Category: Digital Marketing

Clinical efficiency: chasing the unicorn

I remember once talking with a colleague who had transitioned out of the military.  He was previously excited about his new job opportunity, but a year later he tells me, “I hate civilian medicine.  I thought my clinical efficiency was great, but it’s not enough to keep up with everything.”

I was surprised because he had been excited for the opportunity to teach in a residency program again.  He said, “I love teaching, and I love the residents.  But, when I’m not teaching, they’ve got me seeing 30 patients a day!  How am I supposed to do that and get all of my other stuff done?”  

All too often, physicians are struggling at the end of each day to complete all of their tasks.  We have to hurry and dictate notes, answer phone calls, write prescription refills, and still get home to spend time with our family.  We get 15 minutes with each patient and feel like we have to shortchange the patient by rushing through their appointment.  The only way to get to spend time talking to patients is to be more efficient.

The top 9 hacks that revolutionized the clinical efficiency of my practice.  

1. Review charts and write notes ahead of time.

This is by far the most important clinical efficiency hack that I employ.  I spend time in the week prior to each clinic visit reviewing each patient’s chart, reading prior notes, and pre-writing my new notes.  

Based on the referral from their primary care physician, I know the patient’s chief complaint, so I write in all of the relevant details contained in the referring physician’s H&P.  I even pre-write a lot of my assessments and plans when I feel like I have a good enough understanding from my chart review to be able to do so.  

For example, my evaluation for hematochezia or uncomplicated GERD tends to follow a pretty standard approach.  So, I write my basic assessment and plan for evaluation and treatment in my note before seeing the patient.  Then I can tweak it as needed after my actual interview with the patient.  

By the time of the interview, 80-90% of each note is already done.  By prepping the chart beforehand, editing the note takes less than three minutes in most cases.  

I finish my note, print a copy for the patient’s procedure or to send to the referring doctor, and move on to the next patient.  At the end of the day, my notes are already written, so I answer phone calls or urgent emails and I’m ready to go home.

2. Master your EMR templates.

Most EMR systems have templates, “dot phrases,” macros, or other options to create shortcuts for inserting standard blocks of text or sections of the H&P.  This is especially helpful if you employ standard language for procedure consents or disease education.  It’s worth hundreds of hours per year to master your EMR.  Here are a few simple tricks to maximize your EMR’s value.

• • Take a day and get trained on using the EMR:  When I had our IT team train me, I didn’t realize how much I had not known about the program.  They showed me things I wouldn’t have even thought to ask about.  Something as simple as removing buttons from my dashboard that I would never use cut out a lot of wasted time.

• • Auto-coding: If you are personally responsible for your own coding, find out if the EMR has a feature that will automatically generate a code for you.  That saves you of time not having to come up with a code yourself. 

• • “Dot phrases”: Most EMR systems have a way for you to type a preset short word or phrase that converts automatically to a sizable block of text.  I do this for standard instructions on procedure preparation and disease education.  My EMR doesn’t have this built in, so I write my paragraphs on a Word document that I can scroll through.  Then, I can copy the relevant paragraphs and paste them in my note quickly.  

3. Learn to type fast or get good dictation software.  

Like it or not, the medical world is going paperless.  

Some of my colleagues are extremely slow typists, and it massively hampers their efficiency.  If you are a really slow typer (less than 30 words per minute), then you should consider buying a typing training program to increase your typing speed.  

This will take some time to see the effects.  However, it’s going to reduce your turnaround time between patients by as much as half the time.  If you can do that, then you can see more patients in a day or just spend more time with the ones you already see. 

4. Type as you talk.

This one took me some time to get comfortable with, but it’s incredibly valuable.  This won’t work unless you can type without looking at the keys or the screen.  That way, you can maintain eye contact with the patient.  

I rearranged the furniture in my clinic exam room so I can type on the computer and look directly at the patient at the same time.  I get my whole note typed and edited while we speak.  Then I only have to spend 1-2 minutes finishing the assessment and plan after they leave.  

You run the risk here of patients thinking you’re not listening.  Fortunately, I haven’t found this to be an issue as long as I’m looking at them and not my screen.

5. Have the patients arrive 20 minutes early.

If you tell someone their appointment is at 10:00AM and to arrive 20 minutes early, they’ll arrive at 9:58AM.  

If you instead tell them their appointment is at 9:40AM, they’ll arrive at 9:38AM.  Then, they can fill out whatever forms they need for the visit and get vital signs done quickly.  After that, they see your medical assistant or nurse to get any pre-visit work completed.  With that work done, they’ll be ready for you at 10:00AM as planned.  

6. Train your team members to be your gatekeepers.

You want to spend as much time as possible with patients.  So, ideally you should train your team to only bring you questions, tasks, or patient complaints once they’re ready for you to take a specific action on them.  If you’re spending time running down the issue, combing through the chart, or figuring out which pharmacy takes their insurance, you aren’t spending that time seeing patients.  

Also, set aside time for non-emergent clinical tasks to be done once or twice during the clinic day and do them all at once.  That way, you don’t derail your schedule for ten minutes at a time five times a day.   

