Local Marketing for Healthcare
One of the many factors you must consider when developing your healthcare organization’s marketing strategy is how well you expose target customers to your services. As our digital worlds expand, healthcare practices may find it more appealing to market themselves nationally. After all, the wider your reach, the more potential patients you can get, right? Well, not necessarily.
It may seem that focusing your efforts on local marketing for healthcare restricts you from reaching a large number of possible patients. However, before deciding to give national marketing a go, it’s necessary to consider the level of scale required to convert customers nationally compared to the conversion benefits of local marketing for healthcare.
National Marketing vs Local Marketing for Healthcare
The key to deciding between a national marketing and local marketing campaign lies in your campaign goal. Do you want to build brand awareness? Or are you after qualified leads?
A national marketing campaign allows you to reach a wide audience and get more visibility. However, as contradicting as this may sound, greater visibility doesn’t always mean greater profit. National marketing campaigns can help you build brand awareness and become more recognizable, but tend to yield fewer conversions. On the other hand, local marketing for healthcare allows you to reach potential patients in a more targeted way and at a point where they’re searching for your services.
Converting prospective patients into returning ones requires both financial resources and time investment. It takes different strategies to attract these patients. Also, stretching these marketing methods nationally is a major undertaking that often doesn’t yield the results healthcare practices expect.
In case your local market is too small or doesn’t have enough need for your product or service, a great way to expand without going fully national would be to create a regional campaign or select specific cities or states to target. This allows you to expand your market without stretching your budget too thin. It also requires solid market research to choose markets that need your services and aren’t already saturated with providers.
National and local marketing for healthcare have their strengths and weaknesses and they’re not mutually exclusive. Conducting both might help you cover all fields, but this is an expensive feat. So, before making a final decision, it’s worth contemplating a couple more questions:
- Do you operate on a national level?
- Do you plan on expanding your practice beyond current locations in the near future?
- Do you have a lot of out-of-state patients traveling in to be treated in your practice?
If the answers to these questions are negative, it may be smart to focus your marketing efforts (and your budget!) locally.
Why Marketing Locally Matters
People expect immediate and relevant solutions from an online search. For most of them, the important decision-making factors are:
- Proximity—how close your healthcare practice is to the patient’s current location;
- Reputation—how popular and well-regarded your healthcare practice is in the local area;
- Relevance—how appropriate your services are, based on the user’s search intent.
With 46% of all searches being local, ensuring your practice ranks high in local and “near me” Google searches should be your key focus. If your marketing strategy isn’t targeting the locations within your reach, you could miss out on many patients who are likely to visit other practices that are investing in local marketing for healthcare.
Local marketing allows you to craft your target audience profiles in more detail and with greater accuracy. By focusing on the right market, you can reduce patient acquisition costs. You can earn more by reaching the most valuable leads in your network. They’re the ones who will most likely respond positively to your services.
Marketing locally allows you to personalize your campaigns in line with the local references and increase your relatability as well as your conversion chances. Each community has a different story to tell and having a strategy and the tools in place to address these varied options will help you establish a personal touch that patients relate to, gain trust and acceptance, and grow your practice.
Even if you operate in multiple locations nationwide, for lead conversion purposes, local campaigns in each location will yield better results than one national campaign. This will open up access to a given market in ways that big national campaigns can’t. Healthcare marketing is all about access to the patient, and local marketing campaigns provide you with the most direct reach.
How to Boost Local Marketing for Healthcare
While local marketing for healthcare can be challenging, it’s definitely worth the effort when considering the benefits described above. Here are some of the strategies you can implement to improve visibility and show up in local searches:
Optimize Your GBP Listing
If you want to improve the chances of your Google Business Profile (GBP) listing ranking well for relevant local search results, it’s necessary to optimize it. Make sure you’ve claimed and verified your listing in GBP if it already exists. If not, create it and increase the chances to be seen when patients search for medical care in critical moments.
Moving forward, you need to keep it up-to-date and provide patients with the correct information about your practice. Otherwise, you can miss out on many high-quality leads.
Ask Patients to Leave Reviews
Having a growing number of reviews on your GBP listing shows that it’s active and relevant. It makes it more possible for the listing to appear in the three-pack of Local Search results. Also, positive reviews give potential patients more information about your practice and let them develop an opinion about your services before deciding to visit you.
All you have to do is to ask your patients to leave you a review and make it easy for them by sending a personalized text or email with a link.
Use Predictive Analytics
The whole point of adopting a local marketing strategy is to tap into a local specific needs and trends and use that data to meet patients’ needs.
Predictive tools filter and analyze real-time data to help you find individuals in need of specific medical services. As a result, you can use this data while it still matters to patients. Then you can focus your marketing spend directly on them.
Introduce Targeted Ads
Paid ads show up at the top of online search results and significantly increase your online visibility. Based on the results of predictive analytics, you can get ads in front of people at risk for specific medical conditions. All the ones you want to treat and make sure they find you when they search for medical care.
To make even better use of your marketing spend, you can place targeted ads on multiple platforms, Facebook and Instagram included.
Get Closer to Your Patients with Local Marketing for Healthcare
The first thing that comes to mind when you think of digital marketing for healthcare is how much it can help you increase your visibility and gain exposure to a broader audience. However, it’s widely known that brands that are closest to their customers will ultimately win.
Local marketing for healthcare is an essential part of your online presence. Not localizing your efforts can cost you a lot of money and opportunity.
SocialClimb helps you improve visibility and meet your patients’ demands by putting the right tools at your disposal and making sure you’re using them well. Recognizing that local marketing for healthcare is a highly valuable platform for growing your practice. It’s also an essential component of a successful digital marketing campaign. We provide you with optimized local marketing strategy that deliver you larger and more engaged customers ready to convert.
