Medical Marketing for Doctors: 8 Strategies to Help Your Office Get More Patients

Have you been struggling to bring in new patients to your healthcare practice? If so, you may need to revamp your medical marketing strategy.

Marketing your medical practice well is essential to remaining competitive and profitable amongst the dozens of other practices in your state. You not only need to provide high-quality, reliable services to patients, but you also need to reach beyond your current patients to increase brand awareness and patient acquisition.

Read on to learn more about medical marketing for doctors and eight successful strategies you can implement in your medical practice. Then check out Weave’s Medical Software here to see how you can streamline your practice’s digital marketing efforts.

Why Is Marketing Important for Doctors?

Many doctors wonder why digital marketing is so crucial for their practices. If people have medical issues, they will find the appropriate medical practice to assist them — right?

However, because there are so many specialized medical practices in the U.S. today, you aren’t guaranteed to see all of the patients who need your services. Many of them will schedule with other healthcare providers in your area instead.

Using an effective digital marketing strategy for your healthcare business can lead prospective patients to choose your practice over others in your area. Every new patient who schedules with your team increases your profits, boosting your practice’s success.

How Do Doctors Market Their Practice?

Doctors use a wide range of digital marketing strategies to market their practices. Some of the most effective digital marketing strategies include:

• Content marketing: Creating written or visual content to post on your website or social media pages. Content marketing can enhance your search engine optimization (SEO), allowing more people to find your website when searching for related healthcare practices.
• Social media marketing: Posting on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and LinkedIn. You can post organic (free) posts or paid social media ads to market your practice.
• Email marketing: Sending emails to your existing and potential patient base to remind them about your services, share important news, and encourage them to schedule with you
• Video marketing: Creating engaging videos that teach viewers about your practice and give them reasons to schedule an appointment

We’ll discuss these strategies more in-depth below.

Online Marketing for Doctors

Advertising your medical office well doesn’t need to consume too much of your time. Here are a few easy online marketing strategies to help you bring in new patients:

1. Put Efforts Into Social Media Marketing for Doctors

If your healthcare office does not currently have any social media accounts, you are missing out on a hugely influential way to reach new patients.

Most people spend at least a few hours on social media each day. Advertising your practice on these platforms can allow users to learn more about you while partaking in an activity they already enjoy.

You can create two primary types of posts on social media:

• Organic posts: Posts that you do not need to pay for. These can include text posts, images, and videos that appear on your practice’s social media pages.
• Paid advertisements: Ads that you pay for through platforms like Facebook Ads. These advertisements can appear on users’ social media feeds even if they do not follow your practice’s profile.

We recommend using a combination of both of these post types to expand your practice’s reach.

2. Improve Patient Experience by Optimizing Your Website

Your website is a digital marketing tool that can make or break users’ impressions of your healthcare office. If your website is outdated, slow, or clunky, visitors will click away within a few seconds to find a practice that better suits their needs.

You can take the following steps to optimize your website:

• Remove any outdated information
• Improve loading speeds
• Separate written content with headings and short paragraphs
• Include tabs at the top of the page for easier navigation
• Use a readable font and a visually pleasing color palette

3. Blog To Drive Traffic to Your Practice Website

Creating blog posts for your website is another effective strategy for your medical marketing campaign. Many businesses use blog posts to enhance their content marketing strategy, increasing their search engine rankings. For example, at Weave, we have a blog for healthcare providers like you to learn digital marketing tips.

You and your team can write blog posts about:

• Exciting news in your healthcare industry
• How you perform a specific healthcare service
• Why people need to schedule an appointment with a healthcare professional

If you want to optimize your blog posts for SEO, you’ll need to include specific keywords in your posts. Speaking with a medical marketing service can help you understand this process better.

4. Take Advantage of Email Marketing

Many people are more likely to read their emails than open physical mail or engage with digital advertisements. As a result, your practice should create an effective email marketing strategy to engage with your current and prospective patient base.

Weave makes it easy to create high-quality, professional emails and send them to patients with a click of a button. You can use Weave’s email templates and photo library to create stunning emails or make your own emails from scratch. Then, you can use the Weave database to send emails to specific types of patients.

5. Educate Patients Through Content Marketing

Along with creating blog posts to share on your website, you can also create other written articles and text posts to educate patients about your practice. For example, you can create a “services” page that details all of your healthcare services. You can also create a new patient landing page that explains more about your practice and your team.

Like blog posts, these content pages can include specific keywords to increase your search engine rankings. However, they can also improve your practice’s reputation and showcase your professionalism, experience, and expertise.

6. Invest in a Local SEO Strategy

SEO is an essential asset in any good healthcare marketing strategy. However, tailoring your SEO strategy toward your local audience can even more significantly affect your profitability.

Local SEO is the process of making your doctors’ office more visible to a local audience. For example, if you own an optometry business, you probably want potential patients to find your practice when they search for “eye doctor near me” or “eye doctor in (your city name).”

The most effective way to enhance your local SEO is to hire a qualified internet marketing professional to help you. However, you can start by creating written content that includes local keywords prospective patients may search to find your business.

7. Reach Patients Through Video Marketing

Many people are more likely to watch videos than read lengthy blog articles or text posts. You can consider creating medical marketing videos to advertise your medical practice and reach a broader audience.

Here are a few ideas of medical marketing videos you can create:

• Show a tour of your office
• Share what patients can expect during their first visits
• Introduce your team
• Have a medical practitioner explain one of your procedures

8. Collect More Patient Reviews

Online reviews are some of the most effective medical marketing tools you can use. However, it can be challenging to persuade patients to leave reviews of your practice.

One practical way to gain more patient reviews is to use an automation platform like Weave. Weave allows you to send automatic messages to patients after leaving their appointments. These messages can invite them to leave reviews and provide a link to websites like Google Reviews and Facebook Reviews.

Weave can also notify you every time someone new reviews your practice, ensuring that you always remain aware of patient opinions.

Why a Doctor Marketing Agency Is Not Always Necessary

While hiring a medical marketing agency can undoubtedly aid your healthcare marketing strategy, hiring a professional marketer is not always necessary to produce an effective campaign. Many of the above methods are easy to implement even if you have no marketing experience.

Additionally, you can accomplish several essential marketing processes through automation software like Weave. Weave can allow you to send personalized text messages and emails to patients, review your typical patient demographics, collect reviews from patients, and much more.

2 Examples of Successful Healthcare Marketing Campaigns

The examples above are just a few of the many successful digital marketing strategies you can implement in your practice. However, you can also gain inspiration from learning about the effective strategies other healthcare practices have used.

For example, the New York Presbyterian Hospital recently created a marketing campaign highlighting patient stories. The hospital filmed interviews of patients sharing raw, vulnerable accounts of their experiences with doctors and other medical professionals at the hospital. This campaign was successful because of its emotional appeal to viewers.

Meanwhile, the Arkansas Children’s Hospital created a campaign that evoked a different emotion — shock. The hospital’s #100DeadliestDays campaign raised awareness about the period between Memorial Day and Labor Day, when childhood risk of death is at its highest. This case study showed how fear can be effective in medical marketing for doctors.

Both of these medical marketing examples take a unique approach to achieve a unified goal: encouraging viewers to schedule appointments.

Implementing all of these strategies may seem overwhelming at first, so we recommend choosing a few to start with, then slowly improving your digital marketing techniques over time.

If you’re looking for the best way to enhance your digital marketing strategy today, Weave can help. Watch a demo from our Weave team today to learn more about how Weave can streamline medical marketing for doctors.

Want more tips on how to market your practice? Check out our panel discussion on marketing opportunities and tips from our Business Insights Summit: