2023 Healthcare Marketing Trends: Video Marketing
Many marketing observers note how most of the innovation in cellphone technology over the last five years has focused on the phone’s cameras. This is just one of many indicators telling us how important videos are in a successful marketing strategy. Whether you’re aspiring to go viral on TikTok or wanting to tell a compelling story about your healthcare community, video remains one of the most authentic, trusted and effective ways to connect with clients.
What is video marketing and how can it be used?
Video marketing means using videos for promoting and telling people about your products or service. It helps increase engagement on your digital and social channels, educates your audience, and allows you to reach them with a new medium.
Using video as part of marketing is gaining a lot of traction across businesses of all sizes, including entrepreneurs and small businesses. The barriers to entry for video production are getting lower. Video marketing is growing partly with improved cellphone camera technology, partly with major innovations in video editing tools easily available at our fingertips, and mostly, with the proliferation of a culture that’s comfortable in front of the camera. And it’s here to stay.
A Renderforest Survey (Hookle, 2022) found that videos helped businesses increase:
- Brand awareness by 70%
- Traffic by 51%
- Sales by 34%
Videos can humanize organizations, especially if they’re used in any industry that benefits from this kind of personal interaction like healthcare. Doctors’ offices and hospitals tend to feel cold and disconnected. Using video marketing can help patients feel cared for and connected. Here are a few different types of videos the healthcare industry uses to attract and educate patients (522 Productions, 2022):
Testimonials
In designing your overall healthcare marketing strategy, creating a reliable and trustworthy brand is essential. Much better than telling your customers how trustworthy you are is showing them. Sharing a good success story through a video is a great way to show rather than tell customers your main brand messages.
You can select clients and staff who represent you and your organization. New and existing customers can make up their own mind about the authenticity and validity of a testimonial in a way that’s harder to do with written review (although written reviews are also a must-do for your integrated marketing strategy in 2022).
Testimonials make great shareable content on social media and on other marketing channels. With the right clips and editing they can form part of your omnichannel healthcare marketing strategy. With the right creative elements, they might even go viral!
Website Welcome Videos
Like a good dinner party host, there’s nothing better than being able to greet your customers at the door. A welcome video is a great way to invite potential clients onto a journey with your healthcare system. A video is the next best thing to them being able to make eye-contact representatives of your organization and build a deeper relationship.
With relatively simple editing, you can easily take clients on a tour of relevant facilities, introduce them to some of the people they might interact with and, most importantly, share critical information in a way they’re likely to retain. All of this can help convert potential customers into long term clients.
Physician Profile Videos
Comfort-level is everything when making important healthcare decisions and patients want to know their doctors. A growing number of patients are doing extensive research on physicians before scheduling an appointment. As a result, every piece of information out there is crucial in the patient journey. The video marketing in healthcare process can help make that journey seamless for potential clients and effective from a conversion standpoint.
Profile videos for physicians are an excellent way to introduce patients to physicians before ever visiting an office, saving clients, medical personnel and administrative staff an incredible amount of time. The easier it is for a client to get the information they’re looking for, the more likely they will be to schedule an appointment.
This process doesn’t have to be onerous for your healthcare professionals or have high production value. A candid, relaxed and real video interaction can go a long way to give clients a sense of how they might feel working with a particular doctor. Simple interviews or Q&A are a great format. For most potential clients, that’s enough to make a decision to move forward in their journey.
Procedure and Condition Information Videos
Healthcare marketers don’t need to be told about the fears and uncertainties clients can feel about seeking healthcare. Videos are a great way to calm patients before they come in for a procedure. Letting clients know about the library of resources that would be available to them if they enter the system, and even letting them access some of those resources in advance, can help significantly with conversion.
Doing some of the work of educating and informing patients about basic details for their procedure upfront can help save time and resources for more personalized care and attention to clients. Less time spent before a procedure going through basic information leaves every patient with opportunities to ask questions and make a meaningful connection.
Having access to resources like this can also help to educate patients on after care like looking out for signs, symptoms and ways to avoid complications. These resources might also be valuable to the people offering support and care to the client outside of the clinical setting.
How to market your healthcare videos
Like your favorite TV shows, marketing videos in healthcare can be watched over and over. This is one of the best things about them. While videos will need to be refreshed periodically with the latest information – as well as fashions and hairstyles maybe – good videos can be used across channels many times.
Video content could be used on social media easily. Pinned posts with your welcome video can double as your first greeting to clients just like on your website. A YouTube channel is a great way to showcase the full extent of all your healthcare system’s resources and share your content to the masses.
Knowing how to make the most of social media algorithms is an essential part of getting your video content to the right audiences. Just like your core marketing strategies, you’ll need to use data and effective strategy to prioritize where your videos go and who sees them. This can be part of a data-driven, iterative process to help your organization achieve the best results from video marketing.
The Bottom Line
Most people with a cellphone have all the tools they need to develop video marketing content in healthcare. The barriers to what’s considered acceptable production are lowering as more people get in front of cameras and powerful, easy-to-use editing technology is available at our fingertips. There are multiple ways to deploy video marketing effectively in healthcare right across the patient journey. The repeat usability of this kind of content makes it especially appealing. If you can make space for this kind of content, your team could stand out since not everyone is comfortable with getting in front of the camera even though it’s often the most authentic, engaging and impactful way to engage clients.
Sources:
What is video marketing and why is it important for small businesses. (2022, April 19). Hookle. https://www.hookle.net/post/what-is-video-marketing-and-why-is-it-important-for-small-businesses How Video Marketing Is Influencing the Future of Healthcare. (2022). 522 Productions. https://www.522productions.com/how-video-marketing-is-influencing-the-future-of-healthcare/