Marketing Strategies for a Medical Practice

Your patients have more healthcare options than ever before. With the internet full of  reviews, medical information, and virtual healthcare options right at their fingertips, choosing a doctor based on more than location and word of mouth is highly likely.

Geographical convenience and a strong community presence are still vital. In an increasingly digital world, however, your online presence is equally if not more important. Your website, social media, directory listings, and reviews — with your brand clearly defined across them all — are the real catch for new patients. For this to be successful, you simply must have excellent digital marketing strategies for a medical practice.

Many practices choose to create their own healthcare marketing ideas and medical marketing strategies. Developing medical marketing strategies keeps your practice ahead of the curve, helping to not only retain existing patients but attract new ones.

Tips for Marketing Strategies for a Medical Practice

If you have the resources and are well on your way to making your brand digitally clear, great! If you have not bothered creating your digital presence, do not know where to start, or simply do not have the time or manpower to make it happen, iProv has everything you need. We can help you clarify and expand your digital healthcare marketing ideas, take over your website and bring your brand to life, or just help you figure out how to take advantage of what you have.

Listen to what Arkansas Family Dental has to say about using our services to improve their online presence and patient communication strategies, then check out our best healthcare marketing ideas and tips.

Communicate What Sets You Apart

You know your experience and specialty training set you apart from your competition. A big part of marketing for a medical practice is ensuring your patients know this too. Figure out what, specifically, makes your practice and your brand unique.

What about your hospital, practice, or network sets you genuinely apart from competitors? Maybe it’s your bedside manner, a family-friendly atmosphere, a regular community presence. Maybe you have incredibly low infection rates or regularly contribute to award-winning publications.

You may be incredibly proud of several aspects of your business, but one thing, in particular, sets your medical team apart. That is what will help your patients remember your name. You can also encompass that in your branding.

Use Consistent Branding

The best way to make your message stick is to make sure your branding is consistent across all channels. This means using the same logo, colors, hashtags, contact information, and taglines. Familiarity is comforting and sticks in our minds as trustworthy. Take advantage of this correlation by ensuring you are always on brand and on message.

Your brand is more than just keeping your logo evident and maintaining a consistent digital appearance. It is also the information you produce and share.

Regular, clear, and transparent communication with your patients creates clear expectations. You want that to be part of your brand as well. Changes in health insurance, dissatisfaction with wait times, relocations, the retirement of a favorite nurse, or just one negative experience can all send clients elsewhere.

If something goes wrong, tackle it head-on instead of hoping it will disappear. If changes are happening, be upfront about them. Respond to bad reviews, and try to find a way to improve the experience. If you make sure your patients know what to expect, they’ll appreciate that part of your brand even more than what sets you apart.

Evaluate You Patient Experience — On- and Offline

Your website has essentially become your front door or roadside sign. It is the first thing most patients will encounter. If your site is not optimized for a smooth and easy user experience, it might be a door they choose not to walk through.

Think about the last time you visited a bad website. It might have been disorganized, had a badly designed mobile site, or taken forever to load. Did you try to navigate it or wait for it to load…or did you exit out and move on to a different site that suited your needs?

User experience is an entire career path in the technology sector, but there are some basic questions you can ask to see if your website is in need of a little freshening up.

• Would a visitor be able to find your location easily?
• Is your contact information clear and easy to locate?
• Would a patient understand what services you offer within ten seconds?
• Does the imagery represent your average patient?
• How long does it take for your site to load?
• How easy is the site to navigate? Can you find everything within a few clicks?

Even if you recently redesigned your site, make sure you can still answer these questions positively. Designers are not always well trained in user experience. Even sites that look really good could use a few tweaks to improve user experience.

Here’s how iProv helped The Women’s Clinic gain more leads through their website.

Optimize Search Engine Results

When is the last time you visited the second page of Google results? If you are like most people, you scroll the first half a page of results and then try a new search term. Page two is unlikely to be on your radar, so you understand the importance of being in those top few results. When patients Google your practice’s specialty, you want to be at the top of the first page.

The way to those coveted top spots is through search engine optimization (SEO). Many companies sell SEO as a one-time service: “We’ll SEO your site!” Keywords and meta descriptions are certainly important, but SEO is an ongoing strategy in marketing for medical practices — not a one-time fix with no evolution of search terms.

There are a lot of factors that contribute to your SEO “score,” including:

• Website load times,
• URLs and meta descriptions,
• Site-content keywords,
• Frequency and consistency of publishing new content,
• Reviews on Google, Facebook, and platforms,
• Your practice’s directory listings,
• Images and alt tags used, and
• How and how often you use your social media.

Your digital marketing strategy should be based on SEO results to improve patient volume and retention and to enhance your branding efforts.

Leverage Your Social Media

A key part of digital marketing strategies is a social media presence. People spend an average of three hours a day on social media — 25% of their waking hours. If you are not on social media, you are missing a huge part of the conversation!

Wondering how you can stand out in the social media world if everyone is already there? Think about it like this: if you were at a party, you would not just stand against a wall and shout information at passing people. Actually, a lot of companies do use social media like that. Information is good, it’s true, but engagement is more important to attract attention. The most successful brands treat social media as a conversation. When you create marketing strategies for a medical practice, you should too.

Ask questions, respond to comments and reviews, and invite followers to get to know you and your team. Be thoughtful about what you highlight and how — avoid spamming your readers with self-promotion and repetition. Marketing of all sorts inundates our lives constantly. The best way to stand out in that environment is to be genuine.

For More Information

If you want to learn more about the best marketing strategies for a medical practice, contact the digital marketing professionals at iProv! We’d love to schedule a time to sit down, discuss your goals for your practice, and create a plan that suits your brand.