7. Record videos of education for consents.

This is a relatively new concept, but I’ve observed that patients are comfortable with it.  If you do procedures on a regular basis, you can record a video of yourself doing the appropriate consent process, educating patients on the procedure, and answering commonly asked questions.  Patients can watch this video on YouTube, a DVD of your video, or an app that you create.  

Having patients do this on their own can reduce the staff time spent on this task by 90% or more.  For heavy procedure-based specialties like dermatology and ophthalmology, this can be a game-changer.  I first saw this as a resident in my ophthalmologist’s office when I got PRK, and I thought it was really great.

Make sure you have the video vetted so you know that it has all the relevant information a patient needs to know and that it passes the legal “sniff test.”   

8. Engage with “secret shoppers.” 

Hire several people to come in and be a patient for you.  They can go through the entire clinic process, experience what your other patients experience, and report your shortcomings.  You can probably find people in your community willing to do this for free, but there are also companies who can provide people to be your “secret shoppers.”  

9. Ask your staff for their opinions

Your staff observes things that you don’t observe.  Everyone has an opinion about how they’d do things differently.  So, ask them!  Not every idea will work, but some of them will, and other non-workable ideas may inspire variations that will succeed.  

Clinical efficiency: necessity is the mother of invention

Not only can you increase your clinical efficiency, but the reality of the medical business is that you can’t afford not to!  Physicians are constantly being pushed to see more and more patients, and reimbursement is increasingly being tied to productivity.  

These nine tips can greatly increase your clinical efficiency to allow you to be the productive, engaging physician you want to be.  I don’t believe you have to compromise patient care for efficiency. 

Take the next three months and start employing these hacks.  You’ll see amazing results – I guarantee it.  

Meet Brent Lacy MD

My name is Brent Lacey. I’m a gastroenterologist with a passion for financial management and career coaching. As a fellow physician, I understand how overwhelming it can be to step out of clinical training and into a career, and I have seen first hand the lack of education on how to run a practice and manage finances.

Through planning, hard work, and sacrifice, my wife and I were able to pay off all of our student loans before finishing fellowship, and we got a big head start on our retirement savings. Because we were debt-free, we were in a financial position for her to choose to stop working and stay home with our two amazing boys.

Most physicians enter their profession with large amounts of personal debt. Beyond that – they begin working with little to no knowledge of how to actually run a practice.

As a physician, I think you should be able to help your patients and do what you love without being stressed by all the other obligations that come with managing your medical practice.

That’s why I started “The Scope of Practice.” My goal is to help you gain the knowledge you need to run your business successfully and manage your personal finances with expertise.

Further reading

• The Three People Who Can Make or Break Your Clinical Practice
• How to Maximize Your Patients’ Experience in Your Practice
• First Impressions: What Your Clinic Exam Room Says to Your Patients

Healthcare Marketing Guide for 2021

Healthcare marketing has evolved and grown to be a sophisticated process of finding creative ways to engage with patients where they are on the patient care continuum.

Patients are more than ever interested in taking back their healthcare journey and educating themselves on what you do and how you do it.

That is why it is critical to developing an effective healthcare marketing system to reach and educate new and existing patients.

Why is Healthcare Marketing important?

The importance of marketing in the healthcare industry is to develop and execute marketing strategies geared toward engaging and educating patients on their healthcare journey through SEO, digital advertising, website, content marketing, and more.

The most effective marketing in healthcare is patient-centric, meaning it focuses on who the patient is, what information they care about, and building a know, like, and trust relationship.

The healthcare industry is always changing, and patient education and information are fastly becoming the forefront of focus.

The healthcare world is competitive, and as local competition grows and large hospital systems come into the mix, the more difficult it can be to stand out and promote your medical services.

Healthcare marketing allows you to increase your visibility from your competitors on local search engines and social media platforms.

Another reason why healthcare marketing is important is that an effective healthcare marketing strategy can provide the ability to reach potential patients and position you as a thought leader in your specialty. 

Benefits of Healthcare Marketing…

1. Will Increase the Patient Base of the Practice

That is what this is all about, right? Attracting and retaining patients and improve patient engagement. Effective healthcare marketing services should do just that.

2. Increase Local Physician Referrals to the Practice

Increasing the local reach of your brand should and will result in an increase in new patient referrals to the practice from other local primary care and specialty physicians.

3. Make Your Physicians Thought Leaders in Healthcare

Getting your physicians involved in the marketing initiatives through storytelling and video is a powerful way to allow them to develop thought leadership in their field of expertise.

This will make them a trusted advisor in the eyes of patients and increase the likelihood of a patient choose them over a local competitor.

4. Promote Important Medical Services

Healthcare marketing systems like social media marketing, website, healthcare content marketing, and digital advertising are fantastic tools to let physicians feature and promote their medical services and capabilities.

5. Enhance The Patient Experience at the Practice

Now with the use of healthcare marketing strategies, patients receive not only the top quality medical care but can have an overall fantastic experience, with the availability of continuing education resources, patient portals, reviews, and much more!

