Are you a doctor and are struggling to attract new patients to your clinic? Are you tired of relying solely on referrals to attract potential patients?
The healthcare industry is one of the most competitive in the market. How can you make your practice stand out with so many medical services and clinics? Through effective digital marketing strategies!
If you are new to this field, you might be overwhelmed with lots of information on different marketing efforts you can start implementing. But don’t worry.
In this blog, we’ll provide you with an effective medical clinic marketing strategy. By the end, you will be able to attract new patients through different channels besides a patient referral program.
What Does a Medical Marketer Do?
Before mentioning the different medical marketing efforts you can implement, let’s define what a medical marketer does. A medical marketer is a professional in charge of working with brands in the healthcare industry. They develop and execute marketing strategies to promote healthcare services, products, and organizations. Some tasks involve developing a brand and message, managing social media, and running advertising campaigns.
Medical marketers should work with clients to understand their business goals and target audience needs.
Why is a Digital Marketing Strategy Essential for Medical Practices?
In today’s digital market, users use the internet to find healthcare information and providers. You need a solid online presence to connect with patients, enhance brand visibility, and provide valuable healthcare information.
Digital marketing can help your clinic grow in authority and become discoverable by the right users. Moreover, a strategic approach enables medical practices to tailor their messaging to specific patient demographics, improving patient engagement, retention, and appointment bookings.
Benefits of Hiring a Medical Practice Marketing Agency
Expertise in Healthcare Marketing
A specialized medical marketing agency possesses industry-specific knowledge and experience, which allows them to create tailored strategies that resonate with patients and adhere to healthcare regulations.
Time and Resource Savings
Delegating your marketing efforts to an agency frees up your time and internal resources, enabling you to focus on patient care and core medical activities.
Access to Diverse Skill Sets
Marketing agencies have experienced professionals in areas such as branding, content creation, SEO, social media management, and analytics. This provides a holistic approach to your marketing strategy to ensure you cover all the essential areas.
Stay Updated with Trends
The market is constantly evolving, and so should your clinic if you want to remain competitive. Hiring an agency will allow your business to stay updated with the updates and technologies in digital marketing, ensuring your practice remains relevant in the ever-changing online landscape.
Access to Tools and Technology
Marketing a medical practice requires the latest and most efficient tools to deliver effective solutions. Marketing agencies access advanced tools and technology that can streamline campaigns, enhance analytics, and improve overall efficiency.
Measurable Results
Hiring a marketing agency helps you access clear metrics and reports on the performance of campaigns, allowing you to assess the ROI and effectiveness of your marketing investments.
How to Market a New Medical Practice
Defining Your Brand and Target Audience
Start by establishing a strong brand identity for your medical practice. Identify your target audience’s demographics, needs, and preferences. To make this task easier, think about the answers to these questions:
- What are my practice’s unique selling points?
- What kind of patients am I looking to attract?
- What are my buyer persona’s needs and wants?
- Where do they spend their time online and offline?
Once you have identified all these, develop a visual identity for your brand by defining a logo, colors, slogan, and graphics that will make it remembered. Remember that it should communicate your business’s value proposition and appeal to your target patients.
Design an Optimized and Responsive Website
Your website is your online storefront. It’s where potential patients will go to learn more about your practice and book appointments. Ensure it’s user-friendly, mobile-responsive, and visually appealing.
To enhance your website’s performance, consider the following factors:
- Compress and reduce your images and visual elements’ size
- Have a clean website code
- Optimize your core web vitals
- Create a comprehensive internal linking structure for your main pages
- Create a user-friendly menu to go through your website
- Use a clear URL structure
Also, ensure you include relevant information that builds credibility with users and encourages them to contact you. Make sure you showcase the following:
- Your services
- Contact information (address, phone number, and email address)
- Patient Testimonials
- Booking form
An optimized website will help you become discoverable for new patients and help you with search engine rankings, leading us to our next strategy.
