8 Tips to Building A New Effective Marketing Plan for EMR

Regardless of where you’re at as an Electronic Health Record (EHR) software company – a startup or an established name – bringing the right traffic to your website is essential to your success. You need a marketing strategy that identifies your target audience and then focuses on bringing them to your website. With competition so high, marketing professionals must implement diverse skills to gain and maintain an edge:

• Strategy development
• Content marketing
• Email marketing
• Social media marketing
• Search engine optimization (SEO)

So, let’s look at some of the essential steps you can take to develop an effective Inbound marketing plan for EMR – a plan that will draw in the right traffic, convert those visitors to qualified leads, and create more satisfied customers:

1. Build Buyer Personas

The first step to attracting the right traffic is knowing who, exactly, those people are. What do they need? What kind of content will best appeal to them? To answer these questions, we need to create Buyer Personas of our ideal customers. For example, our ideal customers might include:

• “Health Services Manager Mary”
• “Private Practice Owner Otis”
• “Physician Phillip”

You get the idea. These ideal customers vary in their needs, their goals, the challenges they face, and their daily responsibilities. And effective buyer personas will help you create the content they desire.

2. Map the Buyer Journeys

With buyer personas in hand, invest some time into understanding how they think about buying decisions. You can do this by speaking with customers who match these buyer personas, and asking them about their own buyer journey leading up to the purchase:

• What challenges were they facing?
• What were their goals?
• What were their responsibilities?
• What questions did they have?

HubSpot has identified three unique stages to this Buyer’s Journey: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. By understanding these stages in relation to each of your buyer personas, you will be able to create exactly the content they need.

3. Establish Your Marketing Goals

What, precisely, do you need to accomplish with your marketing strategy? And when do you want to realize a return on investment (ROI)? Make sure your goals are S.M.A.R.T. – specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. And you’ll want to have the right key performance indicators (KPIs) in place:

• Your sources of traffic (email, social media, blogging, SEO, PPC, etc.)
• Unique website visitors
• Number of inbound leads
• Visitor-to-lead conversion rate
• Lead-to-customer conversion rate

To make matters simpler, we recommend integrating ROI measuring tools from HubSpot.

4. Assemble a Marketing A-Team

An effective Inbound Marketing strategy requires a wide array of skills – copywriting, blogging, web design, web analytics, email marketing, search engine optimization, social media management, and conversion rate optimization just to name a few. Most companies aren’t going to be strong in all of these areas or even have the in-house personnel to cover them. Outsourcing these skills to professional inbound marketing experts often makes the most sense. Hiring freelancers managed by your marketing personnel might run $150k per year, whereas hiring the necessary employees could cost well over $350k per year. Outsourcing to an Inbound Partner like Responsify, rather than doing-it-yourself (DIY) in-house, could save you over 50%. And it would bring the best strategies and resources available to your company from experienced and successful Inbound Marketing professionals.

5. Develop Your Content Strategy

We previously mentioned the three stages of the Buyer’s Journey and how content should be crafted for each of these unique stages. So, let’s look at that a little more closely:

Awareness Stage

At this point in the Buyer’s Journey, your Buyer Personas desire content that will help them identify their problems. In the Awareness Stage, your goal is to provide them with this content – lots of it. Use a variety of media: infographics, blog posts, SlideShare presentations, and informative videos. What you don’t want to do just yet is promote your EHR company. Instead, become the authority they need.

Consideration Stage

With their problems identified, your ideal buyer is now looking for ways to solve those challenges. Now is the time to begin providing content with solutions that will build trust. And to convert these ideal buyers into leads, offer premium content in exchange for their contact info. This premium content should be the best you have to offer – eBooks, white papers, special reports, etc. By catering to their needs in this way, you continue to position yourself as the authority.

Decision Stage

Finally, your ideal buyer has identified their problems and has sought out solutions. They are now ready to begin making a buying decision, and now is the time to provide them with the content to help them make the correct one. At this point, you should begin providing content that both educates your ideal buyer and promotes your EHR company’s solutions to them. Ideal content would include demo videos, free assessments, catalogs and brochures, case studies, spec sheets, and even more relevant blog posts.

6. Grow Your Audience

When a lead fails to make a buying decision, the culprit is usually insufficient information. So, rather than give up, keep developing these leads with a sequence of automated Lead Nurturing Emails. A study by Email Monday found that over 70% of companies enjoy their greatest ROI from Email Marketing. And take full advantage of this, there are several ways you can go about growing your email list:

• Place email opt-in forms prominently on your homepage
• Use popup email opt-in forms
• Offer premium content in exchange for their name and email
• Gather emails with social media contests
• Grant access to exclusive webinars in exchange for emails

7. Enhance Your Blog Content

Your company’s blog is a foundational component of the overall Inbound Marketing Plan. So, it only makes sense that your blog posts are optimized for building trust with your ideal buyers while improving your search engine ranking and increasing the right traffic to your website. Here are some points to remember:

• Search engines favor long-form content (750-2000 words or more)
• Include interactive content (podcasts, videos, infographics, surveys, polls, etc.)
• Use many visually-appealing images as is appropriate
• Ensure that your website if sully responsive for those accessing via mobile devices

8. Optimize Your Social Media Strategy

Research from Business 2 Community has found that an increasing number of professionals find company information through social media. It goes without saying, then, that a focused social media strategy is important for engaging ideal buyers and converting them into leads. For effective social media, ensure that every post has a specific goal. Maybe you hope to generate more engagement through likes and shares. Maybe you wish to address problems being discussed by your ideal buyers. The point is to have a purpose. And don’t forget to like, share, and comment on your followers’ posts, too!

The Final Word

All of the tactics we’ve outlined here are a part of the proven methodology known as Inbound Marketing. This strategy is built around the creation of epic content focused on attracting your ideal buyers and converting them to qualified leads and satisfied customers for your EHR company. Implementing an effective Inbound Marketing strategy is no easy task. That’s why we here at Responsify partner with EHR marketers, providing the strategy, support, and assistance necessary for an efficient Inbound Marketing plan. We have helped numerous marketing professionals successfully harness the power of Inbound Marketing, and we’ve love to help you. Take advantage now of your free strategy session, and we’ll evaluate your marketing assets, provide free insights, and offer suggestions to get you moving in the right direction.