Patients are also able to quickly and efficiently communicate with the medical practice and send and receive valuable information to their care.

6. Scale the Reach of The Healthcare Organization

Healthcare marketing has created new avenues to reach patients, share patient journeys, educate the public and patient base, and so much more.

Physicians can now reach the masses with patient education and feature themselves and their brand as an industry thought leaders. As more patients turn to online resources for healthcare, the more ability you have to capture new leads than ever before.

In addition to attracting new patients, healthcare marketing implements tracking and analytics. Tracking and analytics reports can give you a full 360-degree view on where your marketing efforts are most profitable and what you need to do moving forward to scale.

Top Healthcare Marketing Tips to Reach Patients

Now that we more closely understand the importance and benefits of healthcare marketing services, it is time to take a look at the most effective tips that you should be leveraging in your practice to reach and convert new patients.

Marketing in healthcare can seem overwhelming as to what to do and where to get started, which is why we laid out these tips with examples and case studies as well.

These are tested and proved healthcare marketing tips that we leverage with our clients day in and day out.

1. Local SEO Starts with Your Google My Business

A large part of any healthcare marketing strategy is super local by nature.

Why? Because patients are generally only willing to travel so far for patient care.

Therefore, it is critical to winning in your local search environment for whatever specialty or conditions you treat.

About 80% of patients do an online search before booking an appointment with a provider.

And when it comes to winning medical SEO searches, Google My Business is king.

What is a Google My Business listing, you may ask?

Google My Business is a free tool provided for physicians and businesses to manage their online presence for Google.

You run into it nearly every time you search, and it looks like the screenshot below.

When it comes to optimizing your Google My Business, there are a few things that matter the most.

1. Make sure you pick the most accurate category possible (ex. Hand Surgeon in the photo above)
2. Make sure to include where you are and what you are in the first sentence of your business description, i.e., John Smith MD is a hand surgeon in Phoenix, Arizona.
3. Fill out all of your contact info completely

2. Your Reputation Matters, Invest in Patient Reviews

Reviews have quickly become one of the most critical components of healthcare marketing strategies.

This is for several different reasons.

The top reason being is that consumerism has arrived in healthcare.

Meaning (whether we like it or not) patients shop for medical services and physicians similar to how they shop for products on Amazon, they do research, and they read reviews.

92.4% of consumers read online reviews. That is a staggering number. And reputation matters most in healthcare decisions or any other industry.

In addition to that, one of the top local ranking factors for your Google My Business that we mentioned above is….reviews.

That’s right, now that you know how important Google My Business is to good marketing in healthcare, the best way to move yourself to the top of rankings is by generating positive reviews consistently.

The top recommendation for getting started is to find a good workflow to ask patients for reviews.

The easiest way to achieve success is to automate as much of the process as possible by leveraging reputation management for medical practices software.

3.  On-Page SEO Starts With Great Content

One of my favorite personal quotes that I tell to providers is, “If you want to rank for it, you need a page for it.”

In simplified terms, that means that if you want to show up high in local search rankings for your focus specialties and procedures, you need excellent, well-structured content on your website for it.

For example, say you are an orthopedic practice that wants to rank #1 in your local market for your Spine Surgery department.

We would recommend that you have an extremely in-depth page on spinal surgery on your website, complete with who, what, why, and common FAQs.

Just take a look at the screenshot below on a search for ‘knee surgery knoxville.’ The results speak volumes.

The #1 ranking SERP result is a client of ours with a super detailed treatment page about what they offer for Knee Surgery solutions.

Keep this simple rule in mind when thinking about your website’s role in your healthcare marketing plan that you need to make sure you have content as a top priority.

If you want some more specific tips about how to structure the content pages on your website to perform well in search results, check out the video below.

4. Digital Advertising is Extremely Targeted Now

Data has made paid digital advertising a powerful way to connect and drive new patient leads no matter what type of patient you seek or practice you are.

With so many options available to choose from Google Ads, Display Ads, Youtube Ads, Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, Programmatic Ads, Native Ads, you should be able to get the right blend to reach your ideal patient.

Developing a great digital ads strategy as part of your health care marketing starts with excellent planning.

Answer questions like:

Who is my ideal patient? Create a patient profile on each of these

Where do they go online to spend time?

How much website traffic do I currently have for retargeting?

What assets do I have for advertising? Videos? Graphics?

These questions are essential to find out which platforms will be ideal for you to start advertising on.

For instance, we have a women’s health facility that offers menopause and bioidentical hormone replacement services.

Their primary target audience is women over 45 years old in a 20-mile radius of their location.

So we came up with a menopause quiz to get potential patients into an email automation sequence.

The results? Nearly 350 targeted new patient leads in the first 30 days!

5. Patient Email Address as Still Extremely Valuable

Email is still not only a viable but powerful marketing for healthcare tools that you should be leveraging.

Whether it’s new patient funnels, remarketing to existing patients, or disseminating critical information during times like COVID, email is a vital line of communication between you and your patients.

Investing resources into developing a healthy email marketing program will yield a steady stream of new and returning patients through for doors (physical or virtual).