Drive Organic Traffic with SEO
SEO (search engine optimization) improves your website’s ranking and visibility in search engines like Google. Users that reach your website through SEO do it naturally or organically without investing in paid ads. For example, let’s say you have a page on your website targeting the keyword “chiropractic services in Massachusetts.” If your page follows SEO best practices, it will appear at the top of Google’s results, increasing the chances of attracting patients searching for this service.
There are several things you can do to improve your website’s SEO. Some include:
- Use relevant keywords across your website for your specific services and locations
- Create engaging content that provides users with relevant information
- Get backlinks from other authoritative websites in your industry
- Optimize your title tags, meta descriptions, URLs, headings, and images alt texts with keyword variations
- Resolve technical issues that hinder your website’s performance with the help of a web developer
If you own a small local clinic, you can improve your website’s visibility through local SEO.
Invest in Local SEO
Local SEO helps you rank better in local search results. This is especially useful to target users in a specific city, town, or area.
For example, let’s say you are a chiropractor operating in Boston, Massachusetts, and you want to target patients in that specific city. You can optimize your primary services pages by including geo-modifier keywords across your website, such as “chiropractor in Boston.” This is a great strategy to start growing your business’s authority in the market.
There are several things you can do to invest in local SEO, such as:
- Claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile listing
- Encourage patient referrals by encouraging them to leave reviews in your Google Business Profile
- Optimizing your website for local keywords
- Featuring your business in local directories
- Making sure your business’s information is congruent in listing on online directories
Develop an Engaging Content Marketing Strategy
Content is the main booster for any healthcare marketing strategy. Content marketing helps you create valuable content to attract and engage your target audience.
To ensure that your content is engaging and relevant, address your patients’ main pain points across your content, let them know the importance of addressing them promptly, and offer your services as a solution.
The beauty of content marketing is that there isn’t a specific format to follow to deliver value to users. Create blog posts, videos, infographics, social media posts, ebooks, emails, guides, and more. Start by trying each format and identify which works better for your audience. From there, you just have to deliver them more than they requested.
To create high-performing content, consider the following:
- Make sure your content is well-written and informative. Watch out for grammar mistakes.
- Promote your content on social media and other channels. If your content is not found, it won’t likely drive any results. Share it with users in diverse digital channels to maximize reach.
- Avoid jargon and technicalities. Remember that your audience is not proficient in the healthcare industry. Avoid terms and expressions that might confuse them and use easy-to-understand language.
- Share how you have helped other patients in the past. This presents your clinic as an expert in the field and increases the chances of attracting new patients.
By educating your audience, you are creating raving fans that consider your clinic the #1 option for their medical needs.
Advertise your Medical Practice with PPC Ads
You should consider running PPC ads to generate sales, revenue, and new patients quicker. Pay-per-click ads (PPC) allow you to run advertising campaigns for your business’s services. This type of online advertising allows you to pay only when a user clicks on your ads. This way, you are ensuring that your investment is bringing in users interested in your services and more likely to convert.
PPC ads allow you to segment your ads based on demographics, interests, and keywords. You can also track the results of the campaigns so you can see what works the best. Here are some tips to make the most of your PPC ads:
- Choose the right keywords users might search for when looking for your services
- Set a budget on how much you will spend daily or weekly on your campaigns.
- Use negative keywords you don’t want your ads to appear for. This ensures that your ads reach the right audience and avoids unnecessary spending.
- Write persuasive, clear, and concise ad copy relevant to your target keywords.
- Test different ad formats to find the one that works best for you. These include text ads, image ads, and video ads.
By running PPC ads, you can significantly increase your sales quickly compared to SEO.
Market your Services on Social Media Platforms
Social media helps you connect with new patients and engage with your current ones. These marketing channels allow you to create profiles for your business where you can post relevant and engaging content that attracts potential patients. Make sure that the social platforms you decide to be present on are where your target audience is. Social media also allows you to run ads to encourage sales, new followers, and engagement.
To make the most of your social profiles, take into account the following tips:
- Post regularly to increase your reach and attract new followers. Be consistent in posting frequency to send signals to search engines and users when sharing valuable content.
