If you are reading this article, you probably are considering hiring a marketing agency for your healthcare company. Whether you are a clinic, hospital, diagnostic center, pathology lab, or an online health portal, inbound marketing will play a critical role in your marketing efforts in 2019.
Perhaps you are struggling to find the right people to help you embark on the inbound marketing journey. Or maybe you want to avoid investing too many resources into it.
Either way, hiring an inbound marketing agency to manage your efforts can be a promising idea.
But investing in a marketing agency is a critical decision.. – You will have to look into various factors – do they have a good brand name, how well have they handled their previous projects, clients, etc., do they set realistic expectations or make far fetched promises?
Most importantly, can you trust this agency with your business that you have built so carefully over the years?
See also: 5 Healthcare Marketing Trends For 2017
If you are in the healthcare industry, you already know that your customers start their buyer journey by looking for information and solutions for their problems before actually searching for healthcare providers.
Given the highly competitive nature of the healthcare, you can no longer afford to just set up a website with a simple offerings page and expect customers/patients to find you.
You will need to produce, promote and distribute great content in order to increase patient engagement.
Outsourcing this activity to a good marketing agency allows you to focus more on your growth goals and creating better business outcomes.
So what are the factors you need to check before investing in a marketing agency?
How can you know if the company is genuinely trustworthy (Especially if you know nothing about it)?
Doing your due diligence is critical. This means you will have to ask the right questions and make your final decision only after performing a comprehensive evaluation of the agency’s customized proposal for your business.
Here are a few questions you must absolutely ask: Here are a few questions you must absolutely ask:
Does the agency have past experience in Healthcare?
A marketing company grows in expertise in a particular industry ONLY through experience! This proficiency is especially important when it comes to the healthcare industry.
The company must know the complete ins and outs of the healthcare field in order to execute successful inbound campaigns for you. The healthcare industry is constantly evolving, new discoveries and inventions are made every day which result in improved treatments as well.
What is the agency’s level of familiarity with the medical research of your health solution? It’s important to engage with an agency that makes it a priority to stay updated with the goings-on of the industry.
What you can do
Check out the company’s website and look for existing or previous clients that are also from the healthcare industry. What work was done for them? How successful were the efforts? What results were they able to drive? And most importantly, what did the ROI look like?
Is the agency offering you a comprehensive strategy rather than stand-alone tactics?
The two most important components of a successful healthcare campaign are an effective content strategy and lead generation plan.
As I mentioned earlier, people search for content regarding their health problem before actually looking for doctors and external help.
Even if you have first-rate resources for providing great content, without a content strategy, you may not be able to reach your ideal customers.
Writing a blog post per week or posting on social media every two days will not drive real results. You can only achieve them with a comprehensive strategy that takes into account your buyer personas, their challenges and the best ways to resolve these problem areas.
Find out how the agency buyer personas for your healthcare offering and what their strategy would be for acquiring the right fit of leads.
A good marketing agency not only strategizes content creation but also its promotion and distribution, in order to connect patients with your clinic or hospital.
What you can do
- First, ask the agency to review your website, your brand positioning, offering, your competitors, and more to draft a thorough marketing review.
- Use this review as the base to have them create a proposal. Also, find out what kind of results they expect to generate with the activities mentioned within the proposal.
Further Reading: Inbound Marketing vs Digital Marketing for B2B companies
Is the agency certified by a reputable third party marketplace?
This is self-explanatory. You will be handing critical business information and essentially the reigns of your business to this agency. Doing your due diligence is beyond essential.
What you can do
- Go to an internationally notable site such as clutch, which provides a directory of leading software and professional services firms.
- Search for the agency you are considering
- Scrutinize the company’s portfolio, reviews, etc. to get an idea of the firm’s performance and reliability
- If the company has a healthcare client, it is even better. Check out complete details of feedback, project summary, etc.
This way you can get a genuine assessment of the company.
While these questions provide a good start, it’s also important to assess early on how much of the marketing efforts you want to outsource.
Are you looking at building internal capabilities over time? If yes, find out if the agency will be training your internal marketing team during this period.
Would you like to learn more about inbound marketing and whether it can be a good fit for your healthcare business? Sign up below for a free marketing review.
