Feb 23, 2023

A Channel Guide for Medical Practice Marketing

Healthcare digital marketing requires fresh, innovative thinking. With the amount of policies healthcare must adhere and adapt to, new ideas may fall short. To survive an ever-changing digital world and stay on top of your competition, healthcare must invest in digital marketing.

This guide will evaluate various digital channels and tactics to help medical practice marketers and healthcare practitioners determine the right new patient lead generation strategy for their practice.

illustration of stethoscope with medical marketing on phone

A Healthcare Marketing Prognosis

Most medical practices digitally transformed their record systems into Electronic Medical Records (EMRs) in recent years. However, when it comes to digital marketing, revamping is still needed.

Many practices still solely rely on traditional advertising methods to drum up new business, some of which include:

  • Mass mailing lists
  • Postcards
  • Billboards
  • Brochures

We’re not saying these don’t work. Though we are saying a strong digital marketing approach should complement them well.

Most advertisers have difficulty measuring success using the traditional approach in terms of lead generation and ROI. With digital marketing, one of its biggest advantages consists of the ability to gain a deeper understanding. You can see which campaigns and strategies directly generate calls, qualified leads, and appointments. Likewise, you can see which projects fall short of success.

Ultimately, this data should give your medical practice the big-picture and should help make informed decisions about your overall marketing activity.

Paid Search

Paid search reaches people the moment they search for something your medical practice provides. Furthermore, paid search ads appear at the top of a search page. You can customize them to deliver the right message at the right time, no matter what device. It can also be used for mobile users seeking to get customer support on the phone, a common occurrence in medical practices. Regardless of your exact paid search strategy, this tactic is critical to your medical practice marketing when you’re up against powerful competitors.

One downside to paid search is cost. Without an experienced PPC manager to build campaigns, initial testing costs can be expensive, as health-related terms can sometimes run over $75 per click or more. But while understanding those clicks may have a high out of pocket, they may have higher likelihood of conversion.

To avoid insane expenses, perform in-depth keyword research. Don’t be afraid to be selective of the terms you plan to use. Also, carefully craft your budgets and targets while you frequently monitor progress.

Programmatic Display and Video

Through programmatic advertising, your organization can reach visitors via audience-based buying. When pinpointing your target using data segments, your programmatic partner locates your target on a wide variety of websites that appeal to their interests.

Programmatic advertising’s objective serves to produce brand awareness and traffic, making it a more top-of-funnel approach. Therefore, your out-of-pocket expenses typically cost less. We recommend focusing on reaching users in the geographic area close to your practice for best results.

Be cognizant of regulations when setting up your medical practice marketing funnel. Retargeting, a common marketing tactic of running display ads to previous website visitors, is strictly prohibited as it violates HIPPA patient confidentiality. Moreover, several healthcare-specific programmatic partners exist that can help avoid any privacy issues and have extremely accurate data for reporting.

SEO and Content Marketing

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of boosting your appearance within search results, which can be specific to your geographic location. Unlike paid search and display advertising, SEO is an organic way to obtain a healthy online presence. It has many moving parts all of which aid search engines to deliver the most relevant content to the searcher.

Technical SEO

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website so a search engine can better understand its value. It focuses on improving a site’s performance, relevance, and structure in order to provide the best experience for users while making it easy for search engines to access and understand.

Local SEO

Local SEO is similar to a company’s listing details in a phonebook or business directory. Local listings help the search engine provide details about your medical practice, such as location, hours, specialties, etc. The more reviews, comments, and interactions your local listing receives can improve future visibility in searches in your area.

illustration of local seo building blocks

Link Profiles

A link profile is the collection of other websites that link to your website and what context they provide about your site. Are you being mentioned and linked to by reputable organizations, or spam websites? A link profile will tell you.

Conversion Rate Optimization

Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the structured testing of various elements within your marketing funnel to find variants that convert more frequently than the initial version. For example, a CRO process for a landing page would focus on improving conversion rates over time by testing offers, headlines, button copy, and other page elements, and finding variant pages that convert better.

