Can you engender trust in your healthcare marketing?

By Geoffrey Cooling

The simple answer is you can and if you do, you will be a winner. According to the latest research undertaken by Pew Research as detailed in Reach 70 Million a lot of people are searching online for health information. But what sites did they trust for that information.

According to the Pew Research, these health searchers were very satisfied with informative, fast, interactive sites that conveyed a ‘seal of approval’ image and offered helpful links to educate them more on the disorder they were researching.  On the contrary, health searchers turned away from sites that were too commercial, and that lacked the endorsement of a trusted independent organization. Likewise if they appeared unprofessional, or if you could not determine the source of information or tell when the information was last updated, these elements proved equally discouraging.  In short, when health searchers felt the sites were not trustworthy, they abandoned those sources.

The answer is content, the answer is good content. The creation, curating and sharing of good content designed to meet the needs of prospective Patients. That content needs to cover a host of topics pertaining to hearing loss, hearing aids and assistive listening devices. But just the supply of this content deployed in the right manner is not enough. The information needs to be well researched and referenced. You also need to include links to established and trustworthy sites that may supply more information. These links lend you authority, they lend your online channels authority.

The content needs to be multi dimensional, photos, video and text. So you put up that content, the prospective Patient comes and views it. But where is the call to action, where is the come on if we can not be overly commercial? That is in fact the nature of inbound marketing, you provide content that establishes your worth. The viewer perceives your worth and then contacts you for the services you provide. So the question is how do you deploy content that meets their demands but also meets your need as a business?

The content can serve your needs as a business through anchor texted back links pointing at various elements of your website. This will help with your rankings for the keywords you are trying to target. It also leaves it open for the consumer to follow those links. Do not pack your content with either keywords or anchor texted backlinks, this defeats the purpose. Ensure there is an about us page on the blog site that contains information about your Practice. This is not an advert, keep it human, photos of you and your staff and details of what you do and your qualifications and association memberships.

You should also always leave a message within the last paragraph of every post that if they need more information, they should feel free to contact you. Make sure the contact hyperlink brings them to a page with a contact form and your contact details. Because some people don’t trust forms that they have to leave an email address on. It is up to you to provide all the means of contact available.

In this way, you are serving their needs without pushing on them yours.

Regards

Geoff