You can be an entrepreneur, someone who wants to start a holistic healthcare business, or someone who just needs a digital marketing strategy. In any case, this blog is going to help you build your digital marketing strategy successfully. Keep reading to learn how to implement a step-by-step digital marketing strategy for holistic healthcare businesses.

What is Holistic Healthcare and Wellness?

Holistic healthcare is not something new, it is an ancient approach that focuses on the overall wellness and natural way of preventing illness, rather than just treating the symptoms of the disease. The term ‘’Holistic’’ refers to overall health and well-being including physical, mental, emotional, social health, and spiritual well-being that are closely interconnected and balanced.

The goal for the holistic healthcare and wellness approach is to achieve optimum wellbeing physically and at all levels in body, mind, spirit, and environment.

In more detail, holistic healthcare practices address a wide range of health practices, such as Acupuncture, Massage, Chinese herbology, Chiropractic, Naturopathy, Yoga, Meditation, Herbal Remedies, Energy Healing, and so on.

These days, people are getting more interested in natural health care instead of traditional health care and standard clinic visits. In addition, The rise of holistic practice is particularly notable among cancer patients, whereby holistic ways are used to help address pain, nausea, and other symptoms. Recent studies have found that one-third to one-half of cancer patients in the United States use some form of holistic care as part of their cancer treatment.

Benefits of Holistic Healthcare

Natural healthcare has no adverse side effects and noninvasive treatments in contrast to traditional health care. Holistic healthcare has been around and trusted for thousands of years. It is getting more respect from Western Medicine.

Moreover, Holistic Healthcare is getting more popular every day. Also, people are getting more conscious about their health. Thus, a holistic healthcare business can be a great idea considering its non- discovered potential.

Why is a Marketing Strategy needed for Your Holistic Healthcare Business?

Every successful business requires a great digital marketing strategy!
Let’s start with the strategic plan first. A strategic plan is a systematic process that helps you to:

Set an ambition for your business to successfully expand, with a certain degree of protection.
Analyze, test and confirm specific marketing data and improve your overall marketing performance.
Keep your business organized and brands are spending resources wisely

It is vital to have a well-designed strategic plan for every kind of business as it brings success with clearly defined realistic goals. In addition, strategic planning shows you who your customers are, where to find and how to attract them.

On the other hand, the growth of the online world has been affected and enhanced during the covid- 19 pandemic and this provides a great potential to implement your healthcare business to the digital world.

In the following minutes, you’ll be reading about how you can implement the digital marketing strategy to your healthcare business step by step. Let’s continue!

Di̇gi̇tal Marketi̇ng Strategy Plan for Holistic Healthcare & Wellness Business

Understand and Define your Audience
1.1 Define your target audience
1.2 SWOT Analysis
1.3 Where to Fi̇nd Customers?
Set Goals and Objectives
2.1 Measure Current Success
2.2 Identify Short-term and Long-term Goals
Outline ways to Attract Targeted Audience
Implement your Marketing Strategy Plan
4.1 Setup Website as Digital Hub for Online Presence
4.2 Authoritative Quality Content using Blog
4.3 Local SEO
4.4 Email Marketing keeps audiences coming back to website
4.5 Social Media Engages Audiences
4.6 Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
Analyze and Improve your Marketing Performance
Tools and Resources for improving campaign performance

1. Understand and Define

In any kind of marketing activity, it is essential to define what you have and what you don’t. Thus, start by defining your business and the audience. Define what you want to achieve overall, what are your standards, vision, mission, and values. You can ask yourself some questions to define these. For example,

What does your company or brand refer to ?
What do you want to offer to your customers ?
Where do you want to be in the future ?
What kind of benefits can you provide for your customers ?

1.1 Define your target audience

Defining your target audience clearly, gives you the understanding of your customers and helps you in the process of creating products and services that will attract your customers.

Define customers’ persona.
Who are your customers?
What are their interests and issues to be solved?
What do they consume?
Why do they make purchases?
Where do they spend their time?

Then, you can define your services and products. For example;

Free trial consultation sessions for health and wellness
Paid sessions for health maintenance.
Create a related product range or health devices such as TENS machines for pain relief and energy devices.
Nutritional herbs or supplements

1.2 SWOT Analysis

As stated before, it is important to define what you have and what you don’t. SWOT analysis is a great way to visualize that. SWOT analysis shows your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Moreover, this analysis will show you what is the competition between you and your competitors and what you should avoid doing.

Here is an example of the SWOT analysis. All you need is to adjust this according to your business’ features and implement it.

