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Medical practices today navigate the ever-evolving world of healthcare. It includes attracting and retaining modern patients.
The fast-changing industry has made healthcare providers stop relying on pure traditional medical marketing efforts to invite patients.
They have to level up their medical practice marketing online to stay relevant, competitive, and trustworthy to patients.
No matter how hard it is to keep up with the digital world, marketing is a must for medical practices. Don’t worry. Growing your brand and acquiring more customers is highly possible.
In this article, we’ll give you tips to improve your healthcare marketing strategies. Keep reading!
7 Best Healthcare Marketing Strategies To Grow Your Practice
1. Plan Your Medical Practice Marketing
Prevention is always better than cure, and that goes the same way as your healthcare marketing strategy. It’s always best to invest, plan, and create it now rather than to wait until you’ve got near to zero patients visiting your facility.
You may have to hire an external healthcare marketing team and invest a larger budget. That’s fine. As long as the team can deliver better results, the investment should be worthwhile.
2. Improve Patient Experience
When creating your medical practice marketing strategy, improving your patient’s experience should be one of your goals.
Put yourself in your patient’s shoes. Is your location accessible to your patients and staff, especially during emergencies?
Can they access your services online? Is your appointment booking process smooth and reliable enough?
Do you have efficient customer service?
The patient experience does not start the moment they enter your hospital. It begins the moment they think about booking your services. It does not end when their visit is over, but rather when they decide to refer you to new patients or not.
3. Build and optimize your healthcare practice website
Healthcare marketers need to ensure a reliable and responsive medical practice website.
A responsive website should be user-friendly. It adjusts to whatever device the visitors are using – be it on a computer, tablet, or phone.
Google highly values user experience. It prioritizes competitors with a site optimized for mobile users.
Website speed
Speed is also a significant factor. A one-second page load time makes users feel at-ease and confident unless the website fails to respond as desired.
After 10 seconds, their attention is barely kept. They will feel impatient, frustrated, and abandoned. They are unlikely to revisit such slow websites.
You can test your site speed at Google’s PageSpeed Insights here. Compare it with your competitors’ site speeds too. Some of the usual causes of slow site speeds are slow web host, too many plugins, too much traffic and, outdated CMS.
Speak to your web developer to see if one of those is the issue. Also, if possible, ask if they can make your website load faster than your competitors.
Healthcare Web Design
Having a responsive website, however, shouldn’t compromise quality design, content, and imagery. Most consumers visit websites via mobile devices, so having a fully responsive medical website design is crucial.
According to Blue Corona, 38% of people will stop engaging with a website if the content/layout is unattractive. In addition, 48% of people cited a website’s design as the number one factor in deciding the credibility of a business.
For a healthcare business that has to establish credibility and trust, these statistics speak highly of how crucial it is to have an optimal web design.
[Read: SEO Web Design Case Study – North Valley Women’s Care]
The design and content of a website must go hand in hand. Important information about the facility, treatments, and services must be visible.
Patients would like to see if your medical practice offers a wide variety of healthcare services, including the procedures that are worth knowing about.
4. Improve Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
SEO should be the backbone of your digital medical marketing strategies. It boosts the likelihood that potential patients find you via an online search. It can also help drive targeted leads (i.e., patients and referring doctors) to your website.
However, ranking on top of the search engines is a lot more complex for healthcare providers. The ranking has become more competitive in the industry. Here are some tips to improve your SEO:
- Add your practice’s address on your web pages
- Create original content for your website and blog
- Build links from other sites
- Offer a guest blog to another doctor’s site
- Be more interactive on social media.
If you’re a multi-location medical practice, develop a landing page for each dedicated location that you have and include these details:
- Google My Business map
- The city name in the title tag and on the page several times
- NAP – name, address, phone number, hours of that specific location
- Healthcare staff members
- A short write up about that location
5. Leverage social media marketing
Organic social media is a significant part of the digital marketing strategy of many medical practices. This includes posting photos, updates, events to Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube.
The gist of using social media in healthcare is centered around these important steps:
- Update yourself with the current health-related content trends, followed by competitive research
- Create a fool-proof and results-based social media plan from the findings of your research
- Manage your social media profiles with online tools
- Consider specific time frames when posting health-related information online
- Regularly engage with your target audience with professionalism and in compliance with the HIPAA
- Evaluate the effectiveness of your efforts and record your performance metrics
[Read: The Pro’s Guide to Managing Social Media in Healthcare]
6. Ask for patient reviews
Patient reviews are a mirror of your medical practice.
In a 2020 study by Software Advice, about 94% of potential patients read online reviews to find new health providers nowadays. Getting positive reviews from your current patients should be part of your reputation management and medical marketing strategy.
Usually, patients will volunteer to leave reviews if they either had an above-average or extremely poor experience.
Unless you ask for reviews before they leave your facility, you might miss an opportunity to receive feedback from satisfied patients that may help you grow your online presence.
Automating reviews can be a good solution. A patient can use a device at your facility to rate their patient experience on a scale of 1-10. An automated follow-up notification will be sent via email to those who gave high scores to ask them to leave a review on your site. Those positive reviews will be directly shown on your website.
On the other hand, those who gave poor scores wouldn’t be left behind. To improve your reputation management, you can ask the patient to elaborate on their concerns and allow you to resolve the issue.
You shouldn’t get defensive about negative reviews. Instead, take it as a chance to upgrade your process to ensure the best possible service moving forward, based on the prior feedback.
7. Have an active content marketing strategy
Medical marketing for healthcare practices relies on a solid healthcare content marketing strategy.
Content marketing increases traffic in your website, grows organic search, improves your healthcare branding, and establishes your brand as a leader in the healthcare industry.
Healthcare facilities don’t run out of educational and inspiring stories to tell. Take advantage of it to improve your content marketing plan.
You can offer inspiring and educational health content in the form of blog posts, videos, and infographics. These are all attention-grabbing and easy-to-understand forms of content compared with traditional medical white papers and books.
In addition, you can add email newsletters to your strategy to invite more readers and visitors to your website. A newsletter allows you to share monthly content about your medical practice and make your brand more memorable in the minds of your previous, current, and prospective patients.
With a good content marketing strategy, you can become a source for journalists. Media professionals prefer to seek out credible medical professionals to provide context and legitimacy to their stories. This will grow your healthcare branding.
[Read: 5 Hospital Branding Strategies Your Practice Should Do]
Partner With A Trusted Healthcare Marketer
Healthcare marketing is an ongoing and constantly evolving process. Your medical practice needs to adapt to various changes, both industry-wide and globally.
Invest in a long-term strategy to grow your healthcare business. Track results, determine your ROI, and ensure you’re on the right track towards success.
Partner with a trusted digital healthcare marketer who knows all the complexity of marketing in the medical scene. Choose one who knows how to make your brand irresistible, while ensuring your compliance with required medical codes.
If you need an expert partner to help you with your medical practice marketing, reach out to Digitalis Medical.
We work alongside doctors to grow their business through proven marketing strategies. Contact us today to know more about our services!
Do you need more healthcare marketing tips?
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