Marketing for Pediatric Practices

In this day and age, good pediatrician marketing is crucial to your practice’s success, competitiveness, and profitability.

Gone are the days of simply attracting new patients through word of mouth. Your local market is likely oversaturated with pediatric practices offering the same services as you. To stay competitive and get your name out there, you need effective digital marketing strategies in place.

Weave is an all-in-one pediatrician marketing solution that makes connecting with current and prospective patients simple and automatic. Learn more about marketing for pediatric practices and how Weave can help you streamline the process.

Understanding the Pediatrician Market

Before you can begin implementing successful pediatric marketing ideas for your practice, you need to understand the pediatrician market and the unique challenges that come with it.

As a pediatrician, you need to:

Target a specific audience: Your audience is parents or guardians of children from birth to age 18. However, many children see the same pediatrician their whole lives, which means you need to target newborns, families that are new to town, or the rare families dissatisfied with their current pediatricians.

Inform your target audience about the importance of pediatric care: As you probably know, many families only bring their children to a pediatrician when they are actively sick. You need to find a way to create relevance among families even outside of sick visits.

Distinguish your practice from others: You likely aren’t the only pediatrician in your area, so why should prospective patient families choose you? Accepting a wide range of insurance options isn’t enough to convince more patients to choose your pediatrics practice.

Meet HIPAA requirements for marketing: Of course, you must ensure that all marketing efforts adhere to HIPAA requirements. HIPAA may impact your ability to share patient reviews and feedback without express permission.

The Role of Digital Presence

Your practice’s online reputation plays a huge role in your marketing strategy and overall success as a pediatric practice. In this digital age, as many as four out of five people use the Internet to make healthcare-related searches. Even more significant, three in five people choose a healthcare provider because of a strong online presence.

Your pediatric practice needs an engaging, professional, competitive digital presence to spread the word about your practice and engage your target patient base. A strong online presence starts with a solid website.

Your pediatric website should leverage a professional web design that reflects your practice’s high-quality pediatric services, attention to detail, and commitment to patient care. It should also be highly functional, allowing current and potential patients to quickly find helpful information about your practice.

To go above and beyond in your pediatric marketing strategy, you should include features on your website like digital patient intake forms, online appointment booking, and patient portals to aid the patient journey.

Utilizing Patient Feedback and Reviews

Online reputation management is extremely important to your pediatric marketing strategy. You may feel like you have no control over what people say about your practice online, but with the right reputation management strategy in place, you can curate a positive image that accurately reflects your pediatric practice.

Positive patient reviews go a long way in building trust among prospective patients. As many as 77% of patients use online reviews as their first step in finding a new healthcare professional.

You can encourage positive online reviews by sending texts and emails to patients after each appointment, inviting them to provide feedback. Any negative feedback can be sent directly to your practice, while positive feedback can be posted to your Google profile and social media reviews.

You can also manage your online reputation by responding to negative reviews and trying to right the wrong. Responding with a compassionate message that clarifies the patient’s issue can invite other potential patients to take the review with a grain of salt.

Key Digital Marketing Strategies for Pediatrician Marketing

Crafting a successful digital marketing campaign for your pediatric practice may sound like an overwhelming task. However, you can break your pediatrician marketing presence into several smaller strategies and focus on one at a time.

Pediatricians have pinpointed several effective marketing strategies you can use to reach other patients and grow your practice. Drawing from competitor strategies while improving upon them can help you position your practice as the best choice for prospective patient families in the local market.

Leveraging Social Media

If you’ve put off creating social media channels for your pediatric practice until this point, now is the time to jump on the bandwagon. Social media offers an excellent opportunity to engage your patient base organically and build an online reputation.

Your practice can use social media to build relationships with existing patients (and their parents), reach prospective patients by sharing about your services, and establish your healthcare practice as a personable, warm, friendly option. But you need to use social media strategically to gain the most benefits from this strategy — and avoid hurting your online reputation.

