Explained: Digital Marketing For Healthcare Companies
- VentureBlick
- Mar 26
- 7 min read
Updated: Apr 9
You know the drill. Deliver maximum impact at the lowest cost – in the shortest possible time to boot.
Companies in the healthcare industry aren’t spared from such demands, but there’s good news: creating outsized impacts with minimal resources isn’t actually impossible. All it takes is a shift in mindset, to go beyond conservative attitudes typical of this space. It’s worth exploring proven solutions that have long become standard practices in other industries – such as digital marketing.
Is Digital Marketing Really Suitable for Healthcare?
There are two common misconceptions about digital marketing:
That it’s mainly for B2C businesses
That it has limited applications in healthcare
Digital marketing is not limited to the archetypal B2C marketing funnel that farms and filters leads, before converting high-potential ones into customers. While there are B2C applications in spaces such as consumer health, it offers much more elsewhere too.
Imagine being a deep tech healthcare startup with ambitions of being acquired by the likes of Medtronic and Stryker. Wouldn’t it be better to establish an online presence that prompts them to reach out, instead of relying on cold outreaches that may get ignored?
In the same vein, consider a company that has successfully commercialised its innovation. A push into an overseas market will yield more results if potential distributors were already familiar with the company from prior exposures to it online.
Even fundraising efforts can benefit from digital marketing. Passing the smell test is a cinch if the startup has already built brand equity online using social media and other digital engagements – nevermind that it may be pre-revenue or even pre-product.
At its core, digital marketing creates visibility that enhances your discoverability online, making it easier for customers, partners, and other relevant players to find and reach you. On top of this, it’s also crucial for building credibility, which translates to trust.
In the context of healthcare, digital marketing is particularly effective:
Healthcare’s highly specialised nature necessitates research, which begins with online searches. If your company appears in the results – ideally as a top hit – then you’ve already outperformed many competitors.
Trust is critical in healthcare. Your online presence and activities signal credibility that, in turn, builds trust.
Digital marketing enables global outreach, but also offers precise targeting. What’s more, strategies are cost-effective and quickly adjustable, while impacts are measurable.
Digital marketing practices in healthcare lag behind consumer and tech industries’ by a good 5 to 10 years. This means less competition, larger market potential, and higher ROI.
What Is Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing is an umbrella term that subsumes various activities aimed at reaching specific audiences online.
Tools are varied, and include:
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
Content marketing
Email marketing (via Electronic Direct Mail i.e. EDMs)
Influencer/Affiliate marketing
Display ads
Online events
These tools can be used singly or in any combination. It all depends on the marketing strategy that’s tailored for each company’s specific context and requirements.
Some questions we ask when assessing a company’s situation include:
Who’s the target audience?
What are they looking for?
How are they searching for it?
What do they care about the most?
Which platforms are they active on?
By employing digital marketing with the right professional insights, healthcare companies can reach their key audiences globally while generating sustainable business opportunities.
How Do These Digital Marketing Strategies Work?
Every single tool in the Digital Marketing toolbox is a module unto itself. Let’s focus on the three most commonly used ones typically included in a “basic package” for any new company that’s starting out.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization): Make Yourself Discoverable
You’ve developed a cutting-edge portable ECG machine. If someone searches for “portable ECG monitor” or “portable ECG machine”, will your product appear within the first three pages of results? If it doesn’t, potential customers may never even know of your existence.
SEO helps improve brand visibility by optimising a website and its individual pages to improve their ranking on search engines. This is usually done in a targeted way i.e. a page is optimised for a specific keyword or key phrase. By ranking higher for specific search terms, these pages will, in turn, see more organic traffic. Although different markets use different search engines, the optimisation logic remains similar.
Key components of SEO include:
On-page optimisation
What it is: Identifying high-search, low-competition keywords using market insights and analytics tools.
An example: If your company has developed a surgical robot for orthopaedics, "robotic fracture surgery" may come to mind, but users may not search for that term. Instead, a more likely search term could be "new technology for fracture surgery", which you should optimise for accordingly. This is done through components such as your webpage’s title, content, and product descriptions.
Pro tip: Search engines typically use natural language processing to index and rank pages. Don’t sweat the small stuff – functionally, “robotic fracture surgery”, “robotics fracture surgery”, and “fracture surgery robotics” are identical.
Consistent, compelling content
What it is: Regularly publishing useful, non-promotional content on your website, usually on a dedicated blog section. This keeps users on your pages, encourages them to return for more content and, hopefully, leads them to share what they’ve read. The goal here isn’t necessarily to convert visitors to sales. Rather, it’s to provide value, and to reap the indirect benefits of having more site visitors who spend time on your site.
