Originally published by Beacon Media + Marketing. Updated and revised by Jennifer Gracey, Web Content Strategist & Writer on 07/17/23.
Developing a well rounded healthcare marketing strategy for a business in the health and wellness sphere poses many budget vs. capacity vs. quality challenges. The interplay and dynamics between each of those areas require navigating a delicate balance between brand representation and one’s professional obligations to their patient base.
Amidst your standing commitment as a healthcare practitioner, finding time and availability to really sharpen digital marketing strategies can be difficult. Which subsequently creates space for many missed client acquisition opportunities.
The question to ask here is, “How can I harness the power of my established brand to captivate new audiences and not miss client acquisition opportunities?” One definitive, results oriented answer is: Level up on video.
Video Serves Multiple Purposes
Incorporating engaging videos into a company’s healthcare advertising and marketing strategy regularly proves instrumental when working towards forging meaningful connection with online audiences. For optimal impact, however, exploring the most effective avenues to maximize the reach of your videos in the online sphere is essential to overall success.
Leverage Paid YouTube Ads
One compelling approach? Leveraging YouTube ads to expand your reach and tap into a broader audience base. As per Statista, YouTube ranks as the second most popular social network, trailing only behind Facebook. And considering “YouTube Shorts surpassed 50 billion daily views in February 2023″ the data speaks for itself. By integrating videos into your marketing arsenal, you gain an innovative and engaging means of connecting with your target audience. This, in turn, enables you to attract potential patients, while effectively achieving your healthcare and marketing strategies and objectives.
Do you need help creating videos? Learn more about how we can help you
Why Video Is Effective for Healthcare Marketing
Videos play a significant role in dominating internet traffic, captivating and alluring people like no other medium can. The dynamic fusion of moving visuals, compelling narrative, and harmonious soundtracks creates an irresistible allure for countless individuals.
Videos Help Expand Brand Reach
Weaving videos into your healthcare brand’s strategy presents a golden opportunity to captivate fresh audiences and expand your reach. YouTube, a treasure trove of knowledge, is a vibrant platform that inspires curiosity and satiates inquisitive minds. By providing enriching content about healthcare journey, your identity, brand ethos, comprehensive services, and more, you can forge a stronger connection with potential clients, encouraging them to initiate contact.
The creative possibilities for video creation are limitless. Be it dispensing expert medical advice or offering educational insights, you will undoubtedly reach your target audience, diligently seeking out your exceptional services.
Video Boosts Brand Awareness
Embracing videos is an effective strategy for boosting brand awareness, as they foster higher retention rates among viewers. In the ever-evolving landscape of Google advertising, it proves challenging to unearth the precise audience that will drive lead generation. Nonetheless, with the magnetic appeal of videos, you will continue to mesmerize, leaving an indelible mark on the hearts and minds of discerning viewers.
Why YouTube Is a Great Place to Advertise Videos
While widely recognized as a prominent video entertainment platform, did you know YouTube offers several advantages for promoting your healthcare clinic through video advertising? On YouTube, advertisements can appear at the beginning, middle, and end of videos. These placement options present numerous opportunities to capture your target audience’s attention.
Why is this significant? Well, according to March 2021 data from Statistica, the average time spent per visit on YouTube worldwide was nearly 30 minutes! That means viewers have ample time to discover your healthcare clinic’s message. Depending on the length of your advertisement, you can either provide a quick glimpse of your services or present an engaging, longer video that holds their interest.
Here’s the secret: Longer ads are more effective when they manage to captivate the audience, preventing them from skipping the ad. On the other hand, shorter ads often limit viewers’ ability to skip the content altogether. With users dedicating extended periods to exploring YouTube and the frequency of ad placements, investing in this platform can greatly benefit your own healthcare marketing campaign and strategy.
So, what’s the main goal of these advertisements? To raise awareness about your brand and provide viewers with compelling content that encourages them to learn more about the unique medical services your clinic has to offer.
How To Start Advertising on YouTube
Are you ready to take your YouTube advertising to the next level? Let’s dig into the essential steps below to help set you up for success. But before we do, it’s crucial to ensure that you have an established brand that truly reflects your own healthcare system and clinic.
