5 tips to effective healthcare lead nurturing

5 tips to effective healthcare lead nurturing

5 tips to effective healthcare lead nurturing

For healthcare organisations, nurturing leads helps educate and inform. It persuades prospects to become customers.
For healthcare organisations, nurturing leads helps educate and inform. It persuades prospects to become customers.
For healthcare organisations, nurturing leads helps educate and inform. It persuades prospects to become customers.

Oct 20, 2022

Marketing

3

min read

Peter Lambrou

,

Sitecore Optimisation Consultant MVP Strategist

grwoing seeds
grwoing seeds
grwoing seeds
grwoing seeds

However, many healthcare organisations fall slightly short when it comes to lead nurturing: 

  • Not devoting enough people to it

  • Not dedicating enough time to it

  • Expecting instant results  

Companies can't run a nurture programme once, then email or call a potential lead twelve months later and expect the lead to remember your company, let alone become a customer.  

There are numerous reasons why lead nurturing is a good idea:  

  • Healthcare sales cycles are long and can be complex, so potential customers need to be nurtured 

  • Consumers have too much choice between different healthcare organisations. They need to be shown what makes your brand the right choice  

To turn a visitor into a loyal customer, you need to build trust in your healthcare brand. Healthcare companies need to commit time and resources to lead nurturing. Because it works.  Increasingly, healthcare consumers expect personalised advice, care, and support. Healthcare providers, therefore, must create solutions to gather more user-generated data to offer customised services. They also should invest in wearables to monitor health. 

Savvy healthcare organisations know they need to invest in digital channels that can guide well-being and capture the necessary data to improve treatment and health. But most importantly, they need to turn leads into customers. To help you on the path to effective lead nurturing we recommend you consider these 5 steps:  

  1. Nurture unknown prospects

  2. Produce valuable content 

  3. Answer questions. Provide solutions

  4. Educate and inspire

  5. Deliver timely content

1. Nurture unknown prospects 

Of course, you can nurture the prospects you know. But what about those you don’t know? The ones who haven’t signed up for a free trial or your newsletter. The ones who haven’t given you their email address? Shouldn’t they be nurtured, too? 

This is where the real value of having a website with dynamic content comes into its own. Investing in a Digital Experience Platform (DXP) which allows you to push tailored content allows your organisation to: 

Specify the conditions under which content on your website is delivered to a visitor, based on where they’ve come from or what they do. 

Use visitor profiles to dynamically adapt the content shown to different website visitors, in real time. 

Design visitor journeys, assess where people are on that journey, and use triggers to move them through the journey based on where they are at any given moment. 

By using personalisation, you can create a fluid brand experience. You can offer your visitors relevant information that will benefit them, and guide them through services and products of interest 

By researching and understanding customer needs, intent and behaviour, your healthcare organisation can start to map out all possible customer journeys and begin creating relevant messaging and content. This will improve your chances of generating leads and converting them. Ultimately, it's about creating unique experiences for each person. 

Contextual personalisation is a powerful tool. It is critical to the success of lead nurturing in healthcare. 

2. Produce valuable content 

More than ever before, people are taking a greater interest in their health and wellbeing. 

Patients now willingly allow data to pass wirelessly from electrocardiograms and pacemakers and take part in virtual asthma reviews and diabetes checks. Patients can now do more for themselves at home, with their (consensual) data sent to relevant healthcare providers. This allows patients to review their own results and adapt their level of care. 

From 30-day yoga video programmes to one-to-one fitness sessions and diet advice over Zoom, increasingly more consumers are turning to smart exercise devices and the Internet to improve their fitness. From interactive/smart cycling machines and blog articles to how-to videos and success story advertorials, healthy living is mainstream, especially since the pandemic. 

Healthcare content needs to provide real value. It must prompt an emotional response of trust and well-being. This is a positive physical reaction in terms of producing a sale.  

3. Answer questions. Provide solutions 

How does your service or product help people get healthy, monitor their health, or achieve their health goals? What physical and emotional benefits do people see after using your service or product? 

Lead nurturing is about understanding visitor intent and producing content to merit a value exchange. In other words, what does it take for visitors to part with their personal information.  What are they getting in return? 

Your organisation’s mind-set needs to change to one of: “in return for your potential future custom, our healthcare organisation will provide you with unique, valuable insight – for free.” 

This may be difficult for some organisations to fathom. But the point is, you don’t always have to sell hard to get customers. You don’t have to hide every piece of literature you produce behind a gated landing page. 

By developing content that provides consumers with unique, valuable insight, you develop more credibility, trust and reputation. 

4. Educate and inspire 

Recent changes in consumer demographics and healthcare needs have driven a huge rise in new entrants to the healthcare market, and with it, more competition. This increase in competition allows consumers to be choosier and demand results. 

Most of the time, healthcare consumers visiting your website won’t be ready to buy. They need nurturing. 

Healthcare consumers need education. They need inspiration and reassurance. Once again, this comes to the value exchange and slowly building up trust. 

Let’s imagine someone has seen your organisation speaking at an event. They want to know more, so they sign up to the webinar you have planned on a real-life story of a healthcare professional who used your product and the results they’ve seen. They enjoy the webinar. They download a couple of case studies from your website to learn more. 

In each of these dealings, there’s an exchange of value. Your organisation is offering potential customers information that educates, inspires, and reassures. In exchange, your organisation is gaining trust. It’s that trust that enables the final value exchange – the purchase. 

5. Deliver timely content 

As a potential customer goes through the purchase process, their perceptions change, as will their behaviour. 

Your healthcare organisations need to understand visitor behaviour. It must deliver the right content at the right time that reflects visitor behaviour and intent. 

For example, if a potential customer is at the start of their journey, they need relevant information that will help them along their path to conversion.  

Knowing which individual or which company has visited your website, and which pages they've visited is vital to the healthcare marketer’s arsenal in helping drive leads. It could confirm if a recent marketing campaign has been effective in driving traffic to your website. It may make you aware that an older prospect is rekindling interest. It will show you when a certain lead is more likely to convert. 

Your healthcare organisation needs to provide the right kind of assistance in a timely manner. 

It’s not easy. But with the right technology in place, with enough resources, and when done correctly, lead nurturing reaps bigger rewards. 

Working with Codehouse 

We work with some of the biggest names in healthcare including CMR Surgical. Our expert teams have helped them transform the digital experience. 

Our expertise in helping healthcare brands define their lead nurturing strategy, will ensure you’re able to gather the right data to make the right decisions to convert more leads and drive more revenue. 

Download our white paper on Improving the Digital Experience for Healthcare Brands.

If your healthcare organisation would like to know more about how we can help you, get in touch.

THE EXPERIENCE ENGINE

Personalise your site in 20 days! No Roadblocks. No Upgrades. MVP Driven.

THE EXPERIENCE ENGINE

Personalise your site in 20 days! No Roadblocks. No Upgrades. MVP Driven.

THE EXPERIENCE ENGINE

Personalise your site in 20 days! No Roadblocks. No Upgrades. MVP Driven.

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