Content Creation

Content creation is another term for creating posts, guides, graphics, or other media that help educate, inform, or entertain visitors. By building resources that help people identify problems and then solve them, brands can make their website “sticky.” This means visitors will stick around to read the content (and other site pages) and share the link with others.

How does this impact SEO? Good keyword strategy in content can improve Search Engine Placement Ranking (SERP). Also, search engines pay attention to how users interact with a page — quality interactions will help the page get served more frequently in the future.

Focus on creating a few high-quality pieces of content like guides, infographics, or other original ideas that serve a purpose, instead of a high volume of short posts that merely gloss over a topic. Quality over quantity wins in the content game.

Content Promotion with Social Media

After you have created content that matters to your audience, you’ll want to deliver it to that target audience directly. Paid and organic social media promotion is a great way to maximize the reach of your content.

Depending on your target audience, websites like Facebook and LinkedIn offer ways to target subgroups of its users and share your content with them. Most of the platforms offer precise targeting segments to reach people, patients, doctors and partners most likely to interact with your organization.

illustration of users engaging with healthcare ads on social media

Consider this a long-term approach to building your medical practice’s brand, and use it to build relationships with those people likely to need your services in the future. In addition, be sure to set what your goal is for these platforms and monitor the quality of the traffic you receive from the campaigns. If the page isn’t generating quality visitors, try promoting it again with a different or more refined content and/or tweaking the audience.

Local Reviews

Just like in real life, making connections and partnering with other businesses can help you become more visible in a local community. Be sure to add your business listing on local directories such as Google Business Partners, Yelp, local news sites, and other community pages. Check your listings frequently to make sure the data they have is accurate. Encouraging patients to leave a review on Google, Facebook or Yelp can help your business in several ways:

  • Social proof that others think your practice is worth visiting
  • Businesses with positive reviews tend to be higher on the list for searches

You can maintain a steady stream of reviews by adding a review card during your exit process to remind patients.

Encourage patients to leave a review from their smartphone or home computer. Do not install a tablet in the waiting room for patients to do reviews at your office, as it can appear as if one computer is trying to game the system by adding multiple reviews. -Andi Graham

Now, not everyone is going to leave a glowing review. In fact, you might even get a negative review every once in a while. How you handle the response, however, is everything. Respond to bad reviews professionally and offer an opportunity to make it right. Show in your reply that you are willing to make it right and address the concerns that they have.

Email Marketing

Newsletters and emails are a great way to reach clients at a low cost. Think of them as the new direct mailer (just a bit cheaper!) However, each one needs a specific purpose. Don’t overdo the frequency, or you’ll get marked as spam by mail providers, or worse, ignored by your audience. Your medical practice marketing should be helpful above all things. Success will flow naturally if you commit to helping patients and potential patients at every step, including with the emails you send.

How We Generated $6,000 With One Healthcare Newsletter >>

Add value to your patient relationship through email; don’t make every email a promotion. By filling the email or newsletter with useful information, your audience will continue to open and engage with your messaging. If you send only promotions, your audience will flag it as spam, or unsubscribe, and you’ll lose them as an audience forever.

Digital Marketing Tools for Healthcare

In order to gain better insights into your visitors and the results of your digital marketing efforts, these tools are a must-have for any successful digital marketing campaigns:

Google Analytics

Understand website visitors’ behavior, study demographic data, and gauge the effectiveness of campaigns.

Keyword Planner

Check on the volume, costs, and competitiveness for various keywords.

Promoter.io

Gather Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and determine the sentiment of your patients and clients.

Hootsuite

Schedule social media, respond to audience interactions and review results from your posts.

Google Looker Studios/DataBox

Generate custom reports, view high-level marketing stats, and track performance week to week, month-over-month, and year-over-year.

HubSpot

Use a full marketing automation suite to send emails, create landing pages, develop workflows, schedule content across social channels, and manage your marketing campaigns.

Modernize Your Medical Marketing

Digital marketing offers medical practices more effective ways to reach potential patients. Setting goals and then quantifying the results allows medical marketers the insights needed to make better marketing decisions.

If you have any questions about digital marketing for your healthcare business or are looking for help in building your marketing program, drop us a line. We’re always glad to help!