The Complete Guide to Healthcare Marketing in 2025

Marketing is often associated with glitz and glamor, which doesn’t pair well with healthcare. However, marketing for a medical practice is just as important as it is for a clothing brand.

Marketing helps businesses attract clients, and in the case of healthcare practices, potential patients. If you want to grow your medical practice, then you need a marketing strategy that attracts new patients and retains existing ones.

• What is Healthcare Marketing?
• Why is Marketing Important in Healthcare?
• What are the Key Benefits of Healthcare Marketing?
• Healthcare Marketing & Content Creation
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about Chiropractic Practice Management Software

What is Healthcare Marketing?

Healthcare marketing is an umbrella term used to describe all the activities that allow healthcare practices to attract potential patients and retain existing ones.

Marketing in other industries is often focused on marketing products for the purpose of sales and revenue generation. Marketing for healthcare practices is different because the focus is on educating people about your services so that you stay on top of their minds. That way, they will turn to you when they need healthcare services.

Healthcare marketing also focuses on a nurturing approach to patients and promoting a healthier lifestyle overall.

Healthcare marketing strategies might look like using multiple social media channels to educate viewers about health and lifestyle, sharing a glimpse into patients’ journeys and recoveries. Healthcare marketing success can be measured using Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) such as engagement, ROI, patient intake, and retention.

A great way to elevate the marketing of healthcare practices is to use healthcare marketing softwares such as DemandHub, designed to meet the marketing needs of a healthcare practice.

Why is Marketing Important in Healthcare?

One of the reasons why marketing is so important for healthcare practices is because of SEO. Search engine optimization can be the reason why a potential customer finds out about your practice and the services you offer.

Healthcare marketing, especially when it comes to local SEO, can help businesses reach out to potential customers. If you are interested in growing your practice, then you need to focus on incorporating SEO best practices. These include but are not limited to creating high-value content that positions your practice as a source of expert healthcare advice.

What are the Key Benefits of Healthcare Marketing?

The healthcare industry is constantly evolving and offering patients more control over how they approach their health and wellness. Whether it is through healthcare insurance packages or telehealth services, healthcare businesses are constantly looking for ways to attract potential patients and market their services to a wider audience.

Attracting more patients can also help generate more revenue. This is why marketing channels such as social media, SMS marketing, and online appointment management are viable investments. The competitive nature of the healthcare industry makes it absolutely essential for healthcare businesses to incorporate marketing tools such as DemandHub.

While using healthcare marketing software is an important part of growing your healthcare business, there is not much you can achieve with a tool if there isn’t a strategy in place to guide your efforts.

A marketing strategy allows you to formulate a plan of action by taking into consideration your audience (i.e., your patients) and your competition (other practices). A marketing strategy will help you focus all your efforts towards your goal, which is to market your services to potential patients and meet the demand for healthcare services.

If you are interested in building your own strategy to market healthcare services, here’s what you need to know.

1. Know Your Target Audience

The first step in creating your own marketing strategy is to figure out what your target audience looks like.

For example, if you are a dermatologist specializing in cosmetics, your target audience might be women aged 25-55 who are interested in well-aging products and procedures. The ideal location to target would be urban and affluent areas nearby.

Additionally, you should focus on the upper-middle-class income bracket, as these individuals can most likely afford the high-end cosmetic treatments you offer.

This is called strategic marketing. You are focusing all your efforts on areas where there is a high demand for your products and services.

If you notice your audience changing, this is normal. A healthcare practice must regularly revisit and revise its strategy to better align with current trends.

How to identify your ideal customers? There are many ways to do this:

1. Ask yourself: What motivates my customers to purchase a product or service? What challenges do they face, and how can my product and service be of use to them? How do they afford this? What other goals or interests might they have?

   This exercise is called creating a buyer persona. You are essentially writing a character, and the role they play is that of a patient at your practice.

   The more precise you are, the more effective your marketing campaigns will be. This is because you will be able to understand what your customers want and anticipate their needs.

2. Another way to refine your marketing strategy is by finding out what your customers have in common. A great way to do this is by asking yourself: What differentiates consumers of your product or service from those who don’t?

In the case of a dermatologist, the defining characteristic of the group that is not the target audience would be those who either don’t need cosmetic procedures or cannot afford them. We can always use our website analytics and social media stats to see who is interested, or better yet, who is engaging.

Online behavior is a great way to determine someone’s interests, and with the help of tools such as Google Analytics, tracking your audience’s location, age, gender, and where they are in their buyer’s journey can help you create your own marketing strategy.

2. Set Your Goals

Once you have defined your target audience, the next step is to set goals for your marketing strategy. These goals can be defined by asking three simple questions:

• What are you trying to achieve?

• Why is it important to achieve this goal?

• How will you track these goals?

As a healthcare business, here are some goals you can include in your marketing strategy:

• Creating awareness regarding your services

• Marketing your services to potential patients

• Improving patient intake, engagement, and retention rates

• Improving patient satisfaction levels

• Getting more positive reviews online

• Increasing revenue generation

A great way to tell if you are setting the right goals is by using the SMART test.

