This is the third article in our three-part Marketing for Doctors series. Links to the other articles are at the bottom of this page.
As a medical practice, maintaining a profitable patient load shouldn’t be too challenging, right? When potential patients have ailments that your staff can address, they should come to your medical practice for assistance and give you their business.
Unfortunately, the competitive nature of the healthcare industry has made it difficult for many physicians to keep a profitable patient load. Today, many healthcare practices have begun turning to digital marketing for doctors to target potential patients, increase awareness about their services, and promote patient retention.
A successful digital marketing strategy encompasses numerous tactics, such as:
- Social media marketing: Reaching patients through social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn
- Content marketing: Creating written and visual content to post to your social media platforms and website
- SEO: Tailoring your web presence to make your website more visible on search engines
- Email marketing: Sending curated emails to current and potential patients to remind them about your medical practice services and invite them to schedule appointments
Thankfully, digital marketing for doctors doesn’t need to be too time-consuming. We’ve created this guide to help you implement successful healthcare marketing tactics to grow your healthcare practice.
Read on to learn our guide to digital marketing for doctors, then checkout our Medical Office Software and how it can streamline your digital marketing today.
Why Medical Practices Cannot Afford To Ignore Online Marketing
The medical industry is highly competitive. If your practice is like many, you probably compete for patients with at least one other specialized practice in your area. When similar health care practices hold a competitive advantage over your practice, you may struggle to convince potential patients to give you their business.
Additionally, many people across the U.S. currently face steep medical bills and lingering medical debt that dissuade them from wanting to schedule additional appointments. Without financial assistance from an HMO or PPO health insurance plan, many people simply cannot afford to see physicians regularly.
However, your digital marketing campaign can target these challenges within the medical field to convince potential patients to schedule with your practice.
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Get StartedDoctors and Physicians Can Do Successful Digital Marketing Without Hiring an Agency
Many healthcare professionals choose to hire a healthcare marketing agency to manage all aspects of their digital marketing strategies. While hiring a digital marketing agency is a surefire way to implement effective marketing tactics, it isn’t always necessary.
In reality, most doctors and physicians can do successful digital marketing without hiring an agency. Many of the most profitable digital marketing tactics, like social media marketing and email marketing, require no healthcare marketing knowledge or expertise.
Below are a few digital marketing strategies your medical practice can implement without hiring a healthcare marketing agency.
1. Get and Keep Patients by Posting on All Your Social Media Sites
Posting on your healthcare practice’s social media accounts is one of the easiest and most affordable ways to market your practice.
Today, most people in the U.S. have at least one or two social media accounts and check their social networking news feeds a few times per week. Your practice can capitalize on this voluntary social media usage to reach potential patients with digital marketing tactics.
We recommend using social networks like Facebook and Instagram to share longer text posts accompanied by pictures. Meanwhile, you can use Twitter to post short blurbs about your healthcare practice and use TikTok to create fun, goofy videos to increase brand awareness.
Note: You should always make sure that you follow HIPAA compliance regulations when posting to social networks. No healthcare marketing practice is worth the risk of a HIPAA violation.
2. Use Email Marketing To Boost and Maintain Patient Volume
Sending emails to existing and potential patients is an essential step in maintaining good marketing communication. Here are a few ideas of the types of emails you can send to patients:
- Promotional emails that give details about an upcoming discount or deal
- New patient emails that provide more information about the patient’s first visit
- Customer retention emails that remind existing patients to schedule check-ups
- Direct marketing emails that advertise your practice to potential patients
These are just a few of the many ways you can use email marketing to boost and maintain patient volume.
Weave can help you create a professional email marketing campaign even if you have no experience crafting marketing emails. With Weave, you can choose from a range of email templates and insert high-quality stock photos to make your emails more eye-catching to patients.
3. Optimize Your Website for Local SEO
When potential patients perform a search engine query for “dentist near me” or “physical therapist near me,” the first few results they see are for local businesses that have implemented local SEO, or search engine optimization, strategies.
Local SEO is the practice of increasing your search engine rankings when people within your general area search for your type of healthcare practice. You can start optimizing your website for local SEO by:
- Choosing a domain name that features local keywords
- Creating a clean, user-friendly website layout
- Using Weave to invite patients to leave reviews
- Implementing schema markup tactics
It may be helpful to hire a local SEO service to implement the most successful SEO strategies on your website. However, even completing a few of the tasks above can increase your local search engine rankings, allowing more potential patients to find your healthcare practice.
4. Optimize Your Website Pages for Local SEO
Not only should your website as a whole promote local SEO (search engine optimization), but your website pages should also enhance local SEO. Specifically, you should create the following web pages for your healthcare practice website:
- Local landing page
- Local SEO services page
- City page for every city you target patients within
Here’s another local SEO tip: you can also reach out to online directories and ask them to include a link to your website on their local citations page. Creating backlinks, or links to your website on other websites, can also improve your local SEO strategy and increase your visibility within local search results.
5. Maintain a Professional and Patient-Friendly Website Design
Your healthcare website design is also essential to your search engine rankings and overall web traffic. Your healthcare web design should reflect the professional practices and attention to detail that you showcase through your healthcare services every day. A low-quality, confusing medical website design can create a poor image of your practice.
6. Keep an Online Blog With Procedure Based Content That Is Interesting to Patients
One easy way to promote your healthcare practice through content marketing is to keep an online blog with procedure-based content that is interesting to patients. Including relevant health information in your blog content can encourage patients to come to your website to learn about their health struggles.
If desired, you can also create training videos that give potential patients an inside look at your procedures, which may help them feel more comfortable coming to your practice for the first time.
7. Support Your Online Marketing Efforts With Traditional Offline Advertising
While digital marketing should take up most of your marketing budget, we recommend pairing your digital marketing tactics with a few traditional offline marketing strategies. Using both marketing methods will give your practice the best chance of reaching the most potential patients.
Your offline marketing tactics can include sending direct mail to potential patients, creating print advertisements, developing pamphlets, and participating in speaking engagements. Each of these strategies has the potential to reach different types of people, expanding your offline marketing reach.
If you’re looking for an easy way to jumpstart your marketing strategies, we recommend using Weave. Weave can automate several of the most critical aspects of marketing, saving you time and allowing you to focus on delivering the best experiences to existing patients. Click here to request your free Weave demo.
In the next article of this series, we provide a guide to healthcare marketing.
Read the Entire Marketing for Doctors Series