A few great tips for growing your list include:

1. Hosting a webinar
2. Paid advertising funnels like quizzes and assessments
3. Downloads and ebooks
4. Exclusive subscriber content

6. Telemedicine and Online Appointment Book are a Must

Telemedicine and online appointment booking was nice to have as a healthcare marketing component before COVID.

Now, it is absolutely essential to doing business.

The problem is there is still a lot of confusion about getting started and getting patients using telemedicine.

First and foremost, you need to get emails out communicating to your existing patients about your process for telehealth (this goes back to why email is so important).

Then get landing pages on your website and announcements on social media regarding your telehealth solution.

When it comes to online booking, you need to have this option available and accessible on your website. It is expected from patients now.

On top of that, it is essential to track your paid advertising campaigns for new appointment bookings effectively.

7. Physicians Listings and Critical for Local SEO

Patients go about finding local practices, providers, and procedures in a few different ways.

They generally either search or practice types “dermatology practice near me.”

Or they search for procedures “mole removal near me.”

Or they search for a specific type of provider by name “dermatologist near me” or “john smith md.”

Winning this last search at the provider level is critical for marketing in healthcare.

SEO for doctors starts with making sure your provider’s Google My Business and other listings are correct, unified, and stay up to date.

Other listings are Healthgrades, Vitals, CareDash, etc.

Google leverages these other third-party platforms to match and verify against their search algorithm that your information is correct, and they can return your physician high in search rankings.

The problem is??? Physicians can be journeymen by nature.

Think about where you have been from residency, fellowship, first practice position, on and on.

Your listen could be all over the place and delivering lousy information to your patients and Google. A double whammy.

Get started by claiming and verify each of your physician’s top listings and make sure they are all “speaking the same language” in terms of contact information.

8. Analytics and Tracking are Key to Health care Marketing Success

Now that we have looked at several of the best health care marketing tips, it all comes down to one thing…

How do you know what is working and where the opportunities for improvement lie?

By keeping a close eye on your marketing analytics and making sure you are tracking campaigns accurately.

The best healthcare marketing is rooted in data.

To improve, you have to know what is working and be able to attribute success and failure accordingly to be continually improving.

This starts by investing in analytics.

You can start with the essentials like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, to name a few.

When you a ready to see if all in one place, then marketing analytics dashboards are right for you.

Here at Intrepy, we put the utmost importance on data visualization, and it’s why all of our clients get access to analytics dashboards at all times.

Wrapping Up the Best Healthcare Marketing Tips

Marketing for healthcare is an ever-changing world but has endless possibilities for healthcare professionals to reach the audience they need, grow their patient base, educate patients,  feature physicians, and scale their practice.

When beginning your healthcare marketing strategy, choose a partner that understands the space, and only focuses on marketing in healthcare. A healthcare marketing agency understands the patient experience and industry and can use tested and proven methods to get you where you want to be!

Updated: 07/20/2020

A Guide to Developing a Healthcare Marketing Strategy

This is the most in-depth healthcare marketing strategy guide on the internet.

All the components of this guide with help you crush your healthcare marketing goals in 2020 and generate new revenue.

Time to get at it.

Table of Contents:

• What is Healthcare Marketing Strategy?
• Healthcare Marketing Techniques
• Build a Website for Patient Experience
• Focus on Increasing Local Search Rankings
• Utilize Digital Advertising to Target New Patients
• Invest in Video to Connect with Patients
• Build an Engaged Community on Social Media
• Track the Success of Your Marketing

What is Healthcare Marketing Strategy?

Healthcare marketing strategy involves leveraging a collective group of marketing channels both digitally and offline designed to specifically target new and existing patients for practices and hospital systems to improve patient care and generate growth and revenue.

In the last five years, the amount of healthcare marketing professionals and agencies specializing in marketing for medical practices has grown substantially.

Patients have become more sophisticated in how they utilize and integrate the internet into their daily lives.

As a result of constant advertising, patients have become somewhat “tone deaf” to the messages they receive.

They also want to feel that the marketing and advertising they do consume is extremely patient-centric.

Fortunately, more prospective patients are turning to the internet via search engines and social platforms to take their health into their own hands.

They are in search of finding information, practices, and hospitals to aid in their pursuit of optimal health.

80% of potential patients look online for health information about a specific medical problem or disease.

So, what healthcare marketing strategies for medical practices are most effective?

Patients are active and engaged more than ever online, so that is why it is critical to put healthcare marketing strategies in place for 2020.

Where do you start putting together a medical marketing plan?

This will not be surface-level theory that says “create a Facebook profile,” but we will look at each component of a healthcare marketing strategy:

• What tactics to use
• Why they are effective
• Real life case studies and examples
• Instructions to get you started

When you finish reading this, you will be ready to hit the ground running and generate real growth in your practice.

Healthcare Marketing Techniques

This is a comprehensive list of the most critical marketing techniques in healthcare that medical practices alike need to include in their 2020 strategy.

I will address specific things that we do in our agency and are seeing in the world of healthcare marketing working extremely effectively to grow healthcare organizations.

