Nov 6, 2019 · 4 min
Creating a successful marketing strategy is essential for any thriving business, and medical practice’s are no different. Marketing is an influential way to establish your practice as a leading healthcare facility because an effective marketing strategy will advertise your services, demonstrate your commitment to patient care, and build trust between your practice and the community.
Physicians who invest in successful marketing tactics will profit from greater patient volume and improved patient engagement, but how does one determine the best marketing strategy when there are so many methods with which to utilize? We’ve compiled a list of the most effective marketing strategies to help your practice prosper, so read on and learn how to successfully market your medical practice!
Create an Outstanding Website
In today’s world, an online presence is essential to business marketing as your website is likely your consumer’s first impression of your business. A successful medical practice website should be mobile-friendly, have relevant content, be easy to navigate, and utilize strong search engine optimization (SEO) keywords in order to enhance patient engagement and boost website traffic.
Start Blogging
A blog is a key tool in content marketing and should be strategically maintained and updated regularly with relevant content that engages and educates patients. A successful blog provides opportunities to attract significant traffic to a website, educate on health topics, improve patient engagement, and helps to increase patient volume.
Utilize Social Media
Social media platforms such as Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ are essential marketing tools that should be strategically utilized to share content, connect with your targeted demographics, increase SEO rankings, and drive traffic to your practice’s website. Each social media platform is uniquely different and marketing strategies should be distinctively based off of your targeted audience and marketing goals.
Send Email Newsletters
Email marketing is a great way to engage with patients and reach out to new potential patients that may have expressed interest in your practice. Establishing an email newsletter is an easy way to spread the news about promotions, blog posts, specials, new hires, or any other information you wish to share with patients. A monthly newsletter also helps to keep your practice relevant in patient’s minds, drives traffic to your website and social media pages, and can increase appointment requests.
Leverage Online Reviews
A successful medical marketing strategy should prioritize generating positive patient reviews by signing up for review websites and by requesting reviews from patients and referring doctors. Just like how consumers usually check Yelp or another review site to determine which restaurant to eat at, patients typically check online reviews before booking an appointment with a new doctor, so it’s vital to ensure your practice has an online review marketing strategy in place. Positive reviews help to increase your SEO rankings and encourage new patients to receive care from you, while negative reviews provide an opportunity to address and rectify the complaint.
Enhance Your SEO
If you haven’t already realized, SEO is crucial not only for marketing your practice, but also for the overall success of your practice. SEO improves the likeliness of someone finding your website via search engines like Google and helps to lead your target audience to your practice. Improving your SEO can be done through posting original content, adding links to your website and social media pages, utilizing keywords, and commenting on social media posts.
Develop a Physician Liaison Marketing Program
Gaining referrals from primary care physicians or other specialty physicians is an essential strategy to increasing patient volume, and hiring a physician liaison is the best way to do so. A physician liaison sustains strong relationships by going to other medical practices on behalf of your office in order to curate patient referral streams.
Encourage Patient-to-Patient Referrals
Providing optimal care to your patients is the surest way to encourage them to want to refer friends and family to your practice, but there’s nothing wrong with asking. Encourage your team to ask patients for referrals, promote acceptance of new patients, or simply hand out referral cards to motivate patients to refer friends and family. When you do get a referral, be sure to follow up with the referring patient with an appreciate message or phone call.
Video Marketing
Medical content can be confusing, difficult, and frankly quite tedious for the general population to read about, which is why utilizing videos is essential to marketing your practice. Videos offer healthcare providers an opportunity to deliver important medical information in short, simple messages that patients can easily understand which can be used to improve patient engagement and promote your business.
Digital Advertising
Digital advertising through various platforms such as Google and Facebook should be used strategically to spread recognition of your practice and reach your targeted audience. Online advertisements are especially important because your staff isn’t available around the clock to promote your practice, but ads provide 24/7 promotion availability.
Track Your Status
Marketing can’t be optimally effective if you don’t know what is or isn’t working, so it’s important to monitor and analyze your performance metrics in order to determine which marketing strategies are providing the most return on investments (ROI) in order to maximize revenue.
All of these marketing tactics will help to grow your business, but implementing a strong marketing strategy which utilizes these methods in a coordinated manner will provide the best results with the greatest ROI.