing does not make it go away – in fact, it leaves your brand completely vulnerable to becoming a target of potential negative activity and online conversations completely out of your control.

Conversational Marketing and SEO

For the sake of this argument, let’s say that you are not concerned with your online reputation; whether it’s good or bad you are indifferent. However, you are concerned with your brand’s search engine rankings. Your SEO team works tirelessly to increase your online rankings for local keywords in order to drive increased traffic to your website, and consequently increased foot traffic through your doors.

Bing and Google have admitted that ‘social signals’ are taken into account when ranking websites. With that understood, it is important that you incorporate social media into your healthcare marketing campaigns if nothing else but for SEO benefits. However, there is a stark difference between having a blog and social media accounts and having interactive, conversation accounts – and Bing and Google do take note of this.

Let the healthcare marketing professionals at Quaintise get you on the right path to successful conversational marketing.