The Power of Influencer Marketing for Healthcare
People looking for information about medical facilities, doctors, insurance, and other healthcare providers search online. Patients are also comfortable posting reviews and sharing their experience with service providers. This is why healthcare marketers today are turning to influencer marketing on digital channels to give their efforts a boost.
What is Influencer Marketing?
This blog has addressed the influencer marketing trend before, but in short this tactic would see a healthcare service provider partnering with someone who has an engaged following in the target niche.
This could be someone with a large following via Instagram or a YouTube channel or someone with a smaller, but very targeted and loyal following on social media.
These individuals are influencers because their followers generally identify with them in a way that they can’t relate to a brand. Your target audience will value and trust these individuals’ opinions.
How Influencer Marketing Can Help Healthcare
Influencer marketing can have several positive impacts on healthcare marketing:
- Influence patients’ healthcare choices
- Raise awareness of lifestyle and wellness programs
- Foster better community health
For example, a Chicago-area hospital partnered with racecar driver Danica Patrick to influence her followers to participate in its Healthy Driven campaign focusing on disease prevention and health screenings.
Methods of Influencer Marketing
Having a celebrity tout a product or service is one of the main methods of influencer marketing. Even when not a celebrity, the right influencer portraying a particular doctor, treatment, or wellness program in a positive light, can prompt followers to want to try the same approach.
Influencers can also post favorable reviews of a service, product, or service provider via blog, video, or social media. This is typically something the marketer rewards the influencers for doing through its partnership program.
The marketer might also try to boost brand awareness with a sponsored contest on an influencer’s digital channels. This could be something as simple as inviting them to post a selfie in your facility or using your program’s hashtag in a social post to enter.
The relationship with the influencer can also play out in your own content marketing. For instance, quoting a key patient influencer’s advice on living with chronic pain on your marketing materials can supplement having that individual praising the benefits of a certain pain relief product in their messaging.
Tip:Identify top health influencers using tools such as influence.co.
When it comes to healthcare influencer marketing it is important to understand the regulations applying to your industry. For instance, if money exchanges hands the FTC typically mandates consumers must be notified.
Yet, one advantage of influencer marketing is that it can also happen organically, no matter how niche your product, service, association, program or organization. I think internet rule #4080 goes something like this: If you can think of it, then there is probably a community for it.
Having a dedicated person on the marketing team handling influencer interactions can help you identify the influencers who will best align with your messaging and start making a difference for your marketing campaigns.
About Jeff
Email me at jeff@themeadecompany.com if you have any questions or would like to learn more about how I help marketing agencies earn status, attract new customers and grow their business.
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