Proven Medical Practice Marketing Strategies
An important but often difficult part of managing a private medical practice is acquiring new patients. With so much of the world being online, patients can quickly find providers to meet their needs. This can be both good and bad for your providers. It also necessitates an analysis of your current medical practice marketing strategies.
Because so many patients use the internet to find and evaluate providers—90% in fact—you need to make sure your practice is accessible and that your online presence provides an accurate representation of the care you provide.
Digital marketing is often misunderstood and can be overwhelming when considering all the components recommended for a medical practice; however, these tried and true tactics can simplify your strategy and point you in the right direction.
3 Healthcare Marketing Strategies
1 – Optimize your Google Business Profiles
Contrary to popular belief, the first thing that patients typically use to evaluate your practice is not your website—it’s your Google Business Profile or GBP. Your GBP is a free tool that allows you to take charge of the way your business appears on Google. Business Profiles appear in Google Maps and in the local results of Google Search.
Optimizing your GBPs not only ensures that your profiles reflect your practice and providers in an accurate, positive light, but also to help you show up at the top of search results.
Optimizing your GBP includes verifying the basic information for your profile is present and accurate: Business name, Address, Phone number, Hours, Website link, images, Business Description, etc. It also includes selecting the right categories for your business.
Pro tip: You should have a Google Business Profile for each location and provider you have. This helps increase the likelihood that your locations and providers show up multiple times when relevant searches are performed.
2 – Gather Online reviews and Improve your Ratings
One of the most important parts of a Google Business Profile is the reviews and rating section. The best way to improve these ratings and gather reviews is through an automated text or email review invitation.
There are plenty of programs available that can enable you to do this. Be sure that the program you use is compatible with your EHR and is HIPAA compliant. Our data indicates that you’ll see a 1.3 star rating jump, on average, after you start this process. But why does gathering more reviews positively improve ratings?
Well, the truth is, if you aren’t prompting patients to leave you reviews, your ratings are probably negatively skewed. This is because happy patients rarely leave reviews on their own. Leaving your reviews section to be dominated by angry patients who need no extra motivation to share their thoughts. Once you get the majority of your happy patients talking online, those ratings will shoot up and more accurately reflect your level of care.
3 – Invest in Paid Search Campaigns
Have you noticed when using Google, ads appear across the top of the search results page? These ads look just like search results, but have a small “Ad” identifier next to them. These are paid search campaigns. That’s when a company pays to appear at the top of the results page when certain terms are searched.
Utilizing your own paid search campaigns can help you be noticed by more patients. This survey from Search Engine Land shows that 90% of survey respondents were likely to click on the first set of results on a search engine results page and 60% of mobile users were very likely to click on the first couple of results, so the closer to the top you can get your ad to appear, the more likely you are to get patients calling to make an appointment.
At a minimum, it’s important to run brand ads—ads with your practice or institution name as keywords. This results in your name appearing at the top of search results when a patient has prior brand awareness of your practice and searches for you online.
SocialClimb Can Help
Using digital marketing in your medical practice marketing strategy can be a great way to connect with new patients and build your practice. If you’re ready to grow your medical practice using digital marketing, SocialClimb can help. SocialClimb is a healthcare marketing platform that allows you to seamlessly secure your brand and improve your reputation, target high-value patients with ads, and measure your ROI to see the value of your marketing efforts.
Ready to revamp your practice’s healthcare marketing strategies? Start by seeing how you compare online today.