S: Specific

M: measurable

A: achievable

R: relevant

T: time-bound

You can use this test by asking yourself questions like, ‘How can I grow my brand’s awareness by the last quarter of 2025?’

Or

‘Can I get a 100 positive reviews on my Google Business profile by the end of 2025?’

Setting SMART goals is a tried and tested way to keep your goals in sight, and achieving them.

3. Developing Your Healthcare Marketing Strategy

Now that you know what your target audience looks like and have set some realistic goals, it is time to achieve them with the help of a marketing strategy. Here are some factors you need to consider when developing a healthcare marketing strategy.

Budget

One of the most crucial aspects of developing a marketing strategy is setting a budget. Healthcare businesses need to view marketing as a long-term investment, just as they would with purchasing specialized equipment or hiring board-certified professionals. You need resources to manage marketing, and effective marketing ensures that your business stays financially stable.

To determine the marketing budget, businesses need to consider the return on investment (ROI) of their marketing efforts. This can be determined by studying past campaign data and analyzing the successful campaigns of your competitors.

Paid marketing is powerful on its own, but there are ways to market your business for free. For example, creating high-value, SEO-optimized content for your website can engage your audience and leverage higher search engine rankings.

Brand and Positioning

Brands have a chokehold on consumers, no matter what industry we look at. This is because brands tap into the subconscious need of consumers to choose what they know and trust. Think of the last time you went out of your comfort zone and bought a different brand of fabric softener.

You can’t think of it, can you?

This is branding at its finest. You cannot steer clear of brand names in something as small as fabric softeners; imagine how difficult it would be to change healthcare providers.

Branding and positioning are all about making your healthcare business stand out from its competition, but it is also about ensuring that your patients remember and associate you with unique selling points (USPs) such as caring staff, excellent customer service, and high-tech practices.

And if you’re still not convinced that branding is powerful, consider this: branding and positioning can decrease your cost-per-acquisition, meaning your advertising pays for itself in revenue generated.

Marketing Mix

A successful healthcare marketing strategy requires a blend of different marketing activities that will help you reach your target audience and engage them. These include:

1. Product – What services or treatments do you offer?

2. Price – How much do your services or treatments cost?

3. Place – Where are your services or treatments available?

4. Promotion – How will you increase awareness of your services or treatments?

Remember, a good product or service will sell itself. The goal is to appeal to your target audience and show them how these services can improve their lives. You can also engage the audience by sharing discounts, special offers, and promotions at this stage.

Once the audience has shown interest in the product, the next step is to make a purchase. This is where practices need to ensure that the purchase process is as smooth as possible. By using software such as DemandHub, patients can make their payment safely online without any fuss.

Marketing is all about raising awareness and ensuring that updates about your products and services are pushed through marketing channels such as ads, SMS, and email newsletters. Setting up SEO and social media campaigns can also help you reach your potential patients online.

4. Create a Seamless Patient Journey Through Preferred Channels

It is important to understand how your patients find you and the ways you can make this experience more comfortable for them.

To put it simply, you need to create a patient journey map that outlines how a patient is introduced to your healthcare practice, the steps they take to receive the services you offer, and their level of satisfaction with the treatments (including post-visit follow-up).

The patient’s journey begins when they visit your practice’s website and schedule an appointment. The next step involves the appointment itself and the treatment they receive. The journey concludes with them leaving a review that describes their experience.

By adding value to each step and viewing the process from the patient’s perspective, you can improve the quality of patient interactions, enhance satisfaction levels, and foster loyalty.

The goal is to add a level of ease and seamlessness to each checkpoint. Keep in mind that patients are already under some kind of stress because of current health concerns. Practices should go out of their way to make the patient feel comfortable and relaxed.

Here are some ways healthcare practices can improve patient interactions:

• Automate responses to queries and questions while maintaining a human touch.

• Optimize websites, apps, and online portals to nurture leads, increasing conversions.

• Utilize patient data for more sophisticated targeting.

• Prioritize building and maintaining patient relationships.

• Allow patients to get in touch easily and respond promptly.

We understand that this can be a lot for a practice to manage and maintain, especially as a growing business. And that is where marketing automation software such as DemandHub is essential for healthcare businesses.

Marketing automation software allows healthcare practices to focus on providing quality services by reducing manual tasks. A good example of this would be calling patients to remind them of their appointments.

It is a well-known fact that calling or texting a patient to remind them of their appointment can prevent no-shows. But hiring a special resource to manage these reminders can be quite taxing for a healthcare business.

By incorporating software such as DemandHub, healthcare practices can schedule appointments and send out automated reminders to all their patients, among other things. Such software actively reduces friction points, allowing practices to focus on what really matters, and that is quality patient care.

5. Content and Calls-To-Action or CTA’s

Creating high-quality, engaging content is great, but you need to ensure that it is followed by a clear Call to Action (CTA) so that you can see conversions. A CTA allows your customers to take action right after they have read something that they find informative and helpful.