Build a Website for Patient Experience

A healthcare practice’s website is one of the single most important digital healthcare marketing assets they have.

Think about it?

What other salespeople can be on the ball 24/7/365 selling and delivering content to potential patients whenever they need it?

Whether it is midnight and you are asleep or 3 pm in clinics your medical website is always hard at work for you showcasing relevant content.

Great medical website design puts the focus on user experience and providing clear and immediate value from the second a patient enters your website.

Explaining who you are and what you do.

Answering questions and delivering value to get them to convert.

Best Medical Website Design Tips

An Individual Page for Every MAJOR Service & Provider

This is a big one I see TOO often.

Healthcare websites that create a main services page list the services they offer and call it a day.

I can tell you for about 99.9% accuracy that you will never rank for service-specific keywords unless you create excellent, keyword rich, long-form content about each service.

Say we searched for a plastic surgeon in Atlanta that does breast augmentations.

A typical search for that would be “breast augmentation near me.”

As you can see search positions 1, 3, and 8, which happen to be the only practice specific search results, are all service-specific pages.

These practices created in-depth healthcare content on a page entirely dedicated to breast augmentations not just adding it to a list on their services page.

Book Appointment & Chat Features

One of the sole purposes of healthcare marketing is getting a patient to book an appointment.

Once a patient has landed on the website you need to make sure you are not only providing them the information they need to convert but also make it extremely easy for them to book an appointment.

One of the best ways to skyrocket customer service, begin to build a relationship, and improve site conversions is by integrating chat functionality.

Source

96% of patient complaints were related to none exam room factors, and the #1 complaint was communication.

Once you get a chat function set up on your website and have a front desk person task to manage the conversation the options are endless.

There is tons of conditional functionality that you can integrate such as specific intro questions based on what page they are visiting.

It can even serve as a great way to generate new email address collection by asking for an email if you are away to follow up later.

Integrate into your CRM and add those potential patients into a drip email campaign if they don’t schedule.

Great Chat Options:

1.    Lasso (HIPAA)

2.    MedChat (HIPAA)

3.    Ngage Live Chat (HIPAA)

4.    Intercom (Non-HIPAA)

5.    Olark (Non-HIPAA)

Mobile Responsive Website

It has become essential in 2020 for your website to be built for mobile devices.

Mobile traffic owns about 50% of all website traffic now, and that is expected to continue to rise.

As of 2018, Google announced the rollout of mobile first indexing.

This means that the mobile version of your site is the priority that they index and serve in search.

Therefore, if your site is not responsive and built for mobile, it will become increasingly difficult for effective healthcare marketing strategy.

Focus on Increasing Local Search Rankings

An anchor of effective healthcare marketing strategies is excellent search engine optimization.

Medical search engine optimization can be a complex and complicated landscape, so I am going to take you through the steps of creating a great local SEO strategy for a healthcare organization.

Medical Website SEO Checklist

To get started, check this video out on how to rank treatment pages highly in search results.

Website structure is a critical aspect of search engine optimization.

It is the foundation for all of the other local SEO initiatives, so it is critical to not ignore it.

The basis of any excellent web page or post is a focus keyword.

This is the main keyword that you are trying to rank a page or post for.

However, if you structure things correctly you for rank for many more long tail keywords.

#1 Include Your Focus Keyword in Specific Places on the Page

There are a few critical places to make sure your keyword is included to ensure the highest level of ranking impact.

In the Title Tag of the Page – Close to the Front

This may seem like a given but just placing your focus keyword in a title tag is not near as effective as positioning it as close to the front as possible.

Place Keyword in URL & Keep URL Short

URL length plays a vital role in ranking a page.

A study of 1 million searches on Google showed that short URLs rank the best in search results.

Answer Your Page Topic In Totality

What I mean by this is to rank for a completive keyword Google rewards the best content.

The average length of the #1 organic search result is 2,416 words.

That shows how much Google values authoritative and complete content pieces.

They want to ensure the #1 slot fully answers that person’s medical search query.

This is one of the biggest focuses you need to add to your healthcare marketing strategy in 2020. Improve and lengthen content.

Let’s go back to that search results for “breast augmentation near me.”

If you recall the first search result is below.

Take a look at their page here.

See how in-depth on the top they go?

They answer close to every common question a female patient could have about breast surgery.

That is great content.

A great way to get ideas for questions people are searching for is a free tool called Answer the Public.

Type in your page focus keyword in this case “breast augmentation” and voila!

Items in darker green are higher volume searches to target first.

Content Marketing is Critical

An active healthcare content marketing arm of your overall healthcare marketing approach is the perfect ongoing SEO you need after you perfect your on-site SEO.

Check this video out on what thin content is and why it is killing the SEO for your healthcare marketing strategy.

This is where the rubber meets the road for building long term digital marketing success and growing organic website traffic.

Just take a look at one of our clients since we took over and implemented an effective content marketing strategy.

They went from doing 3,109 page views in June of 2018 to over 7,467 page views in March of 2020!

That is a 140.17% increase in website traffic in 10 months!

Invest in Keyword Research

It is imperative when any healthcare marketing strategy for medical practices that you start content marketing planning with keyword research.