Fine Tune Your Brand
Your brand encompasses everything from your business model, logo, colors, fonts, and more. By having a strong, established brand, you can create a truly professional and visually appealing YouTube channel. This is incredibly important for brands that want to instill confidence and trust in their potential clients and make them more likely to choose your services. Now that we’ve covered branding, let’s explore the following steps to maximize your YouTube marketing efforts.
1. Create Your Google Account
The first thing you will need to do is create a Google account. You won’t be able to create your own YouTube channel without one. Because of how the Google ecosystem works, your Google account and YouTube channel are tied together. There are benefits to this and we’ll explain more below.
2. Create Your YouTube Channel
Your branding plays a vital role in capturing attention. Incorporating an eye-catching image for your YouTube banner, draws viewers to your channel. This gives you the opportunity to showcase your tagline and other relevant information, establishing a strong social media presence, for your healthcare clinic.
To further enhance recognition, make use of your logo as your profile picture. This simple yet effective step helps individuals easily identify and remember you, which proves invaluable for your advertisement efforts. With this YouTube channel, you can create and share a multitude of engaging videos that have the potential to convert leads.
Don’t forget to leave a lasting impression by adding a watermark to all your videos and advertisements. This ensures your branding is consistently showcased across all your content.
3. Create Google Ads Account
Are you ready to take your clinic to the next level? It all starts with creating your very own Google Ads account. This powerful tool will help you reach a wider audience and drive more traffic to your healthcare website. By using the Google Ads portal, you can easily push your ads out and get them seen on platforms like YouTube, where millions of potential clients are waiting to discover your clinic.
But that’s not all! With your Google Ads account, you can also create targeted ads that will appear on popular websites and in search results on Google. The conversion rates for Google Ads speak for themselves — it’s a proven investment that can yield impressive results for your marketing strategy. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to boost your clinic’s online visibility and attract more customers.
4. Create Your YouTube Campaign
This is where everything will tie together to use YouTube advertising. Once you’ve created your video, the following steps will be publishing and disseminating the content.
- Publish the video on YouTube: Once your advertisement is ready to go, it’s time to publish it on your YouTube channel. You need to create a title for your video, a description, and choose the right thumbnail. Make sure to publish the video for the public to see when they visit your channel.
- Copy the link: Next, copy the link off YouTube to your video and go into your Google Ads account. This is where you’ll create your YouTube campaign and make your advertisement. Paste the URL of your video into the ad so that Google Ads will know which video to use for your new ad.
- Create the headline and description: So people know what they’re looking at, create a punchy headline and informative description for your advertisement. This is useful for when they want to read more information and learn how to contact you.
- Choose your target audience: Choose the target audience you’d like your ad to reach. Keep in mind, with Google ads you have to rely on broad audience targeting and geotargeting with healthcare ads. However, you can specify a few demographics like age and gender.
- Launch your ad: Now it’s time to launch your ad! Your ads will now be shown to people in your area or within the demographic you specified earlier. While your ad plays, your logo and descriptions pop up. This is so people can learn more about who the advertisement is for and where they can find out more information about you.
- Choose your budget: Choose your monthly budget for your advertisement. Whatever you set as your maximum spend for the month, divide dollar amount by 30.4. This will be your daily ad spend (ex. $500 monthly Google Ads spend ÷ 30.4 = $16.45 daily Google Ads spend.) Be aware: YouTube may spend less or more than your daily spending limit. However, they won’t go above or over your pre-set maximum Google Ads monthly spend budget.
Ideas For Healthcare YouTube Ads
Now that you know how to create a YouTube ad, you may wonder about the kinds of videos you can make for your online advertising. When planning out your video content, keep in mind: these videos provide content for people to get to know you. Below are a few common advertisements healthcare businesses use:
The “Why Us” Video
This overview style video gives people a peek at your office, your staff, and your services. This is the type of that ad should capture your clinic’s mission and specifically emphasize what sets you apart from other practices.
