Booking.com in the Healthcare Industry: from 100,000 to 200,000 Clients within a Year

What is Bookimed? 

Bookimed is a free global platform to search hospitals & doctors and arrange treatment for people from all over the world. The company is based in Ukraine and China and cooperates with over 300 hospitals.

Today, Bookimed brings together 120 professionals. Half of the team are doctors who process patients’ requests. They examine clients’ medical situations and look for the best hospitals and doctors for them. Bookimed Medical Doctors not only assist in organizing customers’ medical trips but also stay in touch with patients 24/7 during the whole treatment program. 

A patient makes the payment at the clinic at the same prices and pays no extra commission for Bookimed services. All the expenses are covered by direct contacts and clinics’ advertisement budgets, therefore Bookimed does not represent specific hospitals or doctors.

From 2014 to 2018, Bookimed experienced moderate growth and got 100,000 clients. In the last year, the company doubled its achievements and has recently celebrated the turning point of serving 200,000 patients from 28 countries.

Weblium team created over 20 landing pages for Bookimed so far. We hope that we made a small contribution to its sharp growth. We asked Evgeniy Kozlov, one of the co-founders of Bookimed, about how they promote their services and look for the clients on the web.

Evgeniy, how did everything start? 

I discovered an empty business niche by encountering customer pain points myself. I faced a negative experience when helping my grandfather to get treatment in a Ukrainian hospital.

Then, I had a check-up in an Israeli clinic and was fascinated by the quality of medical services there. I realized that the healthcare industry in developed countries is a couple of years ahead of ours, but clinics charge foreign patients 200-300% margin fees. 

At the same time, I was reading a book called “Delivering Happiness” by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. Also, as a constant traveler, I became a true fan of booking.com in terms of customer service.

All these factors grew into an idea to make medical treatment abroad affordable. In 2014, my partner Eugen Khotyanov and I founded Bookimed – Booking.com in the healthcare industry. 

At that time, we didn’t know anything about providing medical services, or even what MVP means. However, we were 100% sure that we wanted to become a customer-oriented company.

We reached out to the hospitals and gained our first partners and investors. Thanks to that, we survived the first year. Then, after lengthy negotiations, we got $500,000 from the leading Ukrainian investment fund AVentures Capital.

Who are your customers?

70% of our customers are people who have some health issues, but medical check-up and cosmetic surgery procedures are rising in popularity. 

Our patients are superconscious. They look for the best hospital, not for the nearest one.

Our target audience is people who have already decided to get treatment abroad. They search on Google to find a solution and mainly come across us over there. Our new clients usually get to know about us through the recommendations of our existing customers. 

We don’t have any problems with customer acquisition because Ukraine’s anachronistic healthcare has put our services in high demand.

How did you achieve double growth in a year? 

Within the last year, we grew from 100,000 to 200,000 clients. It wasn’t an accident. To achieve double growth, we increased KPIs by 30-50%. 

Bookimed is a 100% online project. We should have an effective digital marketing strategy to build a strong online presence.

We do not promote clinics or services. We promote “Hair transplant procedure” at a particular price in a particular hospital with the assistance of a particular doctor. 

Landing pages are the best way to advertise the procedures. On a landing page, we can tell our potential clients about the benefits of the treatment and get contacts of a person who is interested in that. 

We understand our clients’ needs and product features, but we don’t know anything about creating a professional-looking landing page that will convert website visitors into prospects. We asked Weblium Studio for help and have already made more than 20 landing pages on Weblium platform.

Initially, we decided to work with Weblium just to take a shot. As a result, we got quick high-converting sites at minimal costs and efforts on our part. 

The landing pages are mainly promoted with performance marketing (SEO+PPC+Facebook & Instagram Ads) and regular enhancement of the conversion rate of the sites. 

SEO is our most effective traffic acquisition tool. Search traffic brings 80% of our monthly 200,000 visitors. We use the landing pages to promote our services in a long-time perspective. Although SEO takes time, it works perfectly for that.

We didn’t carry out a deep SEO analysis, but we frequently noticed that the landing pages made on Weblium are ranked higher on Google than other pages on our domain. The Weblium platform allows implementing all SEO settings we need.

Bookimed SEO promotion strategies are based on our experience. Before launching Bookimed, I owned one of the biggest SEO agencies in Ukraine. That’s why we are the main SEO specialists at the company. 

60% of our traffic is mobile visitors. We take great care to ensure that all our websites are adaptive to mobile screens. We chose Weblium because we know that it’s a mobile-oriented website builder. Despite the difficulty of the process, Weblium web designers first create a mobile version of the template and then adjust it to desktop and tablet versions. Whatever changes are made, we are sure that websites on Weblium will look perfect on any screen.

We are going to continue creating websites with Weblium because it helps us grow. The strategy of promoting different procedures on separate landing pages generates a bunch of traffic and improves search relevance for our potential customers.

What are you working on now?

We take great focus on building trust. People expect that there is a catch somewhere when Bookimed Medical Doctors offer phone consultation or medical record translation services for free. However, a good service is just a good service, and we explain to people that we try to provide top-notch customer experience, not to cheat them. 

Also, we care a lot about the quality of the hospitals that we cooperate with. Our specialists visit and check out a clinic personally before we start partnership. 

Our goal isn’t promoting particular clinics. We rate hospitals on our website, but the rating is based on the popularity of the clinics. The hospital that is most often chosen by our patients is the first in the rating.

We are very selective when it comes to hiring doctors. They should be great professionals, able to speak different languages, and eager to solve clients’ problems 24/7. We need plenty of such specialists to scale the business, but it is tricky to find them.

To sum up 

If you have smart goals and a team of great professionals, the growth is expectable. Add to that a wise digital marketing strategy, and your sucсess іs inevitable.

We are happy that our clients achieve their goals and their businesses are not only profitable but also socially responsible. We are even more happy that we can help them on the way.

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