In addition to seeing patients, doctors are constantly keeping up with the latest care practices and medical industry innovations. Similarly, the world of advertising is constantly shifting with an entirely new landscape of online advertising mediums and digital out-of-home displays.
Lucky for you, this article will give you a breakdown of the current and best marketing strategies for medical practices!
How To Market Your Doctors Office
Optimize Your Website
On average, consumers spend 6 hours and 40 minutes online daily. With people spending so much of their time on the Internet, it’s essential to put your best foot forward and polish your medical practice website.
Some important factors for optimizing your website include creating easy-to-navigate menus, FAQ sections that address common patient questions, and a highly visible area for loyal patient reviews.
Another crucial factor in website optimization is making it mobile-friendly. 82% of US consumers use their smartphones when looking for local services, and they often make assumptions about the quality of an institution based on the appearance of its website.
Create Educational And Video Content
The most popular and effective form of content marketing for doctors is currently educational video content. Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are great homes to a whole host of physician video content.
Here are some of the best ideas we’ve seen from medical video marketing trends:
- Patient testimonials: By creating a variety of testimonials that feature patients of different backgrounds, you have the greatest chance of winning over specific portions of your target audience.
- Procedure and treatment recordings: There is a large online community of healthcare enthusiasts who love to see how medical professionals perform both basic and intensive treatments and procedures.
- FAQ videos: Posting an FAQ on social media is a great way for prospective patients to quickly learn about your medical practice and see if it is right for them.
Online video content marketing can bring an immense amount of visibility to your brand. If you’re looking for some inspiration on what to post, Doctor Mike and Dr. Eric Berg create content on a regular basis and have approximately 20 million subscribers combined!
Improve Your SEO
Search engine optimization refers to the strategic use of keywords and phrases throughout your online content to improve your rankings in the search listings. With the increasing use of search engine platforms, understanding and using them is essential for medical marketing.
There are two primary digital marketing categories when it comes to SEO, let’s take a look.
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO refers to taking keywords and phrases that prospective patients are most likely to search for and placing them throughout your online titles, content, and meta descriptions.
To maximize the effectiveness of this strategy, consider writing articles or blogs that relate to common patient concerns, such as “5 Signs Your Child Needs to See a Pediatrician”.
In addition to providing you with more content to optimize, search engines like Google favor businesses with perceived Expertise, Trustworthiness, and Authoritativeness (E-A-T). So, by writing informational blogs and articles, search engines will recognize you as a public educator and reward you for it.
Local SEO
When a prospective patient searches something like “pediatrician in [city name]” or “dermatologist near me”, you want to be among the first practices listed. To fully grasp how important local SEO is, understand that a stunning 86% of consumers use Google Maps when looking for local products and services.
The first step to establishing your medical practice on Google Maps is to create a Google My Business account and claim your listing. The Google algorithm ranks businesses with up-to-date profiles more highly, so be sure to include your number, address, and operating hours.
Another key factor that determines your Google Maps placings is the number of 4- and 5-star reviews you’ve received online. It’s important to note that Google doesn’t just take into account the reviews you’ve received on their platform but also evaluates your presence on other review sites like Yelp, HealthGrades, and Angie’s List.
You can certainly drive more reviews through excellent service, but it can be quicker and more effective to actively solicit your patient base for reviews.
Engage On Social Media
We mentioned that consumers spend an average of 6 to 7 hours a day on the Internet. Well, 28% of that time is spent on social media platforms. Like any good marketer, your objective is to meet your prospective customers where they are– and that increasingly is on social media.
Having active social media accounts can provide your medical practice with an additional touchpoint to attract existing and prospective patients. It can also give your practice a friendly face that people can relate to and trust. Consider using a mixture of posts that varies between informational content and behind-the-scenes looks at your clinic. These “inside look” posts could feature a new piece of medical equipment, a typical day in the office, or even a celebration picture for a staff member’s birthday.
You can also further your credibility as a caring community member and public educator by hosting monthly Facebook Live Q&A sessions. During these sessions, you can answer general health inquiries and help prospective patients acknowledge when it’s time to seek professional assistance.
Use Wellness Boards
Medical professionals have often used out-of-home (OOH) advertising mediums like highway billboards, street signage, and transit displays to promote their brand. While these advertising channels can reach large numbers of people, it’s virtually impossible for them to track engagements and target your primary audience.
However, there’s an OOH advertising medium that solves these issues– wellness boards. Wellness boards dispense sanitizing wipes from below a prominently featured advertisement.
