What Are The Digital Marketing Challenges in Healthcare Industry?

I’m Nefise, one of the “SEO Painkillers” team members. Here to share with you the recap of our latest Weekly SEO stream from last Friday, on 28 January 2022.

As you might know, our goal with the Weekly SEO live streams is to keep you updated in the SEO industry. We share updates, strategies, tactics, opinions, and more based on the experience.

In the previous week, we opened the doors of the Weekly SEO 2022 edition with Massive Bio’s Marketing Manager, Oğulcan Koca.

Oğulcan Koca, with 10 years of experience in digital marketing, was our guest, and we had a great conversation with him. We sincerely thank Oğulcan again, and we will start talking right away! Because the issue of Digital Marketing is critical in the Healthcare Industry, which everyone is most curious about. Everyone wants to share their experiences, and as Oğulcan said, everyone is trying to find their way.

What Did We Cover?

• Host: Adem Yildiz, SEO Team Lead of BoostRoas
• Guest Speaker: Ogulcan Koca, Marketing Manager of Massive Bio

Transcript

General Digital Marketing Challenges Faced by Healthcare Industry

“Healthcare sector or industry is not a digital marketing environment!”

In the healthcare industry, people get some advice from the Physician population. These physicians from healthcare or medical backgrounds are severe people and are always suspicious about marketing. Because it’s beneficiary, it is generally accepted that people who think about getting a healthcare service don’t need to be manipulated. And they need to make their own decisions on their own. But now we are in 2022, so everybody gets in everybody’s influence effects and people at least ask questions to each other about the services they want to buy.

We cannot think of an ideal world where people make their choices on Healthcare independent from any side effects. So that’s why there are so many ancient business models because of controversial points, especially the hospital’s physicians who run their medical in their office. And private clinic dates still work like papers. Papers, secretaries. So, for digitizing all these business models, You need to convince your customer about your values and contributions. 

Also, one of the challenges is there are so many unique cases in there. Typically there are some like three or four business models and cases mainly, and you try to follow the success stories and everything. But there are so many unique cases in the healthcare industry, and you need to understand your case first. Then you can try to convert it totally to digital marketing. 

Limitations of Targeting

“It’s really hard to create a persona in healthcare. Because everybody can get sick.”

First, you need to target your audience; then, you need to create your content and then distribute your content. This is the most common and primary method. But in Healthcare, it starts from the limitations of targeting and creating content. And also, even on the distribution side, we have some rules, and we need to understand them first. Then we can try to find some solutions.

It’s tough to create a persona in Healthcare when there’s a world that everybody can get sick. Even the physicians are hard to target on any social media platform. So, it’s tough to create effective personas.

You cannot be active like you can in e-commerce. Healthcare is not straightforward because you can get cancer tomorrow; you cannot know. It is not a plan. You cannot plan when you’re going to be there. You cannot plan when you’re going to like to spend more money on your health or less money on your health.

What could be the solution?

What I can suggest is a solution to the power of organic solutions. Whatever your case is related to Healthcare, you need to build a community. If you want to work with cancer patients, try to build up a cancer patient community with your brand. If you are dealing with physicians, try to build that physician community with your brand.

Word-of-mouth is the key in Healthcare!

People need to know your name, services, products, and everything you need to build up a community. Based on this, try to get inside from your field teams. It can be a field sales team, and it can be nurses. These people are the ones who are also stakeholders of Healthcare but also get most of the experience because they’re in the field. They get what you need while talking with possible audience candidates. These are the essential things for targeting.

But as I mentioned, you need to figure out; you need to explore and understand. Then you can start to create successful audiences and personas.

Limitations of Creating a Contents

I want to tell you that ad content, in that case, means pretty much everything. Ad text, headlines, descriptions, extensions, the content you created, and distributing content are everything. I’m calling them ad content right now. And the problem with creating ad content in Healthcare is how you can make it not out of policy content.

As you also know, the intensity of policy keywords in Healthcare is super high. So,  any keyword you want to target as a keeper, you can target them, but you cannot mention them on your landing pages, on your URLs, on your headlines, descriptions, and ad text. That’s why I call it “you know who” situations, like Voldemort. We both know we are talking about cancer. But we cannot say cancer. So it’s a huge problem; that’s why we cannot have or create a textbook for storytelling. Let’s say in sports digital marketing or let’s say in pet food; we would know that the text we need to use. But in Healthcare, you don’t know; you need to discover that. 

The other problem is the audience, all the people you want to target. Generally, there is a minimal time window. If there are physicians, they are super busy people. They don’t give you like 1 hour; they don’t give you time. If you know targets, let’s say, patients (depending on their situation) have limited time. They need to decide who will get healthcare services and products and everything. So they probably have very little time indoors as well. So with all these problems, you need to create more image and video-based content for policy limitations. Because it’s effortless for Google and Facebook to delete any out-of-policy keywords, at least yet cannot back this keyword in your video or on your image. 

