How Inbound Marketing Can Help Grow Your
Healthcare Business
PART 1
What is Inbound Marketing and How Does It Work?
Welcome to our Inbound Marketing series! If you’re here, you’re wondering how Inbound Marketing can help you grow your healthcare business. Over the next four articles, we’ll dive into Inbound Marketing and answer burning questions about how it can help your healthcare business grow and flourish.
What is the first thing everyone does before buying something that takes a bit of research? They look online for answers. Search engines have become the go-to tool to find information about everything.
Everyone uses them, and that means they funnel a massive amount of traffic.
The bottom line is that people search for information about what you do. Wouldn’t it be nice if they found you instead of the competition?
In a nutshell, that’s what Inbound Marketing helps you do. It’s not a quick marketing tactic.
Inbound requires a commitment to a philosophy and a plan. Inbound Marketing takes time, but the results can pay big dividends for your healthcare company.
Inbound Marketing requires four main steps and a lot of little ones between them.
1. Attract strangers from search traffic 2. Convert visitors into leads
3. Close the best leads into customers
4. Delight customers, so they become promoters of your brand
HOW INBOUND MARKETING CAN HELP GROW YOUR HEALTHCARE BUSINESS - PART 1
Attract Convert Close Delight
KeywordsBlog Social Media
Forms Calls to Action Landing Pages
EmailCRM Workflows
Surveys Smart Content Social Monitoring
Strangers Visitors Leads Customers Promoters
Attract Strangers from Search Traffic
The first step is to attract strangers so you can move them to become customers. To do this, marketers have to create educational content those customers will LOVE.
That’s the heart of Inbound. It flips marketing around. You publish great content online that educates customers about what you do. When they search for solutions, they find YOU.
Education is essential. The content you create should be informative. You want to answer questions people are asking related to products or services you offer. By educating them, you build trust.
Content should follow an organized plan. Keywords, personas, and essential topics should drive what kinds of content you create. Choose subjects that are relevant to what your healthcare business does. Figure out how those topics apply to your personas. What kinds of questions do they have? How can you help? Write about those things.
Always be helpful and informative. Visitors from search results found you because you are talking about the things you know. Those are the same things they want to learn about. Help them find answers to their questions.
Once you have fantastic content created, promote it! Organic traffic will reach you over time, but promotion can speed up the process. Social Media can be a great way to share your content. Choose Social Channels that your ideal customers most often visit.
Attracting visitors takes time and commitment. Create content on a regular schedule if you can. Be authentic. Educate your visitors. Help them learn. Stick to a plan, and you can rank well for keywords and topics associated with your healthcare business. When strangers search, they will find you and become visitors to your site.
PART 2
Got More Website Traffic?
Great! Now what?
In Part 1, we talked about how Inbound Marketing
generates traffic. Content becomes the net you cast into the world and when it’s created with the right context, the right people find you.
Now great content is bringing new traffic to your website.
So what’s next? You need to convert some of those visitors into leads.
What exactly is a lead? We all know that leads are prospects and someone that we might ultimately get business from in the future. For the purposes of our Inbound Marketing discussion, we’ll make our definition one step more specific.
When someone gives you their information, usually from a form on your site, and they give you permission to talk to them again, they become a lead.
Convert Visitors into Leads
Getting personal or business information from visitors requires trust. That trust comes in part from providing them with authentic content. They are getting answers to questions they searched online to find. And they are getting those answers from you.
There are lots of ways to convert visitors to leads. Collecting visitor contact information in a form online is the one most associated with Inbound Marketing. To get them to do that, you need to offer something of value in return. If they are giving you their information, they should get something that’s worth the trade right?
Do you offer a free consultation? Collect visitor information from those interested in getting this advice. Do you have worksheets or guides that could help visitors? You’ve built your healthcare business on establishing expertise doing what you do. By giving people helpful information or tools, they can see for themselves that you know what you are doing.
It’s all about helping people. So offer content that helps them in exchange for information from them. This process is often referred to as “gating” your content, but it has to be content that’s worth it to them. You save the good stuff behind a gate, the form in this case, and in exchange for information they provide you trade that good content.
You don’t have to gate all great content to convert visitors into leads. Pillar pages are a great example. They are informative and accessible, but also give you opportunities to convert leads.
HOW INBOUND MARKETING CAN HELP GROW YOUR HEALTHCARE BUSINESS - PART 2
A pillar page is a centralized page that acts as a hub for a particular topic. All the information is there so you aren’t gating anything on the page. A typical pillar page will have lots of information about that topic. Links throughout will guide visitors to sub-topic pages. These sub-topic pages will have more detail about their subject but also link back to the pillar page.
Pillar pages, when done right, are becoming more valued in search results. For the same reason that humans would value a central resource on a topic, search engines do too.
Conversions to leads on pillar pages can come from offering a downloadable PDF version of the pillar page. Having an offline resource could be valuable to visitors. After all, you’ve put together a lot of information in one centralized place. That’s helpful to visitors. High-level offers related to the topic can also act as calls-to-action on pillar pages.
Content is key to converting visitors into leads. Content accessible by everyone first establishes trust. More valuable content behind a form can then help you convert those
visitors into leads. Use calls-to-action to drive traffic to landing pages where you have valuable offers and then use forms to collect lead information in exchange for the content offer. It’s a simple concept. The trick to making it work is to always be in the mindset of helping your visitors learn. Your content should do that.