Here are a few ideas to help you leverage social media for your pediatric practice:

• Share photos of your staff to break the barrier between staff and patient families.
• Provide helpful content about children’s health and wellness that links to your website, where patients can find more information.
• Film a walk-through of your office so new patients and their families know what to expect.
• Post about common treatment reminders to keep families healthy, remind about back-to-school vaccines, or inform on upcoming flu seasons.
• Post practice news and timely information to keep patients informed about changes and updates to your services.
• Host giveaways or contests (while maintaining HIPAA adherence) to bring more visitors to your social media profiles.
• Share information about your community to position your practice as having the best local pediatricians.
• Post about awards, licenses, and honors your healthcare professionals receive to boost your reputation.

Ideally, you will create a steady stream of social media posts throughout the week and engage with your patients in the comments of your posts. Doing so will help humanize your pediatrics practice and engage your target audience.

Content Marketing and SEO

Content marketing and SEO are huge components of successful pediatrician marketing.

Content marketing is the practice of creating written and visual content that moves potential patients through the pediatrician marketing funnel, converting them from leads to prospects to patients. Meanwhile, search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of tailoring that content and other aspects of your online presence for search engines.

Content Strategies

Effective content marketing helps you show that your pediatric office is highly educated and informed. You can share relevant content about your pediatric services and answer common questions, such as “How often should my child receive a check-up with their pediatrician?”

Having high-quality content on your website makes your pediatric office look good, but it also assists your local SEO strategy.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine marketing helps your practice’s website and online profile rise to the top of search results for queries like “pediatrics practices near me.”

When your website is higher in the search engine results pages, more patients will find your practice, boosting online visibility. However, search engine marketing is a complex strategy that requires ongoing adjustments and improvements to your online presence to perfect.

You must include the right keywords and practice information in your content to show that your website should appear in relevant search results. Without effective search engine marketing strategies in place, you’ll lose out on web traffic to other medical practices that are investing in SEO.

Email Marketing and Patient Engagement

Don’t be fooled — email marketing is still a relevant pediatric marketing strategy in the 2020s. Your practice should be using this free, organic outlet to maintain patient relationships and remind prospective patients about your services.

Many families don’t think about their pediatric office until their children become sick. By sending out emails regularly, your practice can stay at the top of patients’ minds, maintaining that relationship even between visits.

Email marketing sends relevant information and news about your pediatric practice right to your patients’ inboxes, providing a direct line of communication. Through frequent emails, your patients will come to see your practice as one that values the patient experience and wants to be part of the family’s lifestyle outside of scheduled visits.

Community Involvement and Local Marketing

As a local pediatric practice, your pediatric marketing strategies center around a local audience. Getting involved with your community shows potential patients that your practice cares about making a difference in your local area and isn’t just trying to turn a profit.

Your practice may consider donating to a local cause, volunteering for a local nonprofit organization, or setting up a booth at community events as ways to boost engagement with your community. You can also implement local pediatric marketing ideas to engage families in your area, such as the following:

• Creating city pages on your website that target specific cities/suburbs in your practice area
• Optimizing your Google Business Profile to get your practice into the local pack, which displays area businesses at the top of search results
• Using paid search ads, social media ads, and Google ads to target local users
• Offering referral incentives to encourage patients to tell their friends and family members about your practice

Spreading the word about your clinic within the community can help you reach more local families already in a great position to schedule an appointment.

Measuring Marketing Success in Your Pediatric Practice

Implementing effective marketing strategies is only the first step in reaching more patients and staying at the top of patients’ minds. You must also track your marketing success to ensure that your pediatrician marketing strategies are working as they should.

Every marketing strategy has its method of tracking KPIs. For example, with email marketing, you can review the click-through rates, bounce rates, and conversion rates of the direct mail you send to patients.

You can view data on your website about traffic and the time users spend on each page. You can also evaluate the frequency with which patients are using digital intake forms and online appointment booking on your patient portals.

Check the performance of your marketing strategies at least once per month. If a strategy is underperforming, consider whether you need to solve any issues or approach it a different way.

Reach More Current and Prospective Patients With Weave

Tailoring your pediatric marketing strategically can help your practice stay competitive and continually reach more patients, ultimately boosting your bottom line.

The above pediatric marketing ideas are cost-effective ways to get the word out about your clinic. Pairing these strategies with Weave, a comprehensive patient communication platform, can help you save time while promoting patient satisfaction and enhancing care.

Weave includes features like automated appointment reminders, email and text marketing templates, automatic billing and payments, digital forms, and much more. Request a free Weave demo today to learn how Weave can assist your pediatrician marketing efforts.