- Use relevant hashtags in your posts to reach a wider audience. Hashtags increase the chances of your content appearing in new users’ feeds. For example, you can use hashtags like #Patient, #Physicians, and #Telemedicine.
- Engage with your audience by responding to comments, messages, and questions. The more you engage with them, the better business relationships you will foster.
- Use social media analytics to help you track the performance of your campaigns. For example, you could measure how much engagement your content generates, the leads you have attracted, and the sales you have closed.
- Ensure your business’s information is up-to-date and complete in your business profiles. This makes it easier for users to contact you if they buy from you.
Social media helps you build a community of existing and potential patients and help increase your sales efforts.
Nurture your Current Patients with Email Marketing
Even though it might surprise you, email is one of the top channels to execute effective marketing strategies. Studies show that there are currently 4.371 million email users worldwide in 2023.
Email marketing helps you nurture your current patient relationships by providing helpful content, offers, and insights. Different email marketing tools allow you to segment your email list on demographics, interests, behavior, and more. This is an excellent channel to ensure your patients return for more.
To make the most of your email efforts, watch out for the following:
- Use a catchy headline. Users will first see headlines before opening your email and what will drive them to click. Ensure it is within the characters’ length (60 characters) and summarizes what content they can find inside the email.
- Personalize your emails to show your subscribers that you care about them. You can include their names in the email, mention their interests, or use other relevant information.
- Create compelling and engaging content that is relevant to your target audience. Use clear and concise language to encourage them to read through.
- Monitor your results to identify what works and what doesn’t. Different email marketing tools offer analytics to measure the performance of your campaigns over time.
- A/B test your emails to compare two email variations and determine which one brings more results.
Email is an excellent strategy for cross and up-selling your current patients while keeping them engaged with valuable content.
Take Care of your Online Reputation
A medical provider’s positive online reputation is crucial to attracting new patients. People will choose a medical practice that has a good reputation. Think about it, would you trust your health to someone who is not ethical or trustworthy? Probably not.
There are several things you can do to protect your brand from negative comments:
- Regularly check your online reviews and respond to any negative reviews promptly. This shows you are responsive to feedback and committed to providing quality care.
- Encourage your current patients to leave their feedback on your online platforms to help build a positive image.
- Be transparent about your practice, including your fees, qualifications, and procedures. The more access patients have to this information, the more informed decision they will be able to make.
- Get involved in local events and organizations to build relationships with potential patients and boost your online reputation.
- Provide an excellent patient experience to encourage word-of-mouth marketing about your services.
The better reputation you have, the more patients you will be able to attract.
How Much Should a Medical Practice Spend on Marketing?
There isn’t a specific answer to the amount of money you should spend on your marketing efforts. This will highly depend on your business’s size, locations served, and number of services. However, you don’t have to start big if you lack the resources.
The purpose is not breaking your bank account but boosting your business’s ROI through effective marketing strategies. Our agency has packages for all business sizes, so you can rest assured that you can access quality marketing services.
How We Helped Medical Clinics Grow Online
Are you still unsure if you should invest in medical practice marketing? Check our case study below!
Our main goal was to optimize a current campaign managed under a different agency to see results and monetize the marketing investment while creating a predictable lead-generating machine. Through some historical data optimization, our team generated 400 leads at $21.78 a lead in the first six months. This resulted in 421 more conversions than in Q1 & Q2 while reducing the cost-per-acquisition by $236.
Conclusion
Marketing your medical practice is essential to stay ahead of the competition. These channels will help you create a solid online presence and attract new patients. If you are still trying to figure out where to start, don’t worry, RealTop is here to help.
We are a digital marketing agency with over 15 years of experience helping medical practices grow online through various marketing efforts. Our team will guide you every step of the way to ensure a successful digital strategy. Contact us today and get a free marketing plan!
Nik Tsoukales, founder of REALTOP, is an experienced digital marketer with a track record of growing businesses and sales teams. He has received multiple awards for leading fast-growing companies and specializes in organic SEO, Google PPC, and Social Media. With over 89k clients acquired online, Nik’s expertise spans various industries including finance, healthcare, and real estate.
