Once upon a time, the healthcare industry was seen as dragging its feet when it came to innovative digital marketing campaigns that captured peoples’ imaginations online. That, however, is changing. Over the last few years, we have seen a fantastic roster of superb digital marketing campaign examples by private healthcare companies, that have gained plenty of traction in search engines and social media.

The rise in brilliant digital marketing ideas from private healthcare brands is in no small part thanks to the rising demand for healthcare services online – during lockdown health-conscious customers and patients turned to search engines like Google in their droves, resulting in a boom in demand in demand for online healthcare services. According to Google Keyword Planner, searches for ‘Online GPs’ skyrocketed by 72% during lockdown – and have remained well above pre-pandemic levels ever since.

We’re always excited to see so much innovation in the digital marketing healthcare space, not least because we’re always looking for inspiration for our own digital marketing healthcare campaigns.

SEO & Newsjacking with ice lollies (MyHealthcare Clinic)

This one is simple, but effective. ‘Newsjacking’ is a term that’s been popularised by the PR and digital marketing community over the last few years, and it’s great to see private healthcare brands catching on to its benefits. The term essentially refers to the rise in private companies responding to the news agenda in real time as a tool to generate widespread and media coverage for their brand, often resulting in increased traffic, backlinks (for SEO) and leads.

To capitalise on this trend, London-based private healthcare providers, MyHealthcare Clinic, saw an opportunity here and implemented a creative SEO and newsjacking strategy – blending search engine optimisation with online PR.

Having seen journalists constantly seek out expert medical opinion in response to healthcare trends on platforms like Twitter, MyHealthcare Clinic jumped on the opportunity by courting all the main Healthcare Editors at major news and lifestyle websites. This was completed by consistent technical and on page SEO tactics to enhance their website, enabling Google to crawl and index it more easily.

Journalists are pressed for time in a 24/7 news cycle, so they did this by offering them access to specialist medical practitioners for comment at short notice – being available when needed made MyHealthcare Clinic a go-to source for medical comment for many writers, resulting a plethora of impressive national coverage that boosted their visibility online significantly. By responding to requests for comment on everything from breast cancer and alopecia to why people shouldn’t use ice lollies to cool themselves off in intimate places during a heatwave, they made significant inroads – landing them repeatedly in titles such as the Metro, Yahoo, the Evening Standard, the Mail on Sunday, the Sun, and many more. The campaign was simple but effective and resulted in significant exposure and a long-term rise in traffic and leads.

Content Marketing using healthcare professionals (The Mayo Clinic)

The Mayo Clinic blog is a great example of a digital marketing campaign in healthcare, as its focused-on audiences and is clear with its objectives. A common misconception about content marketing is that it’s all just fluffy stuff – but this campaign example is an excellent demonstration of how a blog can be used to position your organisation as a thought leader and position it in front of the right audiences.

By investing time in their blog, they’ve created content authored by trusted medical experts and specialists, and created content that specifically targets search queries related to questions about common health conditions. How many times have you Googled your symptoms or turned to a search engine when you think you may be suffering from a particular condition?

It’s simple, but effective, and because the content is trustworthy it’s been well linked to, creating a snowball effect which has seen the domain authority of the site grow and grow. What this means is it’s more likely to be served to users in Google when they make relevant searches.

Revealing Healthcare ‘Hotspots’ with PR & SEO Campaigns (Better2Know)

SEO paired with PR is a great tool to get seen online, and the UK’s largest private provider of sexual health services, Better2Know, used it to their advantage to capitalise on the growing demand from people turning to search engines for STI testing and healthcare services. Having seen the rise in demand in search engines like Google, they quickly implemented SEO and digital PR campaigns to capitalise on that demand ahead of competitors.

To do so, data from sources like Public Health England were mined, to reveal newsworthy statistics about healthcare issues such as STIs and cervical cancer at national and regional levels across the country – most of which the media hadn’t seen or cottoned on to yet. Armed with these news stories, they created data visualisation graphics of the trends and pitched the stories to national healthcare writers with great success – landing them several prominent media slots in major online and print news networks such as the Daily Mail, the Evening Standard, the Sun, the Metro, Yahoo, Cosmopolitan, Elle and Women’s Health.

The coverage didn’t just drive huge exposure for the brand, it also drove relevant traffic to their website and the authority of their website in search engines. ‘Authority in search engines’ may sound a little dry, but what it did is allow Google to see their website as being more relevant to its users, sending them up the search engine’s search rankings. This allowed the brand to outcompete some competitors and capitalise on the rising demand for healthcare services online.

Swiping Right on Heart Burn with Tinder (Rennie)

We love this one. Back in 2020, we read about how Rennie partnered with Tinder to create some branded profile cards that users could swipe on within Tinder. These cards were made of characters representing some of the public’s favourite foods that cause heart burn – such as ‘Margherita’ the pizza and ‘Chip’ the bar of chocolate. Once logged in, users of the platform were able to swipe right on the profiles to get special offers on Rennie.

The campaign was great for a couple of reasons. To many indigestion tablets may seem a little dull, but the campaign really injected some fun and excitement. It was a way of communicating product USPs without being overtly salesy (which can be off putting to consumers), it drove home the core benefits of the product – and reminded everyone why they’re so useful! The use of fun and humour is also a great way to create engagement around a product.

If you’d like to share your thoughts and ideas, or chat about digital marketing campaigns in private healthcare and what they could do for you, please get in touch. Check out our digital marketing blog for more hints, tips and guides on how to implement digital campaigns.

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