The health care industry is competitive and marketing can be a challenge, with potential customers not actually wanting to come and see you. There are a lot of useful hospital marketing tips to help you, but one stands out above all else—be an authority source in your community.
If your medical facility is the first one that comes to mind when people in the community think of different health care concerns, then you are an authority source. It takes sustained effort for any business to develop that kind of reputation, but especially so in an industry where many people have negative instincts due to expense and the natural dislike of needing to go to a hospital.
The way to become an authority source is to create useful content and give it away. Make sure your hospital website has a blog and that it’s updated multiple times a week. Your blog posts should aim at providing valuable information to people—maybe the three steps to take when a sick child has a cough. Or the nature of the flu viruses coming to the area.
Your content should have a preventive theme to it. Let the community know you don’t want them in the hospital any more than they do and that you’re their ally. When they do run into the situation where there’s no getting around the need for a hospital, you’ll have built up trust.
Furthermore, people consume content in a wide variety of ways and that should be reflected in your distribution strategy. Create videos and podcasts. Send out social media blurbs with a quick-hitting nuggets of information. You can do all this with the same content that was developed for the blog post.
There’s certainly much more to any good list of hospital marketing tips. But it all starts with content. Be valuable to people. Be their authority source. And you’ll be where they turn when the time is right.