Thank you pages wrap the process up and provide a jump point for people to learn more about what you can do to help them. If fact, thank you pages are a great place for an
additional content offer that builds upon the one a lead just downloaded or accessed. Visitors that have become leads through one conversion are even more likely to give you a bit more info in exchange for additional content that helps them again. See how that works?
PART 3
Your Contacts Database is Growing! How Do Help Leads Become Customers?
In Part 1 of our Inbound Marketing series, we talked about how publishing great content with a purpose, or context relevant to what prospects search for, can drive new traffic to your website. In Part 2 of this series, we followed up with how to convert those visitors into leads. Educating visitors helps earn their trust. Giving them information or tools they value encourages them to give you their information, and thus permission to contact them.
Now it’s time to take a closer look at the leads in your system. Visitors have gotten some answers to burning questions from their search. They’ve even traded their contact info for something of value in return. How do you decide who the best leads are and then close them to customers?
Close the Best Leads into Customers
Closing leads to customers takes nurturing and a personal touch. This is where Marketing and Sales must work together. Both groups need to agree on the definition of a good lead. Is it the first time someone gives you their information? Or is it later when they’ve read several things and downloaded several content offers? Is it a defined lead score that could be a combination of several interactions?
The answers are different for every company and can even vary quite a bit over time. The important step is for Marketing and Sales always to agree. In fact, both groups need to think of themselves as halves of the same team: Team Revenue. Together both groups should understand what the other is doing and why.
Once Sales and Marketing agree, both can go to work. Marketing should focus on capturing new Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) and nurturing them. Sales should focus on the Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and closing them to customers.
These MQLs, who are a good fit but not ready to buy, should continue to hear from Marketing.
Automation can play a big role in this process. This group should get pre-planned emails and extra content to educate them. Later, when they’ve met the criteria to become an SQL, Sales can take the hand off and close the deal.
Marketing needs feedback from sales on what makes a good lead. If criteria changes,
Marketing should update their workflows to capture meaningful lead information. Sales needs this lead intelligence. With it, they can make more effective sales calls and can provide the best help to new customers that need what you do.
Inbound Marketing provides a structure to both Sales and Marketing. Sales has traditionally been good at tracking information. Marketing not so much. But with Inbound Marketing, both groups can, and should, measure everything. Over time you learn what works well and you can improve what doesn’t. Processes get better, and things run like clockwork. Content or processes that deliver a great return on investment get repeated. The best part? Customers are coming to you instead of you hunting for them!
HOW INBOUND MARKETING CAN HELP GROW YOUR HEALTHCARE BUSINESS - PART 3
PART 4
Things Are Clicking. Visitors Are Becoming Customers.
Do You Stop There?
Hint: Absolutely Not.
Inbound is a structured data and content-driven process where strangers become loyal customers.
So why is it so important to always delight customers once they cross that threshold? It’s simple really. When you delight the customers you have, they are happy to promote what you do. That brings new strangers that you can convert into leads and then customers. The process repeats and your healthcare business grows.
HOW INBOUND MARKETING CAN HELP GROW YOUR HEALTHCARE BUSINESS - PART 4
Delight Customers So They Become Promoters
Think about that for a moment. When you share a product or service with a friend, what motivated you to do that? It was trust. If you have a good experience as a customer, you don’t mind sharing with others.
You should focus on building trust during every interaction you have with visitors, leads, and customers. That means being authentic in your content and being helpful in your actions. If you’re doing those things on a consistent basis, it’s a step toward delighting customers.
There are some simple things you can do to help ensure customers are always delighted.
You’ve likely heard them referred to as the three pillars of delight. The three pillars are:
• Innovation • Communication • Education
Innovation doesn’t have to be huge breakthroughs. Focus on improving the customer experience. Inspire and teach your team why it’s always their job to innovate, no matter what their role is. Everyone should be challenging their job’s status quo. If something isn’t contributing to customer delight, even in some small way, what can be improved so that it is?
Communication is critical in helping you build trust and create delight. Think of yourself as a teacher, facilitator, and adviser. You play all those roles and more when trying to help someone understand why they should buy from you or not. That same mindset should remain when they do buy. After all, maintaining good communication through every project for clients is just good business right?
Education is a process that should never end. Use content as primary educational tools. Think about how you currently interact with customers. Do you provide enough education? Does it add value to their lives? Is everyone at your organization educating customers in some way?
They turn to you for your expertise and help. If you are always educating, you are helping them reach their goals. That leads to happy customers.
Remember, it’s everyone’s job to delight customers. Every interaction forms a customer’s experience impression in their minds. Helping them at every step can ensure their long-term success. If you do that, they won’t mind sharing it with others that they realize you can help in the same way.
HOW INBOUND MARKETING CAN HELP GROW YOUR HEALTHCARE BUSINESS - PART 4
The Skinny?
Inbound Marketing Takes Time, But It Works to Grow Your
Healthcare Business
Inbound Marketing is a long-term plan. Organic traffic takes time to come to you. The evidence shows that the process works. The buying habits of consumers have changed. People research, then they buy. Inbound embraces that concept.
Education and content drive traffic to you. Some of that traffic contains your next customers.
This outline is a very simple walk through of a process that has a lot of steps. The key components are still great content, firm commitment, cooperation, and a plan. The bottom line is that Inbound Marketing, when done well, works to help grow your healthcare business. Leads find you and some of them become customers. When you focus on helping them every step of the way, those same customers become your advocates. The process starts all over again. And who doesn’t want that as a part of their business plan?
