Direct Marketing in Healthcare
Direct marketing has emerged as one of the top marketing strategies in America. In the
previous year, U.S. companies invested an astounding 163 billion on direct and digital
marketing (Kotler, 2014). Subsequently, direct marketing related sales made up nearly 8.7
percent or 2 trillion of the American economy (Kotler, 2014). Perhaps the most dominant
form of direct marketing, Internet-based campaigns have been highly profitable bring in
over 202 billion last year alone (Kotler, 2014). As a result, social media has become the
new frontier of direct marketing, giving marketers a platform to reach millions of
individuals on a daily basis.
When one considers 77 percent of healthcare internet searches are performed using a
search engine, being relevant in those searches becomes vital to an internet marketing
campaign (Caldwell, 2015). Programs called “spiders” gather information pertinent to the
search with the use of keywords (Boswell, 2015). Social media sites like Twitter, drive up
the amount of search engine hits if used often and in volume (Caldwell, 2015). For
instances, a cardiology clinic tweets daily about ways to prevent heart disease and post
pictures of staff to familiarize faces with the public. In doing so that particular clinic
increases it search relevance and in theory, creates more web traffic in searches related to
the subject matter of the clinic’s tweets (Caldwell, 2015). In other words, more exposure to