So if you wrote a blog about the benefits of getting Botox, it makes good sense to add “Schedule a consultation online” as a CTA to guide your readers to the next logical step. As the name suggests, a CTA needs to be linked to a landing page or a booking platform to allow readers to take action.

It is important to keep in mind that a CTA is only as good as its placement. If you are educating your readers and they are in the awareness stage of their buyer’s journey, it is better to engage them with more resources and relevant content. But if your readers are ready to take the next step, a CTA is the perfect way to market your services.

6. Patient Review Management

A weak patient review management strategy is the kryptonite of successful businesses. Encouraging patients to leave a review is not only a crucial aspect of your healthcare marketing strategy, but it also determines whether or not potential patients will consider making an appointment. This is because 93% of customers read online reviews before making a purchase.

You can encourage patients to leave reviews by making it easier for them to do so. Consider sharing a review invite link that they can easily access, paired with a discount code and a prompt response. You are golden!

Online reputation management is very important for a healthcare business. If you are wondering how you will be able to manage the larger volume of reviews, consider investing in review management software such as DemandHub, which consolidates all your patient interactions to make them accessible and manageable.

Healthcare Marketing & Content Creation

Running a healthcare business can be quite challenging, but with the right approach to marketing, you can easily stand out from the crowd and build a rapport with your patients. If you are wondering where to start, here’s something you can try.

73% of consumers prefer short-form video content. Suffice it to say, content creation is an opportunity that any business should jump at. For healthcare businesses, video content is the perfect way to educate patients on healthcare best practices and the services they offer.

It is also a way to soft-launch the practice by allowing audiences to engage with a focal person, i.e., a healthcare professional with a personality. There are many popular examples of this. Dr. Shereene Idriss is a New York-based dermatologist and cosmetic practitioner who shares skincare anecdotes on her Instagram and YouTube channels. This was before she launched her own line of skincare ‘Major Fade’.

Content creation coupled with digital marketing tools such as pay-per-click (PPC) and search engine optimization (SEO) can help practices not only reach a wider audience, but also hold their attention.

Content creation is also a powerful form of marketing that can help practices get a better understanding of what is working and what isn’t by analyzing metrics such as social media engagement, website traffic, and patient acquisition rates. Practices can use their audience as a control group to test their marketing efforts, and in doing so, improve how they engage with their patients overall.

Get a demo now to see DemandHub in action.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about Chiropractic Practice Management Software

What is healthcare marketing?

Healthcare marketing refers to the practices and activities that help healthcare providers raise awareness about their services, attract potential patients, and build long-term relationships with existing ones.

Why is healthcare marketing important?

Healthcare marketing allows healthcare practices to grow their business and generate more revenue. Marketing activities create awareness about the services offered, so more patients will be drawn to the practice. With more patients come more reviews, which improves the online reputation of the business, making it more competitive. The more competitive the business, the better the quality of care offered.

What’s the difference between healthcare marketing and regular marketing?

Healthcare marketing refers to the specific marketing strategies that help businesses flourish in the healthcare industry. The main difference lies in the messaging, as health and wellness are subjects that need to be handled with more care and sensitivity.

Healthcare marketing software, for example, needs to be HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant to ensure that patient data protection and privacy are maintained.

What are some challenges in healthcare marketing?

Common challenges in healthcare marketing include:

• Regulatory restrictions
• Maintaining patient privacy and confidentiality
• Effectively targeting the right audience
• Building trust and credibility
• Keeping up digital marketing trends
• Educating patients on advancement in healthcare and technology

What is a healthcare marketing strategy?

A healthcare marketing strategy is a plan that allows healthcare practices to generate awareness and market their services to their target audience using digital marketing tactics such as SEO, social media marketing, and email marketing.

What is the definition of marketing in healthcare?

Marketing in healthcare is a set of practices that ensure healthcare practices are able to promote their services and engage with their patients, while also being able to scale and grow as a business.

How do you create a marketing strategy for healthcare?

You can create a marketing strategy for a healthcare business by identifying the practice’s target audience, the marketing goals, and the channels that can be used to reach the audience effectively. It is important to note that if the marketing strategy requires using software, it should comply with HIPAA guidelines.

What are the marketing channels for healthcare?

You can market your healthcare practice using a variety of channels. Some of the most effective channels include social media, websites, blogs, email newsletters, and SMS. The best marketing channel is the one that helps you connect with your target audience and is cost-effective.

How Can Demandhub Help You Grow Your Business By 10X?

DemandHub is the perfect tool to help you achieve your healthcare marketing goals. Whether it is scheduling appointments or making seamless online transactions, DemandHub is designed to elevate customer experience at every touchpoint.

Here are some ways in which DemandHub can elevate your healthcare practice:

• Attract new patients by improving the practice’s online reputation.
• Improve patient satisfaction by providing seamless intake.
• Increase brand awareness with improved local SEO.
• Build trust and rapport with patients through review management.
• Generate more qualified leads and increased conversions.
• Boost revenue with good margins due to branding & positioning.
• Motivate patients to schedule appointments and reduce no-shows with automated reminders.
• Encourage patients to leave positive online reviews online with review invite links.