The second thing is you need to focus on Personal experiences. Because you know, people who get healthcare services, people who give healthcare services they have a memorable and vital experience. And if you want to show people What are your values? What are your contributions? It would help if you directly went to your consumers, went to your followers, and talked about your contributions. And if you do something outstanding, probably people will tell about it genuinely, and there will be comments. So, of course, content is the key for the digital, but quality content is the king for Healthcare. People concerned about their health or trying to help people while giving healthcare services are a strong community. We care about their comments, ideas, and judgments. So if you manage to succeed in helping one of them, let the other know. This is important, and that’s what I think one of the most important we can select on Healthcare is people’s personal experience.

Hostile Updates

If you are working in healthcare marketing, It means that once a week, you will get a notification that you have some ad sets which will affect you from the following update, and you can use them until next month. Due to the GDPR rules, healthcare data is one of the most important and valuable. Social media platforms don’t want to mingle data set with that frequency.

So they are just trying to cut it all. You know what I think about Healthcare, and it again brings the topic of building up your community. Probably doing digital marketing in Healthcare will be like the beginning of Facebook. You know that time that people were creating pages and trying to say, “I can find one million people who support the Galatasaray team.” People who want to get services, information, or product in Healthcare create pages on Facebook groups and help each other. Target interests like cancer that I need will be gone until the end of this month. It means that you will not be allowed soon with how you are acting right now. 

As I mentioned to you from the beginning of creating a persona, as creating a person is like a kind of zero point in any digital marketing action until the final distribution, you need to find your ways. About these hostile updates, I don’t have any solution. I’m just trying to deal with them.

Difficulties of Gaining Strong Organic Position

“This is basically a kind of survival journey from authority war.”

There are compelling pages with massive authority. Contrary to typical cases, pages with the .gov .edu domain are very motivated to content. Governments and, let’s say, public office is aware that people need to get the correct information related to healthcare issues. So, they are trying their best to create this page’s domain power to help massive authorities. Let’s think about something widespread, let’s say covid; in my opinion, no websites without a .gov or .edu domain can get the result on the first page in English, whatever the content they create. So what do you need to do? 

And also, people generally don’t want to change their habits related to to to healthcare searches. They know that they get used to what they get information, and it’s tough to convince someone to change any habits related to their health. My solution is to create pillar pages. You need to create a pillar pages structure for every related topic and publish your content to stable people. Getting used to hearing from you on any social media platform can bring and create a loyal audience for you. And these audiences, these people will start to bring some other people. Because I criticize it to that point in the healthcare sector, but something is outstanding. The word of mouth effect in Healthcare is powerful, and it’s easier than you think. If you’re providing something good, do at the moment. Because it’s vital to find solutions in Healthcare, and if you provide one, people will figure that out.

So That’s why I think you need to create quality backlinks, valuable landing pages, and content pages about the content side. And then you’ll be aware that people will start to follow this pattern and keep finding your websites. Like probably Adem doesn’t have a solution as well. But I cannot give you a way to find your place on the first page of Google Search. But being on the second page is not as bad as you think in Healthcare. Because it’s different visitors’ habits on Healthcare, if they are not satisfied with the first page, they look for the second and third pages. So be aware and be ready that you need to provide what people need on a content site if you get the chance.

Bottom Line

You need to be aggressive and attack every possible organic platform. Not just in search engine’s organic search. For example, YouTube is kind of like a search engine right now. I mean, people who got cancer are probably looking for information on YouTube, so you need to think about that and get anything you can thank your contacts. Generally, when we talk about organic power, people directly think about organic search, which is understandable. But in Healthcare, it’s not like you need to attack any organic channel you can have. Because people who use these platforms or search engines or anything are looking for information related to healthcare services or diseases and anything like that, you need to discover all these channels first and then create your content. You will see that people will follow.

Questions & Answers

Q: How do you align your digital marketing strategy for a healthcare company like MassiveBio? You have an excellent idea, but how would you approach the principal to get this idea accepted?

A: It is unique in the healthcare industry. We are trying to convince cancer patients to clinical trials, which is tricky and fragile. So first, you need to understand Those people’s problems. You probably cannot create any 100% corrected persona. But the problem is you need to convince these people with all the content you have, all the events you have, all the products and services you have are for their problematic situation. They are diseases. So, it would help if you made them your followers, not leads, about the performance marketing actions. This is important.

You don’t try to close a deal; you try to help a human being. So first, you need to make them followers related to your call. And in case we are trying to make it simple for enrolling any enrollment to clinical trials. We are trying to make this process super simple. We are trying to make this process 100% accurate. So, This is what you need to do for MassiveBio first. You need to create and build up your community. You need to make sure that you work for them and understand their needs and every content you create; every suggestion is suitable. Then they will trust you.

See you in the next Weekly SEO live stream!