Is your healthcare business generating enough leads?
Are you acquiring patients at the rate you want?
In this post I will show you how to create this sales engine and nurture your traffic from a stranger right the way through to a happy patient or client.
In the good old days, healthcare businesses only needed a simple web presence as old traditional marketing was still effective.
As time has gone by more and more businesses have seen a sharp decrease in the ROI from the old traditional marketing (I question if we ever knew the ROI of outbound marketing).
The game has changed and now people want to research companies themselves online and no longer want to be marketed to. Inbound marketing is so effective in view of the fact that it gives your prospects and patients the answers to their questions and helps them in making the right buying decision, which usually means using your business.
Many healthcare professionals come to me because they are just not generating enough leads and patient enquiries via their website. They realise that everyone is online and they want to reach their audience.
However the way their website is currently performing means they are not going to reach their sales goals.
Without changing to a more inbound marketing mind-set many businesses will see their leads an patients dwindle and their prospects end up going to a competitor who helps answer their questions, pain points and are more knowledgeable in their field.
I am not saying your competitors know more about your industry than you but if you do not create great content that demonstrates this then how will anyone ever know?
One of the biggest challenges businesses have is turning traffic into leads and patients. They spend a large budget on SEO, PPC and traditional marketing which is sending traffic to their website that is not converting.
The first thing you must do is create a sales engine on your website that mirrors your sales process.
The Engine that powers enquires
Before we start to talk about how you nurture someone from a website visitor to a patient we need to talk about building your sales engine on your website.
<pid=”last”>This sales engine is basically your sales process mirrored online. Every business is different and so your sales engine will be unique to the way you do business.
I believe this needs to be the first step in turning someone from a website visitor into a customer as if you do not have this sales engine in place most of your website visitors will leave without getting in touch, making a purchase or making themselves known to you as 95% of people who visit your website leave without buying.
If you are doing a little PPC here and some SEO there and perhaps some other kind of online marketing then you are not getting the best return on investment that you could be.
When someone visits your website and is interested in a product or service like yours, what happens next?
If you have a ‘contact us’ or ‘get a quote’ button on your website these people won’t click it as they are not ready to buy owing to the fact that they are only in the research phase.
This is why your website needs to create content that matches your prospects needs at every stage of their buying journey.
Your sales engine then does the hard work of turning these leads into paying customers. Your sales engine consists of lead nurturing programmes or workflows which is a set of emails that are sent to your prospects in a timely manner that are personalised to their needs.
Also premium content that helps tp answer their questions, address their pain points and solve their pushbacks should be created.
This can be in the form for ebooks, guides, free consultations, free quotes, case studies, whitepapers and much more.
You will also need inbound marketing software to implement all this and track the ROI of your efforts.
Until you have the process in place to convert and nurture your leads adding more visitors to your website will just mean more of them won’t convert.
If for example you are currently doing a Google advertising campaign and you convert around 2% of that traffic, by creating a sales process on your website this traffic will convert at a much higher rate but at the same cost, meaning the ROI on your google ads would be much higher. This works for all forms of traffic generation you do.
By building this engine your website will become your biggest marketing asset.
Key take aways
For you to generate a good level of interest in your business from your website, you have to treat the disease not the symptoms (no pun intended) not generating leads is not the real problem it is the fact that your website is geared up to turn traffic into leads.
For more in-depth guidance on how to successfully carry out digital marketing strategies for your business, click here to learn about our free ebook:“Digital Healthcare Marketing in a Nutshell”.
Now it’s your turn?
I would really like to know how you generate leads from your website? Or does most of your business come from other sources?