Table 1: Holistic Healthcare SWOT Analysis

1.3 Where to find customers

After completing these steps you can decide where to find your customers. Obviously, you already know that the answer is social media. Use social media tools to interact with your potential customers. We’ll be talking more in detail about how you should use social media in the implementation step but for now, keep that in mind. Also, if you are a local business, you should always try to reach people around you, using Google My Business. You will also find more information about Google My Business in the implementation step below.

2. Set Goals and Objectives

Setting goals is a significant part of strategic planning. You should never ignore this step because setting well-designed and realistic goals will help you to understand and realize your success in the overall process. You will be reading more about how and why you should set your goals in the following minutes. Let’s dive in!

2.1 Measure your Current Success

Before setting up goals for business growth in the future, your existing firm needs to analyze its current business situation or success.
Website and Social media analytics tools can be used to analyze content, engaging activities and audience, and track related demographics and performance. For example, you can use useful analytical tools such as;
Google Analytics
Facebook Analytics
Instagram Insights

2.2 Setup Short-Term and Long-Term Goals

To have a successful goal and achieve your business objectives, you need to divide it into little goals. Thus, you need short-term and long-term goals, determined according to your business mission, vision, and values.
Setting challenging and realistic goals that are SMART ie Specific, Measurable Achievable, Relevant and Timely

Below, there are some examples of SMART goals for you to adjust and implement to your business.

Example for short-term goals (ranging between 0-6 months):

Within 3 months, I will have 60 consultations per month and achieve sales of 8 health devices per month.
Within 6 months, I will have at least 200 followers on Facebook and 200 followers on Instagram.

Example for long-term goals (6 months +) :

Within 9 months, I will have 3 popular holistic businesses that we can collaborate with and have their endorsement for my brand.
Within 12 months, I will have at least 500 followers on Instagram and 500 followers on Facebook
Within 12 months, I will have achieved sales of 16 health devices per month.

3. Create a Unique Offer to Attract Targeted Audience

Attracting a customer is challenging considering the dynamics of today’s marketing world with lots of alternatives and consumers are much more conscious. As a consequence, to attract your customer, you need to make a unique or special offer that makes you stand out. Understanding specific needs of the audience niche and providing services or products to serve their needs.

Customer relationship management is a great way to achieve this. CRM is a complex method and it is used by many companies. For your small business, you can use the simple methods of CRM which is basically dividing your customers according to the benefit. For example, you can offer some special healing sessions for potentially loyal customers. Also, a unique selling point for services and products is crucial for marketing campaigns. You should be flexible and reachable to your customers.

Examples for Unique/Special Offer

Offer free 1st trial sessions either in person or remotely using zoom session
Advertising QR code for quick scan for signing up as a member and/or follow and share posts in social media, It encourages new audiences to experience themselves without obligation.
Special rewards for people leave comments on posts
Encourage users inputs like gift or lucky draw for testimonials with “before and after” comparison.

Examples for Flexibility

Remote sessions or Telehealth with zoom live meetings will be beneficial as it provides not only convenience but also considered a safer option during a covid pandemic. Few holistic health practices are perfectly suited for a telehealth model including Yoga, Reiki energy healing, meditation, and other modalities.
Hybrid events that combine physical events with online ones. This way more people can attend your events.
Organize customized sessions for people with different needs and requests. This is also a great way to improve your relations with your customers as everyone wants to feel special.

4. How to Implement your Digital Marketing Strategy?

Implementing is the most important part to achieve your digital marketing strategy. Basically, all you need is to apply your digital marketing strategy steps to attract and hold your customer’s attention. The important thing here is to set a timeline and clear goals to achieve your digital marketing strategy step by step.

4.1 Setup Website as Digital Hub for Online Presence

Your website is the primary online presence for your digital strategy. It will get the attention of users when clicking on search and advertisement for relevant information like, what specific services or specialties are provided. Most importantly, the website must be mobile optimized, with informative and professional content.

Also, a landing page can be used to highlight a specific product or service, directing people to it by your digital marketing channels. Landing Page includes a description of discounts, promotions, or special offers for certain services or products, for a limited time period.

In addition, an effective call to action is important, such as appointment booking, purchase products within a certain timeframe, or contact for more detailed information. Setup online booking system.

4.2 Authoritative Quality Content using Blog

Most potential patients have symptoms and search on Google for helpful information but they don’t always realize that they need a healthcare service. In this case, informational and educational blog posts with catchy pictures and videos are beneficial. This quality authoritative content gives answers to their questions and issues, then you are treated as an expert in the relevant practice. So, the patient will keep you in mind to contact in case they need help.

