Video marketing is a powerful tool that can be especially helpful for hospitals, clinics, and doctor offices in striving to reach more patients and burnish their reputation.
Video marketing is a powerful tool that can be especially helpful for hospitals, clinics, and doctor offices in striving to reach more patients and burnish their reputation. Video makes it possible to connect directly with your intended audience in an engaging and memorable way, and medical practices that incorporate video marketing into their overall content strategy tend to see immediate results.
But video also represents a significant investment in terms of both time and money, so it’s imperative that you do your homework before embarking on a video marketing campaign. Let’s take a look at the various options available in the world of video marketing and how hospitals and doctors can best utilize it.
One of the most popular types of videos used by hospitals and medical centers is a tour of the facilities. This could be one landing page video that highlights the key features of your location, or shorter videos covering each major department. How many videos you produce and how long they are really depends on the size of your practice. These introductory videos give you an opportunity to showcase your facilities, equipment, and staff, and earn the trust of your prospective patients. Building a relationship with your community members is one of the most important goals of any hospital marketing campaign, and video is one of the most effective, direct ways of accomplishing this.
While many patients look to hospitals and doctors for treatment, they also represent a tremendous source of information. With this in mind, producing a series of educational videos that cover how to identify ailments or treat certain conditions can be extremely valuable, both as a resource for the community, and for your center’s SEO ranking. Informative videos, especially when you have an extensive library of content, will draw a lot of attention in search engines, accomplishing much more than just text alone. The most successful content strategies usually involve both, allowing the written pages and video clips to create a multiplier effect that can really take your search engine rankings to the next level.
Along the same lines, FAQ videos allow you the opportunity to answer the most common questions people have regarding your procedures, policies, and instructions. Whether they are about patient intake, insurance requirements, payment options, facility offerings of anything else specific to your hospital or clinic, video allows you to quickly and clearly answer questions and convey information. This will lift a heavy burden off of your staff, allowing patients to find critical information when they are home or even in the waiting room.
Along the same lines, video is a great way to broadcast critical information in a timely fashion. When you need to make announcements or share the latest guidelines on a particular topic, video is an excellent option. You can feature such PSA videos prominently on your website, send them out to your email list, or disseminate them over social media, allowing you to get out the word quickly. This is especially important in the time of Covid, when public guidance on all kinds of issues, such as vaccine requirements and recommendations, and the latest safety measures, need to be shared right away.
Speaking of building a relationship, many hospitals and medical offices benefit from using staff videos to introduce their personnel to the public. A lot of patients want to know who will be treating them before they actually visit the hospital, and video allows your doctors and care providers to show that they are knowledgeable, professional, and personable. It also makes it easy to highlight what specialists you have at your facility.
Another important use of video on a medical website is known as a call to action. This is when you make short and to the point clips that direct visitors to take a specific action. Examples include filling out an intake form prior to arrival, signing up for an email newsletter, making a payment, and more. Studies have shown that websites that employ video in this manner have more visitors and get a better response rate than websites that use text alone.
One of the best ways that any business or facility can build trust is with positive customer testimonials. In the medical industry, positive referrals and reviews are especially important, as people are more likely to do research and dig into past comments and reviews when it comes to their medical care. Seeing and hearing patients just like them give their stamp of approval will really have a positive impact on your hospital or clinic’s reputation, and help you grow your patient base.