Over 77% of patients will search for reviews before ever making an appointment with a healthcare provider. This reflects a reality of modern medicine: patients have a lot of choices. Which means marketing is an essential task for any healthcare organization–especially if you want to say hello to new patients on a regular basis.
Unfortunately, an effective approach to marketing can also seem quite labor (and time) intensive. This is time that you’d rather spend helping patients.
Hubspot has become an indispensable tool in the healthcare marketing field. This one piece of software can support a vast array of marketing activities–and automate much of them. And because everything is in one place, you’ll be able to view more useful data in a context that can help you make more effective marketing decisions. In other words, when used properly, Hubspot in a healthcare marketing environment can help you grow and spend more time with your patients.
Hubspot and HIPAA
Understandably, many healthcare clinics and medical organizations are hesitant to introduce Hubspot because they’re concerned about possible HIPAA violations. As the healthcare industry is well aware, HIPAA requirements are quite strict and violations can result in serious consequences.
Hubspot was designed to be used by a broad variety of industries and, as a result, is not natively HIPAA compliant. But that doesn’t mean you need to avoid this powerful tool. That’s because Hubspot’s most significant strengths are as a marketing tool and customer relationship manager.
With the right approach, you can use Hubspot to grow your practice while remaining perfectly HIPAA compliant. Here’s how:
- Avoid syncing Hubspot with any of your patient databases. Keep patient data and marketing data separate.
- Use Hubspot primarily as a means to communicate with individuals who are not patients yet (in marketing language, they’re known as “leads”). The goal of these interactions would be to help welcome new leads to your clinic or organization. Hubspot can help you easily generate and nurture leads over time. This makes Hubspot an effective tool for general communication and education.
- And because you don’t sync your patient database with your marketing list, you have the ability to customize your messages to each audience.
- Do you have a new procedure you want to announce to everyone?
- Maybe you’re opening a new office?
- Avoid using Hubspot to help you deliver any confidential patient information, such as a diagnosis or test results. This should be done strictly through your patient portal.
- You can use questions in forms or “quizzes” to direct site visitors to the right Hubspot form for them, but never ask a medical question on a form that will be tied to personal information.
When used properly, Hubspot can be a perfect tool to promote your services, provide education, and complement your HIPAA patient communications–though Hubspot itself is not HIPAA compliant.
HubSpot Can Help You Be the Answer
Some organizations that have used Hubspot have reported:
- A 10x increase in organic traffic.
- A 69x increase in leads generated.
- A doubling of overall revenue.
Such an example is not out of the ordinary. In part, that’s because Hubspot makes it easier to position your healthcare brand as the answer to leads’ concerns and questions. Hubspot makes this process easier.
For example, if a lead is on a procedure page, you can enroll that person (with proper permissions) into other marketing activities, such as digital media, email campaigns, and more. And all of this can be controlled and monitored from Hubspot. In other words, your marketing team won’t be working in silos anymore!
Improving Your Content Marketing Strategy
Content is often the backbone of a comprehensive healthcare marketing strategy. Hubspot can help your brand generate and share content, automating several steps along the way. In general, Hubspot can help you with:
- Content generation: Data from Hubspot can help you determine topics to cover–and monitor how users and leads respond to that content.
- Social media marketing: Hubspot can connect all of your social platforms to one easy-to-use scheduler. No more bouncing between accounts just to post important information on social media!
- SEO: For most marketers, search engine optimization (SEO) can be something of a mystery box. But Hubspot can help you easily rate the SEO effectiveness of your content and landing pages. This can help you choose the right meta tags for Google searches.
- Public relations: Have a fun event coming up? Hubspot makes it easy to add pop-ups to your website and let people know about important information.
- Pay-per-click advertising: Pay-per-click (PPC) doesn’t have to be a shot in the dark. Hubspot can help you select the right keywords for your campaign–and track the results.
- Landing page development: Sometimes the best way to welcome possible new leads is with a custom landing page that quickly addresses their concerns. Hubspot makes it easy to create and tailor these webpages.
- Email marketing: Emails campaigns can quickly overwhelm you with their sheer volume. By keeping all of your campaigns and data in one place, Hubspot can help you segment audiences, track results, and interpret data. This can make your email campaigns more effective (and easier to create).
- Lead nurturing: Leads aren’t always going to become patients immediately. Sometimes, they need time to consider their options or think things over. Hubspot can keep your leads engaged in your lead nurturing cycle–and monitor the progress of those leads over time. Further, a patient one time doesn’t mean a patient for life. They might get sick again, they might abstain from their regular check ups, they might need a different service line, etc. Continuing to market to the masses is a vital part of your marketing strategy.
The power of Hubspot is that all of these content decisions are guided by data that’s easy to read and stored in one place–making your marketing job so much easier.
Automation and Tracking
Any marketing campaign is going to consist of a series of daily tasks–some of which are dull and monotonous. In part, this is why Hubspot is such a vital tool: Instead of doing all of these tasks manually, Hubspot can automate a good portion of them. Which means you can automate tasks and tracking–and free up time for the things you’d rather be doing over the course of the day.
There is, of course, a learning curve to using Hubspot–especially when it comes to using the software to its full potential. That’s why it’s often useful to partner with a Hubspot-certified marketing agency–so you can just sit back and enjoy the results.