Strategic Placement: How to Use Geofencing to Better Market Your Healthcare Services

Posted November 7, 2023

In Digital Marketing, Events/Conferences, Strategy

Right now, a potential new patient could be scrolling through their phone in a rival clinic’s waiting area.

With a strategic digital marketing campaign, you can instantly reach out to them, showcase an attractive offer, and entice them to leave and join your practice instead.

All you need is an experienced digital marketing agency to set geofences around your competitors—whether across town, a town over or even a state over.

What is Healthcare Geofencing Marketing?

Like real estate, healthcare is all about location, location, location.

Patients want quality healthcare near their homes or work. Healthcare providers, hospitals and physicians want to reach more receptive, segmented audiences while saving time and budget.

Geofencing connects the two.

The tactic refers to using location-based digital marketing technology to create a virtual boundary around a specific geographical area, like a hospital, clinic or even a competitor’s healthcare facility.

When a potential patient enters this boundary with their smartphone or other GPS-enabled device, they can be targeted with specific advertisements related to your healthcare services, either in real-time or later, via a retargeting ad. It’s like drawing a virtual box around a location of your choice and ensuring audiences within that shape who fit your demographic criteria see your advertisements when browsing apps and other websites.

Geofencing delivers relevant, timely information to specific, interested audiences efficiently and cost-effectively. Here’s how geographic boundaries enhance digital marketing outreach in healthcare:

Precision Targeting

Traditional marketing strategies cast a wider net, hoping to attract a fraction of the audience. But geofencing takes a different approach. It focuses on certain audiences in specific locations.

For instance, pediatric clinics can strategically target areas like schools, playgrounds or parks to reach young families. At the same time, specialized practices, such as cardiology centers, can zero in on regions with a higher concentration of older adults, their target patient demographic.

Enhancing Patient Retention

Healthcare is a continuous journey, and your patients will meet your competitors along the way. Geofencing supports client retention by repeatedly offering customized content and ensuring you’re never out of sight or out of mind.

For instance, a family practitioner could launch a series of digital ads about the importance of seasonal health checks, like allergy testing during spring. This tactic keeps the practitioner in front of their patients’ minds and reinstates them as their trusted, engaged healthcare partner.

Timeliness and Relevance

Imagine a shoreline clinic using geofencing to stress the importance of skin cancer screenings during the summer months or a hospital highlighting diabetes awareness programs in ads during Diabetes Awareness Month in November. These examples illustrate the beauty of geofencing in healthcare advertising: Your ads and messages are always incredibly relevant, exactly when and where they need to be.

Event Promotion

Local health camps, vaccination drives, wellness seminars and other healthcare events see better turnout with geofence targeting. Additionally, geofence ads launched after the event can work as reminders or offer discounts on follow-up appointments, ensuring sustained interest and facilitating patient continuity.

Measurable Outcomes

Digital marketing’s advantage, especially with geofencing, lies in its measurable outcomes. Healthcare providers can immediately assess their campaign’s impact and understand patient behaviors and preferences. For instance, a hospital may learn that its geofenced maternity service ads perform better in residential areas geared towards families, like those with a statistically higher concentration of young couples and expectant mothers.

Cost-Effectiveness

Geofencing is a more cost-effective and precise alternative to traditional advertising methods. Focusing on specific locations like university campuses to promote young adult health programs—instead of senior citizen community, where such services are not as widely needed—reduces budget wastage and helps ensure your advertising dollars go where it’s most impactful.

Choosing the Right Marketing Agency

The success of your healthcare geofencing campaign largely depends on the expertise of the marketing agency you choose.

Healthcare advertising has an array of unique challenges. A specialized agency ensures compliance with strict regulations like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) but understands the sensitivities around ethical advertising. Their expertise is critical in maintaining trust and avoiding legal issues.

The effectiveness of healthcare geofencing advertising campaigns hinges on the agency’s ability to navigate the campaign thoughtfully and craft the right messages for the right audience in the right geofencing location.

The answer? Go with an agency with a track record of delivering geofencing results in an array of industries, healthcare included. As the saying goes, there is no substitute for experience.

Kelsey Tweedly

Kelsey Tweedly is the Director of Business Integration at CMA. She ensures our clients and employees transition into CMA seamlessly and are set up for ongoing success. She also heads up the brand of the company and makes sure it is practiced and preached both internally with our crew members, and external throughout all initiatives. She manages our company’s strategy and works closely with the leadership team to promote CMA through social media, digital and web campaigns, videos, content, new business opportunities, networking, community partnerships and more. Internally, Kelsey is the champion for our crew and leads all initiatives that align with the CMA culture.