A few great places to start that are FREE are…

Trusty Google Suggest

This couldn’t be easier.

Go to Google and start typing in the keyword you are planning content for, and Google will spit out popular topical suggestions.

Make sure to include some of those long-tail keywords in your content.

Google My Business is a Top Local Ranking Factor

Most practices and hospitals are incredibly familiar with Google My Business (GMB) at this point.

If you are reading this and have not you need to go and claim or create your Google My Business for your medical practice right NOW.

Here are the step by step instructions to set up a Google My Business profile.

I will skip over that for now.

The biggest thing I want to focus on is making sure you complete your profile IN ENTIRETY.

Go under the info section and max out the relevant categories and fill out the rest of the areas.

info page google my business, and don’t forget to add pictures.

Pro Tip: For the business description make sure to mention your name, main focus keyword, and city in the first 150 words.

Reputation Management & Online Reviews

We brushed on the critical importance of online reviews in the trends section now we will get into how to generate new reviews for a practice.

Essential places to target new reviews on:

1. Google My Business
2. Facebook
3. Real Self (if you do aesthetics)
4. HealthGrades (for providers)

The best way to generate new reviews is by working it into your patient check out workflows via an email or SMS text message.

I recommend connecting with patients within 1-2 days of the patient visit so it is close to the point of service.

Often all you need to do is ask!

When polled 70% of patients said they would leave a review for a medical practice if they were asked.

If you are looking for a more automated approach look for an agency that provides reputation management for medical practices service.

Luckily there are many affordable tools and options, and we recommend automating and involving text messages whenever possible. Text messages make it easier on the patient and are a faster way of generating reviews. SMS messaging has a 98% open rate!

Citation Building for SEO

Building new directory listings for a healthcare practice is known as citation building.

Standard listings sites are Yelp, Foursquare, Google My Business, and more.

You want to focus on making sure the NAP (name, address, and phone) on your contact page gets added to as many local and national directories as possible.

This will help grow your ranking for your website as well as your GMB.

Some of these verifications will require a phone call to the practice to verify it is a working office with real people in it.

Start with the most recognizable pages as the backlink they create to your website is the most important.

Here is a massive list of 1,000+ local and niche citations by business category that will keep you busy for a while!

Backlink Building as a Focus of Your Healthcare Marketing Strategies

Backlinks are the jet fuel that powers any successful medical marketing campaign in 2020.

What is a backlink?

Backlinks are links from external websites and relevant content that link to a piece of content or page on your website.

Why do backlinks matter?

Backlinks are critical because they give Google an “upvote” that someone else on the internet has seconded this content as a reliable source of information.

It’s like having someone vouch for your website.

This helps build trust in SERPs for that content, and ultimate is a significant deciding factor in how the page will rank.

Therefore, once you create an excellent piece of content as part of your healthcare marketing strategy, you need to focus on building high-quality backlinks back to that piece.

Utilize Digital Advertising to Target New Patients

One of the top digital healthcare marketing strategies is leveraging paid advertising in the right way to reach highly targeted, local patients.

However, we see many practices blow through ad budgets with little to no ROI or even an effective way to know if the results were positive.

I have broken down a good rule of thumb for each of the popular digital advertising platforms and when to leverage them for your practice.

Search Engine Marketing

The two most popular SEM platforms for healthcare practices are Google Ads and Bing Ads.

What is fantastic about Google Ads is the level of search intent targeting you can do based on which keywords you are bidding on.

This will help determine how “purchase-ready” a potential patient may be.

A great example is an orthopedic practice that could bid on the term “knee replacement” which is theory is a great fit.

However, their budget could end up being spent on people looking to educate themselves on what a knee replacement is and not looking for a provider in their area to perform the procedure.

However, you could be better served bidding on “knee replacement surgeon Atlanta” which would highly correlate to a patient that is a very warm lead.

Google Ads and Bing Ads are great for practices looking to target specific keywords for procedures or surgeries that they make a considerable margin on and able to spend some funds to acquire high dollar patients.

Social Media Advertising

One of the top healthcare marketing trends in 2021 is leveraging social media advertising to promote and grow medical practices.

There are so many options and platforms to leverage how do you know which are best?

Now that Facebook owns Instagram we find a combo of the two platforms, depending on your target marketing, is ideal.

The most effective types of digital advertising campaigns on social media are retargeting or “offer-based” ads.

Retargeting ads are when you drive traffic to your website via organic or paid search methods and then retarget those people with ads on social media.

This is effective because these ads are not cold outreach because the potential patient has already been to your website in search of information and maybe not ready to book an appointment.

Offer based ads leverage some offer or a free piece of material to provider savings or value to their patient in return for their information.

A great example is a dental practice offering new patients free X-rays with your teeth cleaning or a contest to win a free teeth whitening.

Invest In Using Video to Connect With Patients

Video is the preferred method of how people consume information in 2020.

With a patient’s attention span now barely that of a goldfish around 8 seconds you need to capture and communicate quickly.

Video marketing is a highly effective healthcare marketing strategy to reach new patients.