This is an ideal physical display for healthcare providers as it offers an optimal contextual setting for prospective patients to interact with your medical practice. For one, health-conscious consumers appreciate sanitizing kiosks and the brands that sponsor them. Secondly, wellness boards are commonly placed in the pharmacy wait areas of stores like Walgreens, CVS, and Rite Aid. The pharmacy wait area is highly sought-after advertising real estate for any business in the healthcare industry because consumers associate promoted brands with the pharmacist and medical treatments they trust.
Additionally, these wellness boards can come equipped with geofencing and retargeting capabilities that make reaching your primary audience and tracking engagements easy. Geofencing and retargeting are digital tools that can track the anonymized mobile data of nearby shoppers to accurately assess engagement levels and send preprogrammed online advertisements to their smartphones.
Terraboost is an innovator in this advertising medium, and independent studies have shown that 66% of shoppers engage with their sanitizing kiosks and that 50% would take a coupon or brochure to learn more.
Invest In Paid Ads
The rise in the use of the Internet to look for products and services has been paralleled by a rise in online paid advertising formats.
There is a plethora of options out there. To prevent you from getting bogged down with too many options, we’ve selected the best paid online advertising mediums and tools for medical practices:
- Retargeting: Unlike typical banner ads, retargeting ads are displayed to people who have previously viewed your website but didn’t make an appointment. By reaching prospective patients with a high frequency, you increase your chances of conversion.
- Landing Pages: You can create specific pages for your medical practice that are optimized for different types of conversions, like booking an appointment or signing up for an email list.
- Google Pay-Per-Click: Google Ads will have you featured in the top three search listings for keywords of your choosing, like “family doctor near me” or “urgent care in [your city]”. As the name would suggest, you only have to pay when users click through to your site, however, bidding for highly sought-after keywords can reach up to $80 per click!
- Social Media Ads: Social media platforms are in the data business, meaning they store information on user data points like location, age, interests, and search history before selling it to advertisers. This allows medical marketers to precisely target prospective patients who’ve recently shown interest in healthcare services. For example, you could use Facebook ads to target local parents with back-to-school checkups or flu shots.
Run Email Marketing Campaigns
Email marketing for doctors can provide your practice with another meaningful contact point to build your practice and boost patient retention.
Your emails to prospective patients and current patients should be very different from one another. When sending messages to potential patients, much of the content will be sales-focused with things like seasonal campaigns that offer back-to-school discounts or flu vaccine promotions.
In contrast, emails to your existing client base should focus on fostering a connection with them. It’s important to first segment your email list based on criteria like appointment history, treatment needs, and demographics. In doing so, you can send out personalized emails to each group that are more likely to be opened and engaged with.
Segmented email lists make it easy to set up automated campaigns that send out emails, like new patient greetings, appointment follow-ups, and scheduling reminders. Additionally, segmented lists can help you distribute informational content to groups that care about it the most. For example, you could write two different monthly newsletters that apply to the health concerns of the two primary age groups you serve.
Reviews And Testimonials
We provided tips on how you can use reviews and testimonials to boost your online visibility on social media platforms and Google Maps. However, the importance of using these reviews to their full extent can’t be understated.
By clearly displaying your best reviews from patients with different backgrounds, you can appeal to a wide range of potential patients and instantly foster trust with them.
Start A Referral Program
With all the physical and digital advertising mediums available to medical marketers, it’s easy to forget about the power of word-of-mouth marketing!
Referral programs often operate via simple incentives offered to existing clients if they refer a friend or family member. These incentives can be things like discounts on future services or gift card giveaways.
The unique benefit of referral programs is that the patients gained from them will place long-term trust in your practice since it was recommended to them by a friend or family member.
Network with Local Businesses
There are a variety of businesses that are more than happy to partner with physicians. Some potential businesses to solicit for your partnership program could include wellness centers, pharmacies, gyms, and physical therapists.
Partnership plans are a great way for doctors to expand their reach and help other local businesses grow via cross-promotions. This word-of-mouth marketing method can be extremely effective since it recruits business leaders that community members trust.
Executing a successful marketing campaign for a medical practice can be difficult, but it doesn’t have to be. We at Terraboost have worked with countless healthcare brands and can provide you with key industry insights as well as a free personalized quote.
If you’re looking to access our network of 120,000+ wellness billboards that delivers up to 8.8 billion monthly engagements, get in touch with us today!