Educational Videos
Educational videos are a great way to cultivate understanding around your specialty. Educational videos are good tools to help your audience recognize their need to seek help and prompt them to do so.
Patient and Client Testimonials
Patient and client testimonials are an excellent way to build credibility and inspire trust among your target audience. They work particularly well to convince people that investing in themselves by engaging your services is the right step forward at the right time. People often trust the opinions and reviews of others making them more likely to seek your services IF you have good reviews.
Campaign Videos
For ongoing marketing campaigns, a video ad that garners interest and drives people to learn more works great for a YouTube Ad. With these types of videos, having a specific tagline or concrete idea you want to get across and generate creative content with should be your primary focus. Especially if you want the campaign to appeal to your target audience.
Using these types of video models will help craft your advertisement. When filming, as a good rule of thumb, close-up shots on people’s faces are fantastic! Additionally, don’t extend any one specific frame beyond the five second mark, and ensure your music reflects the overall mood of your video and more importantly — your brand.
Video Tips for Specific Healthcare Industries
The tips below are designed to help shape video content for specific fields inside of the healthcare industry umbrella.
Mental Health Videos
Video advertisements for mental health should focus on two points:
- Educating people
- Driving them to action
Taking a step toward getting care for mental health issues is daunting for many — especially for the first time. With video testimonials and educational content, you creating a campaign that encourages people to seek out your mental health services is a good place to start.
Want to learn more about our mental health marketing services? Learn more here!
Functional Medicine Videos
Functional medicine advertisements should focus on two points:
- In-depth education
- Testimonials
Incredibly effective for this field, creating content for the two categorizations above will help ensure potential clients are educated about your services before reaching out.
You may also want to consider explaining how functional medicine is different than conventional healthcare and addressing how you take a personalized approach to treating chronic conditions.
Dentists
Dental anxiety is very real to many regardless of how many times they’ve visited a dentist in the past. Combat this by framing your office as a safe, welcoming space with compassionate staff. Show off your great team and explain why someone should choose you for dental care over the competition.
Orthodontists
Advertisements for orthodontic clinics do well by including a combination of patient testimonials, meeting the staff clips, and before and after footage. You should also highlight:
- State-of-the-art technology your office utilizes or has.
- Special orthodontic offerings you provide (ex. clear aligners or specialized diagnostics).
- Any special value added services or patient comfort amenities to help set your clinic apart from competitors.
Chiropractors
Videos of chiropractic sessions have increased in popularity. Sharing educational videos depicting how a chiropractor helps ease pain or aids in recovery from injuries (or sports activities) is a way to attract interest and inspire engagement.
Family Medicine
Advertisements should show why you’re a good family doctor. Highlighting the fact you have a welcoming environment is always a good idea. So is taking some time to explain why being a family physician is important to you and why potential patients should anticipate feeling comfortable coming to your clinic. As most family doctors care for people across age groups and treat various conditions, spotlighting your practice’s inclusiveness is a great strategy.
Med Spa
Video advertising that depicts people relaxing in your facility or having a procedure done is an excellent way to help potential clients visualize themselves undergoing similar treatments. Testimonials or pictures showing the results you can provide your clients also serves to draw in new clients.
Why You Should Choose a Marketing Agency for Your YouTube Advertising
Keeping up with your marketing strategy while running your clinic can feel overwhelming. That’s where Beacon Media + Marketing steps in.
You can focus on your clinic and patient experience while we take care of the rest. We’ll guide you through the entire process, from creating captivating videos to running effective advertisements. We’ll even go the extra mile by analyzing your Google Analytics to identify your target audience.
At Beacon Media + Marketing, we deeply understand the needs of our healthcare clients. We’ll assist you with everything from YouTube advertising to developing engaging content and executing paid ad campaigns. We’ll also help you uncover your brand identity, the driving force behind your work, and the unique value you provide to your patients.
Together, we’ll shine a spotlight on the important work you’re doing and how you can help your community. Let us empower you with a solid foundation for your successful healthcare marketing strategy now, and propel you further, faster.
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