Marketing in healthcare can often feel overwhelming. Like any industry, we must evolve to meet the needs of our patients. No longer can you fall back on excuses like, “We don’t need to expand our patient volumes,” or “Patients will come to our location because it is the closest” or “Everyone knows me as I’m an expert in my field”.
These excuses may lead you down a path of complacency, and at the mercy of your competitors. You may risk falling behind.
Why You Need Medical Marketing
Patients may seem loyal, but there are a number of reasons why they may change physicians. As you improve your healthcare marketing, you will need to stay in touch with your patients and know how to best meet their needs.
A few reasons patients may leave include:
- Providers are no longer accepting their healthcare insurance
- Relocation
- Higher costs for the same service
- Limited or no access to same-day appointments
- Limited or no access to direct communication with their physician
- Limited or no access to virtual care appointments (e.g., telehealth).
- Limited or no access to secure online appointment scheduling, bill pay, or medical records
- Dissatisfaction with wait times
- A negative patient experience
- No access to remote patient monitoring capabilities
Areas of Focus for Healthcare Marketing
To help avoid these potential pitfalls, you can start working on an effective marketing campaign. These should be ongoing, with various timetables and objectives.
Our top five suggestions include:
1. Improve Your Web Presence
Your website is the first impression of your practice. Many people will search for a provider or look online before stepping foot in a healthcare facility. Your website is essentially your front door.
Websites should be fast, user-friendly, adapted to mobile, and easy to navigate. Avoid confusing jargon or outdated images. Your website should make a solid first impression and help guide users to what they are looking for.
Your services should be clearly listed on the website. Even if you treat something routine and feel like it is understood if you don’t list it on your website a potential patient may not know that you are experienced in that area.
You can expand your website to include informational videos on treatments performed, what to expect, and discharge instructions so that patients are more informed and prepared.
Physicians are also a major part of your website. Be sure that their bios are up-to-date, images are inviting, reviews are included, and consider welcome videos or other friendly ways to make physicians come alive.
2. Use Consistent Branding
The key to any marketing effort is to solidify your branding. This means having a clear direction for the overall message of your practice. Branding also includes streamlining fonts, colors, images, and tone.
As you craft a recognizable brand, you’ll be able to promote awareness. Your organization will appear professional and predictable in marketing efforts.
Branding can appear in traditional outlets like billboards or print, but also on e-mail newsletters, flyers, Google ads, and more.
Discuss major messages that you want your brand to encapsulate. This is especially important in a large organization as you want to make sure all service lines are streamlined and on board with the marketing plan and overall brand.
3. Invest in Social Media
Many use social media for news, community events, and to stay in touch with friends and family.
As you expand your social media presence, you may be able to market to patients in these main areas. Your providers can connect with their patients in a professional way.
Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms tend to target different age ranges. Depending on your key audience, you may invest resources into a specific platform and expand from there.
You can also consider paid social. Paid advertising on social media is a better way to reach a much larger audience of the right people who may be looking for your services—even if you’re not already connected. Be careful here that you correctly address your ad privacy settings as you do not want to expose any private data.
4. Utilize SEO – Search Engine Optimization and Analytics
Search engine optimization is a powerful tool for getting your medical practice or hospital to the top of search results.
To do this, you may need the right phrases and keywords. This needs to be done in an organic way so there are relevant medication conditions, healthcare treatments, and other services that appear.
Because Google cares about readability first and foremost, these terms should appear naturally throughout your content.
You can use analytics to track your marketing efforts online and rely on the data to make sound decisions. Know where the eyeballs are and how patients find you.
5. Use Patient Reviews to Your Advantage
Utilizing patient reviews is a great way to expand your marketing. This strategy can improve your patient experiences and enhance growth.
This can also be a great way to get positive patient reviews out to the public. As you gather testimonials from happy patients this can be an ideal strategy to expand your reach.
When choosing between two providers, a patient is 91% more likely to select the provider with higher reviews. This is a big number with 9 out of 10 patients will pick your competitor if your online reputation is bad.
You can also make sure that your call center, front desk staff, or patient intake process is working properly. If you have a solid marketing strategy but it takes 10 minutes before a patient can talk to someone, you may have larger issues to address.
Using this feedback can help transform your organization for more positive experiences and intentional marketing in the future.
Ready to jump-start your medical marketing efforts?
Reach out to Practis for a free assessment.
