Using Pinterest as a Healthcare Marketing Tool (SPEC WORK: Healthcare Success Article )

Unlike other industries, healthcare marketing can be very challenging. You can't get results when you have issues with trust and credibility. This is definitely the case with social media. Using social media as a healthcare marketing tool has become very important in terms of communication in real-time.

Social media is the place where your current and prospective patients seek recommendations as well as for healthcare providers. This is the go-to place where you, as a healthcare provider, want to build rapport with loyal and long-term patients. Within the healthcare industry, social media aids in engaging with patients, promote new partner relationships and improve the physician's credibility and trust. According to a study, about 57 percent of patients decide where to get treatment based on a healthcare provider's social media presence. In a separate report, 60 percent of physicians think that the impact of social media is improving the quality of care that they provide to patients. When social media is having a great impact on patient satisfaction and boosting brand reputation, it's not surprising that many physicians are joining this phenomenon.

What are the perks of healthcare marketing on social media?
The perks of social media healthcare marketing is that it let physicians and health experts to connect with patients in real-time. Speaking of connecting with patients on social media, the platform that not many healthcare providers think about in terms of marketing their businesses is Pinterest.

What is Pinterest? How does it benefit healthcare marketing?
When most people think about Pinterest, they think about as a social networking site--in reality, it really a search engine. Pinterest is a search engine platform that is used both actively and passively. This means that having active marketing engagement through on this platform can build up company/brand awareness, generating traffic, and of course, social media presence.

Pinterest has over 100 million active users on a global basis. As far as healthcare marketing is concerned with the Pinterest audience and demographic, women dominates as opposed to men,
in terms of seeking healthcare information and making healthcare decisions at 80 percent. This platform presents a lot of potential for new and effective healthcare marketing and sales initiatives.

When a patient is looking for a health and medical solution, he/she want support from an authority they know and trust. As a solution, social media will provide that; it will establish these crucial connections with your target market, so the physician becomes the go-to resource for anyone seeking medical care.

With healthcare marketing with Pinterest, here are a few benefits it provides and more:

• Educating patients: Social media and content marketing lets physicians to share useful information with their patients. This aids support preventative care initiatives; also makes it much simpler for patients to make decisions on which type of medical care that is in need.
• Building brand awareness: The vast majority of brands know that if they want to get the best results, as in sharing important information to their customers, they need to be active and be engaging on Pinterest. The same should apply to healthcare providers. The proper healthcare marketing approach will assist in reaching the target audience that is suitable, whether it is a foot surgery patient or a family member that needs assistance in searching for dental care.

In addition to educating patients and building brand awareness, healthcare providers can retrieve content on their own business website. From their business website, they can access content that they want to pin or they may want to re-created something where it can be pinnable. Of course, the pinnable content from the website needs to be carefully chosen and as with most health and medical information, medical/regulatory considerations will apply.

In order for healthcare providers to be successful in promoting their business and generating traffic with their website on Pinterest, having high quality images are king! This includes great copy layout, photography, graphics, and infographic-style presentations. 

Before healthcare providers think about promoting their business on Pinterest, they will have to come up a with strategy plan, such as determining the approach of the content marketing, know the requirements of maintaining and monitoring the content, and coming up with a budgeting and implementation plan to be a success on Pinterest. The key to success on Pinterest: persistence and patience.