The field of digital health is a competitive space that demands credibility and confidence. While many generalist marketing agencies provide SEO, paid advertising, content and social media strategies, they often don’t understand the fields of healthcare or telehealth.
Digital mental health marketing is a specific area of marketing needed by mental health companies and ideally completed by professionals with experience in psychology and health. These specialists can provide marketing for telehealth platforms that is informed by a deep understanding of their audience and the ethical guidelines that need to be met.
To explore this topic in greater depth, this article will discuss:
Digital mental health marketing services support businesses that operate in the healthcare, psychology and wellness industries, with a specific focus on technology.
For example, a telehealth marketing agency specialises in supporting businesses that provide healthcare through electronic means. Other digital health clients include remote therapy platforms, mental health and wellness apps and healthcare SaaS (software as a service) companies.
This specific field of marketing is ideal for businesses that want to increase user acquisition for their mental health app or create B2B (business-to-business) lead nurturing sequences for their wellness software.
When healthcare and technology converge, businesses should seek out a specialist marketing agency rather than a generalist one. Since digital health marketing agencies will have specialist knowledge of healthcare and marketing, they’ll understand:
This specialist knowledge enables health marketing agencies to support your business more effectively, as they understand your industry and target audiences more deeply.
As digital mental health marketing is a specialist service, you won’t have to work extra hard to be understood by the agency you choose. Since they already understand the context of your business, communication and projects with them will run more smoothly.
In addition, there are many measurable performance benefits of working with a digital health marketing service. Namely:
You can expect digital health marketing efforts to increase your brand visibility through multiple channels. Whether you receive support with search engine optimisation (SEO), paid advertising, content marketing, or social media, a specialist marketing service can get your brand seen by more of the right audience.
Greater visibility is a significant benefit as it leads to more enquiries, website visitors, social media followers, and conversions. This leads us on to the next benefit:
Lead generation may also be brought about by many different efforts. For instance, B2B healthcare clients may incorporate LinkedIn into their longer sales cycles, while a B2C telehealth app utilises paid social media ads to target specific audience segments.
Both lead generation and nurturing are delicate fields of marketing that must be adapted to the habits of audiences. In healthcare and psychology, leads tend to take longer to research and choose between their options. Therefore, lead nurturing sequences are likely to include a great deal of reassuring and informative content.
A secondary benefit of this is that increased expert content boosts a business’s online authority in the eyes of both consumers and search engine bots.
Receiving specialised marketing support will help increase both your SEO performance and online authority. By tending to your credibility, professionalism, trustworthiness, and written content, marketing services can position you as an expert that audiences and search engines can trust.
This is particularly necessary in the fields of healthcare and wellness, which can be extremely competitive. Currently, there’s a great deal of pop psychology, mental health myths, and businesses offering similar-sounding services. To be effective, health companies must identify what makes them unique and prioritise being authoritative in that niche.
Overall, improved visibility, leads, and authority can result in increased business growth as companies become stronger. When these elements are all working more efficiently, they build momentum and a consistent stream of qualified leads.
This will be particularly important for smaller businesses. For example, a new mental health app marketing strategy will have goals in multiple areas. A digital mental health marketing service would design a strategy that targeted all of those goals to set up the mental health app for continual future growth.
In order to create effective digital mental health marketing strategies, brands must be aware of how they can go wrong. Overall, strategies are unlikely to succeed if they’re sales-heavy, over-promise outcomes, or don’t target audience segments properly.
More specifically, research into the marketing of telehealth services has identified several barriers that healthcare marketing must overcome:1
While marketing for healthcare organisations tends to prioritise educational content, research finds it should be complemented by other factors influencing consumers. For example, businesses should consider how their audiences may be impacted by barriers to entry, class, sex, and age when crafting marketing content.1
Digital mental health marketing can backfire when it doesn’t consider the power of social proof, the importance of credibility and the demographic factors impacting how consumers access services. Keeping this in mind will help you choose the right marketing agency for your needs.
You will find multiple services on offer when looking into specialist marketing agencies. Often, businesses will choose multiple approaches at once to meet different goals and contribute to an overall strategy. The best services for you will depend on your offering, audience, timeline, and business circumstances.
The main services you’ll encounter include:
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the field of marketing that works to improve websites so they can rank highly on search engine results pages (SERPs). This is an ideal strategy to prioritise, as most audiences will use search engines, like Google, to discover solutions to their pain points.
This service will typically involve:2
For example, SEO for telehealth platforms may target keywords like online psychotherapy or urgent care online by writing many informative articles about those topics. These pages will then link to other pages where visitors can either sign up, read more, or complete a conversion.
Digital health SEO services can form a sturdy foundation for your overall marketing strategy, but it doesn’t deliver targeted ads instantaneously.
If you’d rather not wait for a long-term SEO strategy to pan out, paid advertising can provide quicker momentum for gaining traction. This might involve:
While in-person health services may choose local SEO, telehealth marketing services are well-suited to paid advertising as they’re not restricted to a single region. This means that patient acquisition for telehealth can span large geographic areas and hone in on highly specific audience segments regardless of location.
Furthermore, ad targeting techniques can be so finely tuned that businesses can reach the individuals who are most likely to be highly-qualified for their services without waiting for them organically.
Though content marketing can be considered a sub-service of SEO, it warrants a dedicated explanation because it’s often seen as a marketing powerhouse by itself.
Content marketing involves creating and distributing written or video content that’s valuable and relevant to a business’s target audience. It can be used to support every element of the marketing funnel, from initial awareness, nurturing consideration, and finalising conversion.
Common types of content marketing include blogs and articles, long and short-form videos, e-books and downloadable guides, email newsletters, case studies, social media posts, and podcasts. While the creation of these content types supports SEO efforts, it doesn’t include the technical aspects of SEO or backlink outreach (off-page SEO).
A digital mental health marketing agency can support your content marketing strategy by writing, filming, or designing the content for you, but they can also support you from a distance. Some healthcare companies just need help in developing content guidelines or in adjusting their pre-existing content to meet SEO best practices.
For instance, this can involve developing a content handbook that outlines an acceptable writing style, non-stigmatising mental health language, and HTML rules for web pages. Digital mental health marketing agencies can also help you identify what content your target audience is searching for and recommend content silos for your internal linking efforts.
In light of our earlier discussion about how audiences seek social proof, a social media strategy will be a great avenue for digital mental health lead generation. This marketing service may involve:
While this approach provides social proof for your business, it’s particularly ideal if social media is popular with your target audience. Furthermore, it can be used to bolster paid social media advertising efforts.
Healthcare businesses that utilise technology to provide their services exist in a competitive space. With remote therapy and preferences for convenience on the rise, consumers will soon have many services to choose from.
To solidify your telehealth user acquisition processes and successfully differentiate your service as a credible provider, digital mental health marketing should be part of your strategy.
Contact us at PsychWrite to develop your SEO and content strategies. Our team of professionals has years of experience in both writing and mental health, which means we understand what healthcare companies need to perform well in search engine results pages.
