Six Telehealth Marketing Tips

Over the last year healthcare organizations have had to either fast track a telehealth strategy and implementation or enhance an existing offering to continue to offer services in a safe manner and continue to meet the needs of patients. As my colleague Melissa Westphal shared in an earlier blog, the use of telehealth or telemedicine surged for in-person elective and nonurgent medical procedures.

Many organizations have opted to continue their telehealth offerings and have worked out the bugs and challenges. And with telehealth being a permanent offering now for some providers and habits changing for patients, it’s important for providers to market the service as another option. Because individuals consume information in different ways it’s also important to promote the offering through various mediums. Below are six tips for marketing telehealth:

Define your message

First and foremost, like any other strategy, you should define your message and how you want to promote your services. Think about how you can differentiate your organization from your competitors and why patients should use your telemedicine services over another. Create a list of benefits and differentiators to help develop your message.

Add information to your website

Adding details about your telemedicine offering to your website is essential . Using your messaging, include information on your homepage linked to a page with more details on what providers or services offer telehealth, what conditions are included in telehealth visits and how to schedule an appointment. Because some patients may not enter your website at your homepage, also be sure to include information on other pages throughout your site (service offerings, provider profiles, conditions pages, contact us).

Promote your service using digital mediums

Paid digital advertising such as display ads or retargeting is a great way to directly target patients who may be searching for telehealth services online. Digital ads can be static or video and should direct interested parties to a landing page on your website with more information. Paid social ads are another great way to share your message. Social media is one of the most popular channels used by healthcare organizations as it’s a popular place consumers go to search for healthcare information. Your patients likely already follow your social pages, so promoting the telehealth offerings on your social pages is a great way to continue to engage with current patients, but also recruit new patients using targeted paid ads.

Develop an email or direct mail campaign

While digital campaigns are highly effective and very targeted, using vehicles like email or direct mail are great supplements to any strategy. Both strategies can reach current patients who are already engaged with you or new patients you are trying to reach and can serve as another touch point to your potential customers. Direct mail or email are also great for longer messages you may want to share with consumers.

Once you have an established program, start to gather success stories about your program. There is really no better way to market your services than to share how your patients have been happy with the program and received the outcomes they wanted and expected. Whether it’s in the form of a patient testimonial that you were able to gather from a review or a longer form patient story, sharing these stories can help others make decisions quicker because they are able to see how others have been pleased with your services.

Marketing your telemedicine program is important to your organization’s overall strategy. Many organizations are now taking a step back to make sure they covered all the bases after launching. If you need help developing and implementing a strategy, Chartwell Agency can help.