The fantastic thing is creating video does not have to be as expensive or daunting as most healthcare organizations think it is.

We have tons of practices creating highly engaging and compelling video content and reaching new patients.

Youtube is the second largest search engine behind Google and can be much easier to rank for highly competitive keywords over Google search.

Above is a client that we got set up on Youtube to promote a new laser machine for skin resurfacing that they had purchased.

Invest in getting a high-quality intro and outro animated graphic that you can reuse on all your videos.

This will help add a touch of high quality to it without crushing your budget. Below is a recent example of one we created for a radiation oncologist.

Learn Youtube SEO

Once you have your video templates and have a content calendar created go about producing 3-5 videos per month including your providers and demos.

Videos show up in search results now so they can be a quick and effective way to rank well in organic search for highly competitive healthcare marketing keywords.

Pro Tip: Get your videos transcribed and put them up on the website with your Youtube version embedded,

This will allow you to benefit from the blog post style SEO and the video SEO when people watch the Youtube video on your website.

Here are more Youtube SEO Tips to watch before posting any videos.

Build an Engaged Community on Social Media

I am going to skip what social media is.

I know 99.9999% of practices and hospitals reading this post understand at some level the power and reach social media carries.

The problem is answering “is it really effective for healthcare marketing?” and “what platforms should I be on?”

To answer the effectiveness question simply YES.

If done right social media is a highly effective way to reach new patients and create brand loyalty.

A great example is we have a medical spa client that was present on Facebook and Instagram when they approached us but severely underutilizing the platforms.

We revamped their strategy and focused on building engaged, local women that fit in their target demographic surrounding their 3 locations.

When we got started, their Instagram was two years old with around 200 followers.

Their Instagram was driving little to no real traffic to their website which is what is most important.

Generating leads via social media to the website or via messenger.

After 12 months of implementing a proactive and dynamic social media marketing strategy, they have grown to over 2,200 followers generating 100s of website visitors a month.

Check out the numbers below from Feb 2020 and the fantastic news is the followers by city graphic that shows the core of their followers are in the cities they have their locations in.

High quality, local traffic!

That is the power of social media. In just one isolated example.

What are the best social media platforms for healthcare practices?

There is value in each of the major platforms; however, we think there is a priority of platforms that are the best fit for medical practices.

1. Facebook
2. Instagram
3. Youtube
4. Twitter
5. LinkedIn
6. Pinterest

Facebook and Instagram are the two most critical social media platforms to include in a healthcare marketing strategy.

We created a handy optimal posting time infographic for you to reference.

Pro Tip: I recommend posting on Facebook 3X per week and Instagram daily with up to 2-3 posts per day if possible.

Track the Success of Your Marketing

Successfully tracking your healthcare marketing strategy implementation is critical.

Analytics and reporting should become a great healthcare marketer’s best friend.

It starts with making sure you are tracking your program effectively.

Some of the most important free platforms to make sure you have as non-negotiables are:

Google Search Console

This is a free tool provided by Google that allows you to track the search engine rankings of your medical practice website.

Not to mention it helps you catch errors that can pop up from time to time and cause search ranking issues on your website.

Google Analytics

This is a mainstay that every practice must have on their website.

To say it just tracks traffic to your website is a major disservice.

There is an extremely powerful analytics tool that can show you loads of valuable information about how patients behave on your website.

Google Tag Manager

A must for tracking not only Google Ads but many other tracking tools and software.

Facebook Pixel

Get it on your website. I have seen too many people go for years without embedding the Facebook pixel.

Then in walks a healthcare marketing agency and we are missing years of data that we could have leveraged to advertise and remarket to your patients.

Attribution is King

Attribution is powerful.

It shows you the journey that your patients are taking from the first conversion to what they are doing the rest of the time in the marketing funnel.

It is essential when we market for our clients because it allows us to show them not only what is driving the most leads, but ultimately what is converting patients into booked appointments.

Which is what really matters!

Finally, invest in marketing analytics dashboards.

I just scratched the surface on all of the tools and resources for executing and tracking your healthcare marketing strategy.

That means it can seem nearly impossible to pull all of those in a way that paints a picture as to what is working and where we need growth.

That is why we provide marketing analytics dashboards to every client that partners with us at Intrepy.

Because we see the immense value in seeing the bigger picture through data.

Wrapping Up Creating a Healthcare Marketing Strategy

When putting together effective healthcare marketing strategies for your practice make sure to include the components outlined in this guide.

The core components include a well-designed medical website, local SEO, digital advertising, physician liaison marketing, and social media.

Remember to focus on the quality of the content you are making and focus on delivering REAL value to your patients.

If you do that, all you need to focus on is hiring for help on the technical execution.

I hope you found this in-depth healthcare marketing guide helpful and were able to glean some ideas to help improve your marketing strategy.

If you are struggling to get started feel free to reach out for a free consultation. We offer medical marketing services to healthcare organizations and practices.

10 Healthcare Online Marketing Techniques to Implement in Your Practice

Now more than ever, it is critical for providers and practices to realize the importance of healthcare online marketing.