Moreover, Google prioritizes quality relevant information that gives expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, and helps with ranking in search results.

Using Blog with relevant content to retain consumers’ attention, at the same time a website with regular blog posts is considered active by Google.

4.3 Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

List your business on Google My Business, with appropriate business profiles and accuracy of location on Google Map.

Optimizing web content and blogs for local SEO involves creating keyword lists specific to location. Ie General Term + Geographic Term

For instance, A Chiropractor in Auckland can use a potential localized keyword “back pain relief in Auckland.

4.4 Email Marketing keeps audiences coming back to website

Email Marketing provides the best return on investment. It can keep the audience coming back to your site as they are interested when giving their email address.

Implementing tips:
Newsletter signup to update potential audiences of your healthcare business development and holistic health market news.
Use “Read More” links in email to bring readers to your site and keep them engaged and have a good impression which they will recall in future when service is needed.

4.5 Social Media Engages Audiences

Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and TikTok are the most used social media platforms. Thus, it is really important to utilize these free booming resources to build your brand profiles including services, products, working hours, event information, as well as updating happenings for comments and reviews including positive and negative ones. With great customer service, responding effectively to negative comments can be turned into positive comments, which can be a valuable way to advertise an organization’s image.

Determine what kind of content you want to share with your customers. Plan and optimize your content to stay active and attract customers in the digital world. There are lots of social media management tools that you can use for scheduling and automizing your social media posts such as Hero post, Hootsuite, and Buffer.

You can share health-related content to attract people. Pay attention to your posting frequency. To attract people, the content should be posted regularly according to Analytics and social media engagement. For example, you can share your posts three times a day or you adjust the frequency according to the features of your business

4.6 Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

SEO will take the time up to months to have a significant ranking as it is time-consuming for creating content and to be recognized by Google. Pay Per Click Advertising on ads campaigns can be used with a budget for investment on platforms like Google Ads and Facebook Ads. Google has search, videos, shopping, and display advertising. Search ads show up above and below search results which is the first thing searchers see. Video ads show up on sites like YouTube. It’s possible to send considerable traffic to your site if the campaign is run appropriately.

5. Analyze and improve marketing performance

Digital Marketing KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) go beyond sales, leads, and customer acquisition to give you deeper insights into your marketing performance.
KPIs are important for the purposes of:

Understanding and analyzing the success of your digital marketing strategy plan.
Tracking and identifying which campaigns and tactics have the greatest impact or need some tweaks to produce better results.
Pinpoint marketing activities that need adjustments to budget, target, and strategy to achieve business objectives.
There are common KPIs for marketing strategies, you can always use different applicable ones for your situation.

Key Performance Indicators Metrics examples

Unique visitors per day/ month
Pages per visit
New leads per day/month
Qualified leads
Conversation rates
Cost per conversation
Return on investment (ROI)
Click- through rate on paid advertisements

6. Tools and Resources for improving campaign performance

Google Analytics:

You can use Google Analytics. It’s a free tool with metrics to give deeper insights into your marketing performance.

For example, traffic sources e.g. Referral traffic is a marketing KPI that informs us where your website visitors come from, hence your strategy and efforts can be focused in the right area and achieve maximum results.

Social Media Engagement

Social Media Marketing KPIs: Any interaction with customers on social media can be measured and analyzed to gauge the effectiveness of your organic and paid social campaigns.

For instance, by tracking likes, shares, and comments with your social content which can be adjusted accordingly to convert the target audience into leads.

Final Thoughts

We all use the Internet for everything from searching for illness symptoms to alternative health options, and more. If healthcare organizations are to keep up with the competition, they need to enact digital marketing strategies to build and grow their Healthcare business online. We know that building a good digital marketing strategy plan is not easy but don’t worry it is not impossible. All you need is to create your plan carefully and implement every part step by step. Good luck!

For more information about Digital Marketing Strategy Plan, please refer to the Marketing Strategy Master course

Want to learn more about digital marketing? Visit our website and check out our blogs.

About the Authors

About the Author : My name is Hazal and I’m 25 years old. I’m an intern at the The International Institute of Digital Marketing™. I’m from Turkey and I live in Istanbul which is a city full of inspiration. I’m a big fan of creativity and I enjoy creating content, blogs, and visuals. I’m interested in topics such as marketing, literature, art, and anything related to creativity.

About the Author: I am Shirleen from Auckland, New Zealand. I’m an Digital Marketing Intern at The International Institute of Digital Marketing™. My passions are Digital Technologies and Holistic Health and Wellness.