Creative Marketing | 8/04/2019

The future of video marketing for healthcare organisations

Posted by Sophie Turner

According to research conducted on Cisco’s Visual Networking Index, just over 80% of online traffic will be video content by the year 2022.

Is your healthcare organisation prepared for this upcoming shift? We’ve identified a few of the most effective changes you should prioritise on your website that will effectively help you drive more traffic and conversions from both paid and organic search activity.

Video content delivers significant value in terms of showing off a hospital’s USPs, highlighting the different services offered at your facility and sharing patient stories and feedback on the care and treatment they received. Delivering this type of content in a video format can help influence a consumer’s selection process and will demonstrate the added value of a private healthcare experience.

With this in mind, healthcare organisations should start implementing video content on their websites sooner rather than later, if they have not already, to stay on top of upcoming digital marketing trends.

What are people searching for?

  • Detailed doctor profiles
  • In-depth procedure information
  • Powerful patient testimonials

Introduce the people behind the medical degrees

Prospective patients are increasingly researching doctors who specialise in the procedure they’re looking for before scheduling a consultation with them. It makes sense as, before putting their health in the hands of a surgeon, patients want to get to know the doctors prior to consultations so they gain a sense of trust beforehand.

This is where online video content proves useful, as it opens up more opportunities for doctors to show their personalities in the form of a short Q&A style video, or a less formal video to signify their passion for healthcare and areas of specialism. When positioned beside staff profiles and static head shots, these videos can help to humanise your organisation to potential patients and influence their decision.

Educate your potential patients

Procedural information videos can help to ease a potential patients fears or uncertainty, as well as visually and verbally explain the step-by-step process of how the procedure works. Potential patients that are more informed are more likely to take the desired action you want them to take based on the information that they have learnt.

Are you planning on promoting a new service? If so, try using video content on your website to effectively showcase the benefits or process of your new treatment. This can also be utilised across other digital platforms, such as paid social, display and email marketing.

Email marketing tip: Just by using the word “video” in the subject line of an email, it can increase open rates by 19%, click-through rates by 65% and reduce unsubscribes by 26%.

Promote your patient feedback

Who better to help promote a service area such as cardiology or orthopaedics than your patients themselves? Testimonial videos can help people make informed decisions about the treatment or facility.

With videos, emotions and sincerity can be conveyed much more effectively than with written content. Therefore, discovering the ins and outs of a real patient’s journey using video content is a powerful way of getting prospective patients to emotionally connect with your hospital or clinic through real-life stories. These emotions will likely lead to an action (i.e. booking a consultation) and an action will likely lead to a conversion (i.e. going ahead with the surgery).

Ultimately, this can help nurture relationships and help you to stay at the top of your potential patients’ minds, increasing the chances of them choosing your hospital or practice over a competitor.

SEO tip: As videos are becoming an increasingly popular form of content, search engines are more likely to show video content in the top position of the SERPs rather than other content.

So, how do videos benefit paid and organic search?

All in all, video content should start to be incorporated into your entire marketing strategy, from landing pages to email marketing, to add elements of personalisation to each potential patient experience, help to build trust and provide a much deeper understanding of what your healthcare company has to offer.

Incorporating all of these variants of video content on your website can help drive effective results from paid and organic search. If you have either very limited or text-heavy information about each of the services you offer, people may look online elsewhere (often turning to competitor websites) because they can’t find the answers they’re searching for. With video, users can quickly find the information they need whilst gathering an overall impression of the hospital and gaining a better understanding of how the procedure works.

A Google study found that out of 700 healthcare administrators surveyed, every customer reported watching videos to see product demonstrations. After watching, 79% continued to browse the website and 63% talked to others about the information they learnt. Therefore, landing pages with videos tend to generate higher conversion rates as users can find the information during their first point of contact.

At Fox&Bear, we specialise in helping healthcare organisations thrive and grow online. Need help implementing these changes on your website? Contact us today to find out how we can help you implement the best digital strategy specific to your business.