Many medical professionals wonder: What is medical marketing for doctors, and how is it different from marketing in other fields? This article answers those questions and more to help you manage all your marketing needs.
What is Healthcare Marketing?
Although marketing is about finding, attracting, and retaining patients, medical marketing strategies differ for several reasons. A healthcare marketing strategy has to consider how to deal with several regulations and medical marketing campaign guidelines.
Since health is a subject of personal choices and serious consequences can occur if something is inaccurate, content has to be morally unquestionable and adherent to verifiable facts.
An excellent medical marketing strategy needs special attention and careful planning. However, its importance in the healthcare business is central to a medical practice’s success and patients’ health as well.
Why is Marketing Important for Doctors?
Competition is fierce in the healthcare industry, and being able to stand out with effective digital marketing strategies will attract new patients to your medical practice.
In addition, well-planned marketing efforts will target the audience that can benefit from your healthcare services, encourage patients to reach out to you, attract more healthcare consumers, and increase your authority within the healthcare community.
Planning Your Healthcare Marketing Strategy
Just like any other type of marketing, marketing for healthcare professionals is an investment that needs careful planning and consideration to create a return and not become a waste of money and time.
To assist you in your medical marketing efforts, we have provided 8 proven healthcare marketing strategies to bring new patients to your healthcare practice.
1. Have a Well-Designed Website for Your Medical Practice
You want your practice’s website to be perfect before starting a campaign that will attract many visitors. A well-designed medical website is the centerpiece of a healthy online reputation and a good online marketing plan for healthcare practices.
Make the logo and name of your practice visible, your contact information easily accessible, and the user experience enjoyable. Also, test and improve the speed of your website. A responsive healthcare website will positively affect prospective patients’ perception of you as a professional.
2. List Your Practice on Online Business Directories
Making your professional profile visible in directories featuring local medical practices is a great way to integrate an existing marketing plan and improve your patient acquisition.
Use research tools such as Google Maps, social media platforms, and directories with other medical practices to increase your digital presence.
3. Invest in Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
A good medical SEO strategy plays a key role in a successful medical marketing plan because it drives visitors to your practice’s website, gives you online authority in your medical specialty, and improves your website’s search engine rankings.
When your medical website contains articles with targeted keywords, it is more likely to appear in search engines and reach your target audience. Local SEO is particularly effective because it makes your website visible when a user searches for healthcare providers in their specific area.
4. Generate Leads with Social Ads and Google Ads
Pay-per-click (PPC) is a type of paid advertising that has proved to be an effective tool in marketing for doctors and other healthcare providers.
With this type of digital advertising, you can design ads that will be displayed to users searching for specific topics. Google Ads and social media ads like Facebook ads effectively reach a vast but targeted audience in no time.
In addition, PPC advertising can immediately increase the number of visitors to your website, which will compensate for the time it takes for SEO to work at its full potential, making these two digital marketing tools complementary to create strong social media marketing for healthcare practices.
5. Reach Patients Through Video Marketing
Video marketing means using video to market your medical services, increase engagement, and reach an audience that prefers watching videos to reading articles.
Many doctors have found it helpful to post video content related to their services, facilities, procedure techniques, and equipment, and even as a tool to get the patients to meet the staff before visiting the facilities.
You can post your video content from your social media accounts like Facebook, Instagram, and, most of all, YouTube, which is the second largest search engine. As such, it is an excellent supplement to your digital marketing master plan.
6. Harness the Power of Email Marketing
Over 306 billion emails are sent and received daily, and email marketing represents a great content marketing tool with a huge ROI of $36 for every $1 spent!
Although often overlooked, emails are very effective in medical marketing for doctors. There are 4 main types of email marketing types that you can make use of. They include the following:
- Acquisition Emails have the goal of acquiring the email addresses of potential patients. You can achieve that by offering something useful (weekly health tips, discounts, free first consultations) to your website’s visitors and asking for their email addresses in return.
- Promotional Emails can be used to promote a special event you are planning at your facility or a special health check package with a limited duration. The main goal is to increase foot traffic to your medical practice.
- Retention Emails are great for keeping in touch with your current patients by thanking them, sending them reminders, or asking for their feedback or reviews about a procedure. This can also be used to generate new patient referrals.
- Email Newsletters are one of the most common types of emails. They are great for stimulating curiosity about a new article on your website or informing your patients about news concerning your medical field.
7. Develop a Strategy to Consistently Request Google Reviews and Respond Quickly
Patient reviews are one of the best marketing tools, as they are based on real patient experience and can drive more patients to your practice.
Since not everybody is keen to leave online reviews, here are some tips that can help you get some more:
- Include a link for leaving a review in a thank you email or other retention emails.
- Ask for a review through a chat interaction or your social media account.
- Ask for a review after a procedure is completed while handing a receipt.
Reputation management is essential because not all reviews will be positive. You must keep your attitude positive and show professionalism by addressing every reviewer with gratitude and respect. This will help build trust in others about you as a professional figure—no matter what—and encourage others to choose you as their next healthcare provider and attract more potential patients.
8. Track Your Marketing Strategy
Finally, you’ll get the best results from your marketing effort by tracking its effectiveness and making ongoing adjustments.
Your website’s traffic and paid ads statistics will show where you can improve and how to direct your efforts to the right audience.
Take advantage of specific tools, like Google Search Console, Google Business Profile, and Google Analytics, to track your progress and see how you can improve your pages.
Build a Strong Marketing Strategy for Your Medical Practice
Building a solid and effective marketing strategy is a challenging task. However, it is possible to achieve the success you’re looking for!
Here at Golden Tide Consulting, we specialize in online marketing for doctors in all of its facets. We are driven by passion and strive to achieve the best possible results for each of our clients.
Contact our team of online marketing specialists and local SEO experts today! We can help you get the results you’re looking for!
