What exactly is a Lead in healthcare?

In general, a lead is any person or organization who has expressed and shared their clear need and interest in the product or service that a company offers.

The same is true when it comes to healthcare, the difference lies in the level of trust and the urgency a patient has in terms of availing the service. The more urgent the situation, the more the likelihood of buying the service.

Let’s have a look at an example: A pregnant woman is enquiring about a delivery package. She has understood all the available packages with pricing and shown interests in 2 packages. Next, she has asked to schedule an appointment for an initial consultation. This is a good and qualified lead as there is a clear need and buying intent; had she not scheduled an appointment then this would just be a prospect and not lead.

What is Lead Generation?

Lead generation is a process in which you draw in and get individuals to give you their contact information. It is a series of techniques that you can use to gather leads.

Lead generation works on this notion: Finding approaches to make an individual or an entity your definitive customer immediately or soon. It implies getting their correct contact information like name, email, contact number, etc.

It is a strategy for channelizing your suspect to become a prospect and finally converting them to a qualified lead which involves a clear buying intent.

Examples include: If a user lands onto your website, browses through your weight-loss program and fills in the contact form at this page, this is lead generation. Getting the user’s information can be through various sources like websites, email, social media or even through a blog.

Is Lead Generation really important for my Hospital?

Yes, definitely! With new age hospitals and healthcare facilities coming up every year, it has become imperative for healthcare facilities to work on their marketing strategies to get new patients and retain older ones to have a that competitive edge.

With the double burden of disease prevailing in India, it has become mandatory for healthcare organizations to focus on their marketing strategies and know their patients beforehand.

Say for example A patient has undergone a whole body preventive checkup and through this checkup, the patient has been identified in the pre-diabetic zone; now there are very high chances of this patient to become diabetic in the near future. So, to make sure that this doesn't happen the healthcare facility should convert this potential lead to a qualified lead by using precision engagement techniques.

The hospital marketers can push content on the pre-diabetic condition and increase the patient’s awareness of the risk of developing diabetes and convince the patient on how this risk can be decreased drastically by availing their services.

Obviously, in this process the hospital should not sound desperate rather this can be done smartly by pushing content once or twice in a month over a period of 3-4 months.

Lead Generation Channels

There are two broad categories of lead generation channels: Outbound and Inbound. Both the channels focus on generating a good and qualified lead, but the process is very different.

Outbound marketing is more of a traditional way of marketing where the organization initiates a conversation through advertisements and promotions in the form of ads, trade shows, cold calling, etc. It is now considered an annoying way of promoting products or services.

Inbound marketing, on the other hand, is targeted marketing, where the customer finds you and initiates conversation. Here, you can attract users by sharing your content online, which is more of educating rather than promoting.

Outbound marketing is still very useful in attracting patients when it comes to the healthcare industry, but with the advent of patients becoming smarter day by day, this strategy would fall out soon. Look at the below stats:

60% of healthcare needs begin with an online search

76% of patients use hospital websites for research

77% of patients use search prior to booking an appointment

44% of patients who arch hospitals on a mobile device go on to schedule an appointment

With these statistics in hand, it has become extremely important to take advantage of inbound marketing in healthcare to boost patient engagement, thereby enhancing patient care outcomes.

Lead Generation Process

All this starts when a visitor discovers your online presence or content, this can be sourced through email, blogs, social media page or website. The visitor then looks at your call-to-action (CTA) which directs the user to a landing page, designed in a manner to create an offer for the user in exchange for their contact information.

So, it looks something like this:

How to Direct Users to a Landing Page?

There are several ways by which your prospective customer can be directed to a landing page. This includes a combination of both outbound and inbound strategies, some of the best inbound strategies that can be used in healthcare are as follows:

Website – Your website is one of the best lead generation tools. This is where the users will find you first and the content here is the king. There are very high chances to convert a prospect lead to a qualified lead by optimizing your content according to the visitor’s need.
Also, make sure that your website is responsive and can be browsed easily on a mobile device.
Blogs – This is the best tool to educate and address your visitor’s needs and buying intent. So, if your visitor is looking at the information on breast cancer and mammography and if you have a blog on the same, there are high chances for the user to click CTA and submit the necessary information.

Social Media – If you haven’t leveraged social media platforms in today’s world, then this is the best time to do so. Patients are quite active these days on social media, they share their experiences of availed healthcare services and this is something that the hospitals should focus on. Engagement through social media could be done through participating in community discussions, networking and even promoting blogs or relevant content.
Hospitals can also utilize their existing patient database in Healthcare CRM, for running effective social campaigns. This would help them in identifying their target audience and reach potential prospects.
Personalized email campaigns – According to a report, interacting with your patients in a personalized and authentic way will be an essential part of their positive experience by 2020.
Ads – the main goal of running an ad is to make people take action. Make sure that the landing content and your offering matches exactly what is promised, and that the action you want users to take is crystal clear in the ad.

