Overview
COVID-19 has changed the game for a lot of businesses. Healthcare is not an exception. Outside of the tremendous strain, the pandemic has put on organizations due to infection rates, another concern has been in the way practices deal with patients in general. This also includes your marketing initiatives. While the pandemic is a temporary situation, many of the changes in the way we do business can be beneficial. And your marketing routines are no exception.
Medical practice is mainly about patient care but like any other business, it is important to market your practice to thrive in today’s dynamic, ever-evolving world. Let’s be honest – Without patients, there is no medical practice. So apart from ensuring that your patients return to you for ongoing care (through high-quality treatments and compassionate care) you also need to ensure that you’re able to convince new customers to step through your front door. For that very reason, you need to know how to market your medical practice.
8 Tips to Market your Medical Practice Digitally
Developing a digital presence takes work, but the investment of time is well worth it. Did you know that about 80% of internet users search for health-related topics online? Right now, a digital presence gives you a way to connect with your patients and prospective patients even during social restrictions. They’re also efforts that will benefit your medical practice or clinic in the long run.
Here are some top tips to help you use the digital landscape to market your medical practice:
#Tip 1 – Use Best Practice in Your Website SEO
In the blog post we linked above, we mentioned that great content was a good marketing tip. It is, but that’s not the only thing that will drive visitors to your website. SEO, or search engine optimization, will help you rank higher in search engines, which brings visitors to your site organically. SEO is a wide topic, so we’ll cover a few more tips on this specifically below.
#Tip 2 – Develop Your Social Media
Choose the social media platforms that you’re comfortable using and invest time in developing those accounts. This means posting on a regular schedule, making sure to respond to all of your comments, and commenting on other people’s posts, as well. Make sure you remember to share new posts for your website and announcements about your medical practice or clinic but don’t make your social media all about selling your service. Make it about offering useful content to your followers.
#Tip 3 – Reach Your Patients Where They Live
Study the channels or platforms that your patients prefer and then make sure to use those channels to send them updates. This will be specific to your patients, so ask them. Make it a question when they come in or leave. Note it in their file. Some prefer logging into your web portal, others will like text or email. You may even still have patients who like regular mail. Don’t be afraid to cater to these preferences if you’re able to.
#Tip 4 – Pay Attention to Review Sites
Here’s a statistic you might find interesting — 70% of those surveyed said that online reviews impacted their decisions about which clinic or physician to see. Review sites are that important. People trust personal reviews much more than they trust the information on your own website because they know that your web content was written to sell the practice. Personal reviews seem much less biased and more dependable. This can be excellent for physicians because you have the opportunity to respond to patients, thank them for their reviews, and even remedy any possible issue.
#Tip 5 – Publish or Perish
Did you know that you could write guest posts for trade magazines and even commercial magazines about your specialty? You might write articles about running a medical practice or specific areas of medicine. You are, after all, an expert. Having articles published in online venues will give you a link to your site, It also gets your own name out there, which can lead to other opportunities that advance your practice.
#Tip 6 – Develop a Webinar
If you’re a physician who speaks at public events or does any kind of teaching or lecturing in the community, that option is probably not open to you during social distancing. However, developing a webinar can be an excellent way to continue to teach the community and offer something great to your current and future patients.
#Tip 7 – Utilise your Existing Patients
Trustworthiness, authority, and great service are what people are looking for in medical practice. Beyond doing what you can, you can assure your potential patients of your valued care by asking your existing patients to be a reference for your practice. Hence, by encouraging or incentive’s patients to leave positive, honest reviews, you can build an online reputation that can help your practice succeed. You can also create case studies out of past patient experiences so people get an in-depth look at the kind of care and service you provide.
#Tip 8 – Mail still works
Although it may seem old-fashioned, direct mail consistently proves to be one of the most effective and cost-efficient marketing tools that there out there. As with online content, you can send out flyers and pamphlets addressing common health concerns as well as information about the practitioners and services you provide. Unlike a website, your audience is more likely to hold onto a leaflet until and use it to contact you.
SEO Best Practices For Your Clinic Online Presence
SEO is a wide topic. Having a great practice website is more than just writing good content. The content should be developed strategically to help you rank higher and get found by the people in your area. When people talk about SEO, they usually mean the keyword phrases that the search engine reads. But that’s only part of it. Here, we’re going to give you a quick overview of some of the things that you should include in your SEO strategy.
- Research Keywords
You want to research the keywords you want to rank on. For practice, you’ll often want to include geographic terms, as well, so it registers for people who search for things like, “general practitioner in Mobile Alabama”. Your research should include seeing how well those keywords rank and how competitive they are. You should be using keywords in all of your content.
- Write Great Content
Most physicians and healthcare providers are well aware of the fact that most of their potential patients are checking their practice online. They want to get a feel of what the practice has to offer, apart from their health needs. Whether checking symptoms or trying to understand more about a diagnosis or condition, they’re looking for reliable information. As a medical practice, you have the expertise and authority to write content that helps answer their questions while also encouraging them to make an appointment. The 5 Simple Ways to Market your Medical Practice that follow are only suggestions but can be easily implemented.
- Make Sure Your Site Loads Fast
Your website speed will impact your ranking for a few reasons. The most important reason is that people are not patient. They will often leave the site if it takes too long to load. To the search engine, that registers like the content wasn’t adequate for what they were searching.
- Backlinks Are Super Important
Backlinks or link building are links back to your website from other sources. A link on a highly respected website, such as a guest post on a site with a lot of traffic, will be counted as very important in search engines. Basically, these links back to your site act as a sort of referral. The search engines see people linking to you and rank you higher because those referrals rate you as an expert.
Building a digital presence can help you communicate more effectively with your patients and it makes it easier to find new patients. That has been very important during this time when old-fashioned methods don’t work. But it will also be advantageous permanently. People were already searching for their healthcare needs online, prior to the pandemic.
Maintain a good online reputation and let your practice grow with our medical marketing management services. For more tips on promoting your medical practice, sign up for our newsletter and stay updated with the latest
Five Tips to Grow Your Medical Practice