An example: You’ve developed a continuous glucose monitor (CGM) that significantly improves on current solutions. To improve your website’s SEO for terms such as “continuous glucose monitor” and “glucose monitoring device”, your blog section should cover topics such as the basics of CGM technology, the considerations when choosing a CGM, and the latest breakthroughs in the space. This targets a variety of users, from patients seeking solutions to analysts doing desktop research.
Pro tip: Page views aside, time spent on page is also an important metric. Keeping visitors on your pages for longer periods is thus a good way to build your score up.
Technical optimisation
What it is: The technical bits of every website are as important as the content on it. By optimising the technical performance of a website, you don’t just ensure a smoother browsing experience, but also score higher with search engines for better page ranks.
An example: Do your images have appropriate alt text? Is your favicon configured? Are your images optimised to load quickly? Is every page configured for both desktop and mobile screens?
Pro tip: If you’re starting out and building your website from scratch, platforms like Wix and SquareSpace will have these functions integrated automatically, making it much easier to optimise your website’s technical performance.
Network effect
What it is: Your site and its pages don’t exist in a vacuum. Instead, they should ideally be linked from other websites (i.e. backlinks), including social media channels. High quality backlinks from reputable sites and social media mentions by recognised experts/authorities will help to build credibility by acting as by serving as trust signals and social proof. On a related note, your company should have a presence on the relevant social media platforms, of course.
An example: Sometimes, all it takes is a single boost, like an article in a major industry journal mentioning your company and providing a link to your product. The same impact can come from a key opinion leader who shares your article on LinkedIn with his 300,000 followers. Don’t just aim for virality though – good content shared consistently is the key.
Pro tip: Targeted effort can greatly amplify your impact here. Just published a major paper? Share it on your social media channels, email your customers, partners, and investors, and reach out to relevant journalists!
SEM (Search Engine Marketing): Rapidly Gain Targeted Traffic
SEM is pay-to-play, and commonly also referred to as paid search or pay-per-click advertising. Unlike SEO’s slower, organic growth in traffic, SEM involves paying for advertisements to be shown on search engine results, which can quickly attract the right audience.
Paying for visibility comes in two main forms:
Search ads:
Triggered by specific keywords and shown at the top of search results.
Works well for specialised products or terms since niche key words/phrases have lower competition and ad costs (i.e. Cost Per Click).
Example: The keyword "blood glucose monitor" is much more competitive and expensive than "insulin pump", making SEM an effective tool for highly specialised products.
Display ads:
Shown as banners, images, or videos across services such as the Google Display Network, as well as websites and social media.
Can be targeted based on user behaviour and interests (e.g., appearing on medical professional forums).
While SEO builds organic traffic over time, SEM drives immediate results. Combining both creates an optimal balance between short-term impact and long-term cost-efficiency.
Content Marketing: Building Credibility With Your Audience
One key demand of marketing in the healthcare context is establishing trust and credibility with your audience. Although SEO and SEM can increase a company’s visibility, this alone may not be enough. Self-promotional content wouldn’t work either, but if your audience sees expert endorsements, media coverage, or third-party recommendations, their trust increases significantly.
For long-term success, companies should invest in systematic content marketing and leverage:
Medical experts and institutions for credibility.
Events and partnerships to strengthen market connections.
LinkedIn, YouTube, and other platforms to distribute content.
High-quality content serves as the foundation for both SEO and SEM, and works together with these elements to drive marketing and branding.
Which Healthcare Companies Should Try Digital Marketing?
Digital marketing isn’t limited to specific subsets of companies in the healthcare space. After all, some practices discussed above should be universal, from technical optimisations of a website to maintaining a social media presence.
That said, digital marketing is particularly beneficial for:
Healthcare solutions requiring fewer/easier regulatory approvals, which comes with the potential to scale quickly for global sales
Highly-specialised solutions with a niche market – and audience – that’s easy to capture
Small teams with limited resources for overseas expansion resources, which can use digital marketing to gauge international demand
Startups working on partnerships and business development, as digital marketing helps increase global exposure and networking opportunities
Getting Started In Healthcare Digital Marketing?
We can help. VentureBlick has a network of healthcare experts across 60+ countries, with local teams in Singapore, Korea, India, Germany, and China.
Our expertise includes:
Multi-language, multi-platform digital marketing strategies
Professional medical content creation
Advertising, video production, design, PR, and branding
Speak to us to see how we can help you utilise digital marketing for your business goals.
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