The growing health awareness of the consumers and the increasing need for good health services have made marketers in the hospital industry think harder to find ways to attract patients. In Indonesia, this should become a special concern, given the very intensive marketing efforts undertaken by the hospital industry in neighboring countries.
Today, many people prefer to seek information from the internet, so the internet needs to be considered as one of the marketing tools for the hospital industry.
Here are five keys to hospital marketing communications success utilizing the internet:

1. Hospital brand strategy

Plan your hospital brand strategy. You need to map your target audience based on their aspirations, attitudes, perceptions and expectations of your hospital, the problems they face and their unmet needs. You also need to know the perceptions, expectations, and wishes of employees, business partners, vendors and regulators associated with your hospital. Then, analyze your competitors, what their strengths and weaknesses are, and how the patients respond to those strengths and weaknesses. Learn also how competitors run their marketing communications activities. From the various analyses, you will be able to determine the most appropriate “positioning” for your hospital.
Based on that, you can determine your hospital marketing and communication strategy. This strategy should determine how your hospital should be “told” and “sold” to the public. With the strategy, you will be able to determine “personality”, “tone and manner”, color, service identity, and other things related to your hospital.

2. Website

Based on the brief above, you will easily create a professional and effective website for your hospital. Websites are the first “marketers” on the internet. So you have to make sure that your website:

• highlights the excellence of your hospital in accordance with the predetermined “positioning”.
• is informative by providing clear information about the various services provided to meet the needs of potential patients.
• effectively encourages website visitors to use your hospital services. Pay attention to “landing pages” to help potential patients become your patients.
• has an attractive and professional design, as to follow the previous brief,it should also be easy to read and stimulates the interest of the prospective patients.Your website display will give the first impression on your potential patients. Not only does it have to be designed professionally, the website should also be made for various platforms, especially mobile. It’ll be better if the website features additional videos and photos so that the website visitors can have a picture of your hospital.

3. Use medical search engine optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps your website and content to be easily found, and to appear on the first page on Google.
Determine the keywords that prospective patients commonly search for, and work on them using various SEO techniques so that your hospital name will appear on the first page (even the first line) if anyone searches for the keywords on google.

4. Use interesting and necessary content

Display articles, photos, videos, stories and news that attract the attention of patients and potential patients on your website, blogs, social media, and other websites.
Make sure the articles on your website and blog are promoted through social media, newsletters, emails, mailing lists, or forumswith links pointing to the articles, photos, and videos.
You can also discuss articles from other existing sources.
The more discussions andthe more traffic your website gets, the more popular your website will be and the higher your chances are to appear on the first page of the search engines, like Google.
Always remember to include thesource links of articles you take from other websites. The more live links there are to your site, the higher the ranking power on the search engine page.

5. Use video marketing. You can also take advantage of video marketing.

Videos can contain lots of health information in interesting packages. Make sure the tags on your videos contain your hospital’s SEO so that the videos can be easily found on the search engines.
Source:
http://www.knowhealthcare.com