A lead generation software allows to easily create targeted and personalized marketing campaigns, which also makes it easy to distribute the campaign across various channels, such as website, social media, etc.

What are the best Lead Generation Strategies in Healthcare for 2020?

Below are the 5 best lead generation strategies for the healthcare industry in the year 2020:

Targeted and impactful landing page – This involves creating and designing a landing page following the user’s need. For example: if a prospect user is looking for weight loss program and lands on to your website. As a healthcare marketer one can consider leveraging a free weight-loss ebook behind a simple contact form.
Personalized reminders – Let’s look at this example here: how many patients make a follow-up visit at your facility? Follow-up visits are equally important as making the first visit, especially in case of chronic diseases. Won’t it be a good practice to send personalized reminders through the patient’s preferred mode of communication to schedule their appointment with the specialist?
Leveraging your patient feedback – The patient feedback mechanism is not just a tool to improve process management, but these can be a great lead generation tool as well, say for instance what if you add this question at the end of your patient satisfaction survey “Can we send information about our free seminars or webinars?”
Also, having positive reviews online plays a vital role in driving traffic to your website. Having an online review suggests Google that it is a real place, more positive reviews indicate it’s a popular practice and well-liked.
Patient engagement on your website through online reviews → increases traffic to your site → reduces bounce rate → thereby inducing people to know more about you → which would get you more footfalls.
Leverage social media – social media in today’s time has become a great lead generation tool. With various advertising tools such as Facebook Ads, one can create personalized and targeted promotions which ultimately leads to generating qualified leads. If you are using multiple social media channels, then make sure to strategize your content according to your audience on that platform, pushing the same kind of content on all the channels is not beneficial when it comes to healthcare. Your approach should be more patient-centric and hence tailor your messages dependent on who your intended audience is and what they anticipate from you.
Don’t forget your loyal patients – in the rush to attract new prospects, don’t forget the older ones. Try to nurture a strong relationship with your loyal patients and you can do this by executing small steps like reminding them about their routine investigations, asking them about their disease prognosis or if they are facing any side effects because of the changed medications, etc. YOu can leverage the use of loyalty coupons. These small steps not only help in enhancing patient engagement but also builds a level of trust and satisfaction with the patient which would ultimately get you more footfalls. Remember word-of-mouth marketing!

I have generated a good amount of leads, but unable to manage them. How do I manage my leads and what is the best lead management tool?

After you have successfully generated a good amount of so-called leads, it’s very important to manage these leads and identify the actual qualified leads. How do you do that, Welcome to the lead management process!

A new-age definition of lead management is like this: “Lead management is the process of capturing leads, tracking their activities and behavior, qualifying them, giving them constant attention to make them sales-ready, and then passing them on to the sales team.”

So it looks like this:

Leads from various sources (website, landing page, social media, blogs, etc.)
Segregate them into:
1. Not interested
2. Somewhat interested
3. Very interested
As the lead amount keeps growing, segregating them and following a manual process leads to issues such as missed follow-ups, leads leakage, etc.
So, the best is to use a lead management automation tool, which helps you to:
1. Capture leads at one place
2. Segregate as qualified leads
3. Distribute leads
4. Nurture or follow-up leads

Using an automation tool for Lead Management can easily help you to manage leads and get more footfalls. Here’s how:

Automated lead capture – Integrated Lead Management tool allows automatic lead capturing into the system from all the sources preventing the lead leakage. Not just this, it allows analyzes the data in terms of the lead generation sources implemented so that next time marketers and business teams can align their budget and marketing campaigns accordingly.
Tracking the lead – Once the lead is captured, the system then starts tracking the behavior of the lead such as time spent on the website, bounce rate, etc.
Lead qualification and distribution – Once you have a qualified sales-ready lead, it needs to be distributed to the appropriate sales team, which again is a tedious task if done manually. An automation tool allows getting real-time information on what is happening with the lead.
Lead nurturing – Most of the leads captured go into lead nurturing. This task is equally important as it makes you understand why your prospective customer is not interested in your service or product as of now. Once you understand their behavior or need, you can keep engaging them from time to time by sharing content through multiple channels and once they get a good experience and a level of trust is built they would turn into a sales-ready lead.

What next?

Now that you know all about how to generate leads and manage them, we recommend you to try out DocEngage HCRM, which works AI-based algorithms for 0% Lead Leakage, High Lead Conversion, More New Patients, New Revenue By UpSelling & Patient Retargeting, Increase B2B Contracts, Cut Down Excels, and 100+ Benefits.

Have a look at the below stats of DocEngage HCRM till date: