Are your competitors stealing your patients? Are they generating more traffic to their website or social media platforms? Are you running effective ads that engage your patients and keep the phone ringing with new leads? If not – you could be losing patients who have increased consumer choices and are willing to spend more to work with their chosen healthcare team. Whether you own a cosmetic surgery practice, medical spa, or wellness clinic, effective marketing is essential to a growing and thriving medical practice. You should evaluate all of your current marketing efforts and consider how they can be improved upon for maximum efficiency and effectiveness. Investing some time and effort into determining whether or not your practice has the right marketing strategy to attract additional patients can pay off in the form of expanded business opportunities and higher levels of patient satisfaction.
Ready Your Marketing Strategy to Acquire More Patients
You’re a provider who went into healthcare to help patients. Marketing is not a core skill you relish but is a necessity to grow your practice. Before you can treat your patients, you need a strategy that will get them to step into your practice. Healthcare consumers are becoming more savvy in searching for their ideal provider of service. In your competitive space, effective healthcare marketing becomes essential to increase patient engagement with your brand and satisfaction with the high-quality services you provide. Your marketing team must understand your target audience’s needs, interests, and desires in order to create an effective campaign that will help them reach their goals. With the right combination of tactics, your marketing efforts can create a powerful campaign that will help you grow and become more profitable. Here are Nine tactics (and one bonus) that will skyrocket your patient engagement and gain more patients for your practice.
Content Marketing and SEO
Content marketing is a must for any successful medical marketing efforts, and having an active content marketing strategy is vital to educating your patients and also establishing your expertise. It involves creating, curating, and distributing content that engages with potential patients. For medical marketing specifically, a good content marketing strategy should focus on topics that are relevant to patients’ needs and interests. If you are a plastic surgeon, you can develop blogs and educational videos that speak to specific procedures your client wants. If you are a medical spa, you may want to create content around your treatments, how your patients can prepare themselves for the procedures, and show the before and after effects of the treatment. By creating content that educates patients on their health concerns while simultaneously promoting your practice’s services or products, you are setting yourself up for successfully marketing to your intended audience.
Content marketing serves two important purposes in your marketing efforts. One is to educate your patients and make them aware of your services. Another important purpose of content marketing is to establish your SEO strategy to align with Google quality guidelines. In your practice, you want to demonstrate to your patients that you have:
- Experience
- Expertise
- Authority
- Trust
Google’s quality rater guidelines have also established these four factors to rate your website and content and how they will rank in similar searches on Google. It’s safe to say that “Trust” both by your patients and by Google is the most important factor in growing your practice and ranking on Google.
Your Marketing Team can help you optimize your content marketing and deploy an effective SEO strategy to target Keywords, fix technical SEO, optimize on-page SEO, and develop a backlink strategy that will grow your audience to attract your dream patients.
Incorporate Video Marketing
Video marketing is an effective and powerful tool for a healthcare practice to reach out to potential customers. With the help of videos, medical marketing can become more creative, engaging, and persuasive to your patients. Video content can be posted on YouTube, which is a great platform for creating brand awareness and connecting with customers. YouTube Ads are also very useful in getting your message across efficiently and can even be shown in front of your competitors. Shortform videos are exponentially growing brands. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts can all be incorporated into a comprehensive video strategy to grow your audience and build trust and expertise in your brand. You don’t have to be a ‘dancing doctor’ to be effective on these platforms. There are many ways to engage your audience with content they would not normally see. By incorporating video marketing into your healthcare marketing strategy, you can explode your engagement and visibility.
Have a Bomb Social Media Presence
Investing in social media marketing an be very effective to establish brand trust, use engagement, and promote offerings to your patients. Popular platforms such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok are great places to start, providing clinical practices with the opportunity to share relevant content with their patient base. When crafting a strategy, it is important to consider the goals of your medical marketing campaign. Make sure your investment in social media causes your patients to “stop the scroll” and focus on your content. Better content that relates to your visitors will get more attention. By investing in social media marketing, healthcare practitioners can expect better visibility of their medical practice and improved communication with their patients. It’s also important to remember that a successful medical marketing campaign requires consistent effort ability to write effective copy, and pair it with stellar graphics or videos to ensure maximum results. Investing in social media marketing is an excellent way to increase your reach and establish yourself as a leader in your market while building relationships with potential patients.
Start your PPC medical marketing with paid search ads
Pay-per-click medical marketing is an effective way to reach potential patients and promote your healthcare services. Paid search ads are a great place to bring visibility to your practice and get you to the top of Google faster with Ads. You can also use Facebook Ads and YouTube Ads as part of your healthcare marketing ads strategy. These platforms are excellent for reaching those who may be interested in your healthcare services, giving you the opportunity to reach a wider audience with a custom-tailored message. Additionally, paid search ads allow you to target the exact audience that fits the age, demographics, geo-location, and users who have already shown interest in medical topics, meaning that your message will be more likely to resonate with them. With the right strategy in place, paid search ads can be an invaluable part of your healthcare marketing plan and help you connect with potential patients who may not have known about your services before.
Email Your Patients, Often
Email marketing is an essential part of any medical marketing strategy. It is the most cost-effective way to reach prospective patients and keep them informed about the latest healthcare services and products. An email campaign should be tailored to meet the needs of your target audience. You should have a strategy to collect emails through lead generation tools, by obtaining patient consent during patient registration, and by potential clients who show interest in your brand. The key components of a successful email marketing strategy are segmentation, content optimization, and automation. The most effective technique of an email campaign is the use of personalization of your emails to target the user. Any copy of the email should address the user by name, be relevant and message be timely for the patient. By utilizing these techniques, you can ensure that your campaigns are relevant and engaging for your audience.
Another consideration for an effective email campaign is to consider the frequency of sending your emails. Most small businesses send an email to clients once a month. To increase engagement, you could consider sending emails twice a month, then move to weekly. This will depend on your offer, content, or promotions being delivered. It’s a good idea to build a list and keep targeting your clients with ads and offers so they know you are still around, but more importantly, they may consider your offer or promotion and take you up on it. It is always easier to market to your current patients than to incur the cost of obtaining a new patient.
6. Build Sales Funnel for Your Product or Service
Sales funnels are an effective way to market your healthcare service in combination with PPC and email marketing strategy. Sale funnels can target the audience with the right lead generation offer, product, or service depending where they are at in their sales journey. You will want to focus your effort on if you want more leads, more engagement, or more sales. The simple truth of sales funnels is that they work and are needed to nurture your patients and build trust so they will purchase from you. 87% of consumers choose to do business with vendors who provide valuable content at every stage of the sales funnel. Also, 63% of consumers need to hear a company’s value proposition or offer at least 3-5 times before they trust and consider buying from you.
The funnel consists of three stages:
TOFU (Top of Funnel) – Target audience for lead generation
MOFU (Middle of Funnel) – Nurture Leads with content marketing, case studies, and brand awareness
BOFU (Bottom of Funnel) – focus on converting those leads into paying customers by providing them with offers or discounts.
By combining these three stages together, you can effectively build a sales funnel that will help maximize your healthcare service’s visibility and profitability. Using content marketing, PPC campaigns, and email marketing can all be combined to continually advertise to your audience and retarget to your audience.
7. Optimize Your Website
Optimizing your healthcare website for patient experience is essential to successful marketing and building a positive reputation. Patients should be able to find the website easily through the right content marketing, SEO strategy, or local SEO searches. The first thing the patient will do if they are considering your services is to do a search for your website. Healthcare providers should strive to ensure that their website is easy to navigate, contains relevant information about their services, and provides insight into their medical practice. This can be accomplished by providing resources such as blogs, videos, and other helpful forms of content that allow potential patients to become more familiar with the healthcare provider and the services they offer. Your site should be optimized for the purpose intended. Most websites function to generate leads, educate on services, or promote an offer.
8. Generate New Patient Reviews
Patient reviews are a powerful form of user-generated content and can be a great tool for medical marketing. New patient reviews can provide citations that potential patients use to research a medical practice. A good strategy for generating new patient reviews is to ask existing patients to leave positive reviews online. You can incentivize a patient to do this by offering a small token in exchange for an honest review. This will not only increase the visibility of the practice but also help it stand out among competitors. Reviews should be monitored regularly in order to respond quickly to negative comments, as well as highlight positive ones.
9. Start A Referral Program
A patient referral program is an effective way to increase the number of patients receiving your healthcare services. By offering incentives and rewards to existing patients who refer others, you can help build trusting relationships and spread the word about your practice. For example, you could offer a discount or free service for every new patient referred or a gift card for referrals that result in a booked appointment. Additionally, you could reach out to local businesses and organizations to promote your program through their networks. This will help ensure that more people are aware of the services you provide and encourage them to recommend it to their friends and family. With a well-crafted patient referral program, you can expand your patient list exponentially.
Bonus. Run a Promotional Giveaway
Running a professional giveaway is a great way to reward your patients and promote your business. There are several different types of giveaways that you can use, such as monthly promotions on a product or service. Monthly promotions can be used to generate interest in your business by offering rewards for customers who come back on a regular basis. Local promotions can be used to draw in new customers and show appreciation for those who already visit your business regularly. You can also utilize giveaways to advertise special offers or launch new products or services through a sales funnel, email marketing, social media ads, or in-office specials. A well-planned giveaway will help you reach more people, increase brand awareness, and strengthen relationships with existing customers.
Market to Your Audience
You know your audience best. If you are losing market share to your competitors or unsure of the next steps, utilizing these tactics in an overall marketing campaign will ensure you will continue to grow your audience and revenue. By tapping into your patient’s desire for better healthcare service and by putting you front and center of their attention, you can create a comprehensive plan. Any one of these tactics can be a powerful tool to grow your audience and keep them coming back for more. By combining these strategies for medical marketing and by developing targeted campaigns, you can reach the right audiences, create measurable metrics for success, and keep your patients coming back for more.