It is a great time to be an online medical marketer! Why? Health related search, and health related Web activity has become one of the top measured online activities in the U.S.. This month more than 100 million Americans will visit the top health related sites such as Everyday Health, Web MD, eHow Health, Yahoo! Health, About.com, and CNN Health. The New York Times recently reported that four out of five internet users have performed a health related search query. With 180 million Americans online, this equates to 144 million health related searches. More importantly for online medical marketers, fifty percent of health related search activity is a result of users typing "treatment" related queries. These treatment related queries are a vast addessable audience for medical marketers looking to find new patients online.
Health related internet use is now the #3 related activity online behind email use and searching according to Pew Internet Research. This trend is not just young people - or a given age group - all ages participate actively. Of all online adults from 18 to 75+, 80% have looked for health information on line, and most age ranges don't deviate from that average. In fact, Older Boomers (ages 57-65), and Gen X (35-46) skew above the average at 84% and 83% respectively. In a coroborating, but completely separate poll, iCrossing surveyed over 1000 respondants and found the Web was the number one source of health related information for consumers versus any other source (including doctors). All the data points point to the same conclusion - the Web, and online marketing is the place to find patients seeking treatment.
Through the use of careful key word targteing (optimized PPC and SEO), medical marketers can target the transactor (seeker of treatment) and drive real patient inquiries from this massive audience. It is important for medical marketers to draw the distinction between advertising to users via health information sites (WebMD, EverdayHealth, etc.) versus advertising to users of search engines (Google, Bing). While both represnet a huge audience, the health related sites in attract researhers and who are less likley to pick up the phone and "call". Through careful key word selection, and targeting, search engine marketing has allowed the savvy medical marketer to target the right audience, at the right time. Right audience, large scale, active seekers of treatment - it is a great time to be a medical marketer!