Healthcare Marketing

 
 

Healthcare marketing differs from other marketing domains in that it is more regulated. HIPAA compliance is critical to ensure the patients’ privacy. Commission for referrals is also disallowed.

We identify two components in healthcare marketing:

  • Conversion funnel shown on the left side of the figure

  • Continuous engagement shown on the right

Healthcare Marketing funnel

At the top of the funnel we need to bring the marketed product (a doctor visit, a procedure, a supplement, a drug, a medical device, a healthcare subscription) to the attention of interested patients.

There are no shortcuts here. A combination of inbound and outbound marketing techniques are necessary. For inbound, we must prepare an engaging web site, with relevant healthcare content, and do Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to create inlinks from reputable healthcare web sites.

There are many companies specializing in building Web sites for healthcare organizations. They typically try to add health-related content to rank the pages highly in organic web search results. This is complemented by digital advertising, mainly on Google, to bring more patient to the web site’s landing pages.

SmartBot360 complements these efforts by making healthcare Web sites more interactive and engaging, by embedding conversational AI widgets (chatbots) in the Web site, so answer common questions and possibly escalate to live chat with human agents. Both the chatbot and the live chat are HIPAA-compliant.

 
 

For outbound, once we have a list of phone numbers or emails, we need to build drip campaigns to contact the patients. Traditionally, marketers use tools for drip email campaigns, such as Sendgrid, and texting campaigns. At SmartBot360, we argue that the next generation in healthcare marketing campaigns is texting chatbot campaigns, where we deploy interactive chatbots and not one-off mass message blasts. For more information, see our blog on texting chatbot campaigns for healthcare. SmartBot360 achieves HIPAA-compliance over SMS by redirecting patients to secure Web chats via hyperlinks, thus enabling HIPAA marketing.

Continuous Patient Engagement

It is hard enough to get the attention of a patient once, that is, have them visit your web site or send a text message to phone number to get information. To increase the chance of a conversion and to increase the patient lifetime value, it is critical to effectively engage the patient in the next days, weeks and months. The best way to achieve that in todays communication environment is via carefully designed texting sequences. For example, send a reminder after one week, and based on the responses send personalized follow-up material the week after.

 
 


SMS automation has been successfully employed in other industries to maximize a customer’s LTV and revenue. Our goal is to make it easy to achieve similar success in the healthcare industry while ensuring the security and privacy of patient data.

 
 

SmartBot360 has powerful and easy-to-use tools to build such Schedule Flows in a few minutes and assign them to leads automatically (e.g. by the chatbot on the Web site) or manually (upload a list of phone numbers). Read more about such continuous engagement for healthcare.

HIPAA vs. User Tracking

Marketers love tracking, using cookies, Google Analytics or Facebook Pixel. However, many of these pose HIPAA challenges, as they may share sensitive PHI data with third party organizations.

It is possible to track how many users coming from paid ads end up chatting with a chatbot on a Web site, while maintaining HIPAA compliance, if done right. For more details, read about how to leverage Google Analytics in a HIPAA-compliant manner.