Patients are turning to digital avenues to educate, engage, research and book appointments on things related to their health.

It is critical to not only make sure you are investing in the proper areas of growth but to ensure these marketing strategies are patient-centric.

The better you can personalize the marketing experience a patient has with your brand or practice the higher conversions, loyalty, engagement and success you will get from your marketing initiatives.

However, it can be tough for a healthcare organization to know where to get started with so many marketing strategies to consider.

What digital healthcare marketing strategies work?

Where should you spend the most time and effort?

In this article, we are going to layout 10 of the most effective healthcare-specific digital marketing techniques and tools that you need to be investing in.

Table of Contents:

• Patient-Centric Practice Website Design
• Setting Up Google Search Console
• On-Page SEO Techniques
• Properly Optimize Google My Business
• Correct Practice & Provider Business Listings
• Review Generation
• Content Marketing & Storytelling
• Engaged Social Media Platforms
• The Right Blend of Digital Advertising
• Email Marketing Automation

Patient-Centric Practice Website Design

The design, performance, and content on your medical practice website are one of the single most important things to get right.

It is worth investing in a well designed and structured website that is built with patient engagement at its core.

Does it communicate your core values? Who you are? What makes you different?

Does your website make it easy for patients to book appointments and engage with you?

1. Is Your Website Built for Mobile?

Mobile responsiveness is an absolute must-have for any website.

In 2019, mobile device usage share increased by another 10%, and in 2020 51% of all time spent online in the US is on a mobile device.

There is a free mobile-friendly testing tool that is provided by Google. Simply drop your URL in to see how your website fairs on mobile devices.

If your website doesn’t function as good if not better on mobile, we recommend address with either a design update or creating a new website built for mobile.

2. Is Your Website Load Fast Enough?

Website speed is not only an important ranking factor for SEO, but it can drive patients away from your website if it is too slow.

74% of mobile users will leave a website if it does not load in 5 seconds or less. Preferably you need to be at 3 seconds or less.

Luckily, speeding up your website is usually a reasonably easy fix.

Here are a few medical website tips you can leverage to start speeding up your website today.

1. Check Your Website Speed with this free tool 
2. Ensure your images are compressed and optimized. Here is a tool we leverage at the agency called ShortPixel.
3. Use a caching tool on your website. Here is a free tool for WordPress websites.
4. Make sure you are on a premium hosting service. We are Intrepy leverage WP Engine.
5. Consider leveraging a CDN if you have a lot of images or videos hosted on your website

Your website is the 24/7/365 day a year salesperson that you never have to pay a commission to!

It should be a significant driver of new patients into your practice if you are willing to invest in a high-quality design.

The investment should return itself 10X over the lifetime of the website.

Make sure patients can schedule appointments, find information about all of your services, navigate the website easily, and educate themselves with resources and content.

Setting Up Google Search Console

SEO for doctors starts with data and research. SEO is a foundation of good healthcare online marketing.

There is no better tool than Google Search Console to understand the organic search health of your website.

The best thing? It’s FREE!

Google Search Console is a treasure trove of invaluable information related to the organic search status of your website, and it’s pages.

It shows you:

• Errors or issues Google is having when crawling your website
• Indexing status of all the pages on your website
• Which search queries your website is ranking in the top 100 search results for
• Which keywords and pages are driving the most traffic for any particular date range

Here is an example of a Google Search Console page performance report for one of our client’s Tennessee Orthopedic Clinics for the Orthopedic Urgent Care page on their website.

This screenshot shows the exact search queries and how much visibility and traffic they are driving to their Urgent Care page.

Getting started with Google Search Console is pretty straightforward. Here is a guide that Google has created.

The big thing to keep in mind when setting it up is to make sure you submit your sitemap.

On-Page SEO Techniques

Now that we understand why your website is so essential when it comes to design and content, and we have talked about Google Search Console as it relates to medical SEO.

Let’s talk about the on-page SEO techniques or structure of your pages that matter the most to improve rankings and ensure great organic search success of the pages on your website.

I want to take a look again at the orthopedic urgent care page that we referenced above. Below is a screenshot of the keywords that are drawing the most search impressions.

I, therefore, know that if we can get our client’s page to rank in the top 3 search results for many of these, we can drive 1,000s of website visitors per month.

Here are the most critical on-page ranking factors that you need to focus on:

1. Title Tag

The title tag is the title of the page that appears in blue in Google search results. It is one of the top 2 most important things.

A proper title tag will contain the focus keywords of that particular page as close to the front of the title tag as possible.

Going back to the orthopedic urgent care example, see the title tag that we have optimized for their page. As you see, ‘Orthopedic Urgent Care’ is at the front of the title tag because it is the most crucial keyword string in terms of search volume and page focus.

2. H Tags

H tags are the headers on the page. You want to ensure that you have one H1 tag only on each page, and the rest should be H2 – H4 tags depending on the importance they have on the page.

Check out the below screenshot of a section on the Quick Care Ortho page.

As you see, the purple title is an H2 tag and contains another relevant keyword we want to rank for ‘orthopedic walk-in clinics, which gets 340 searches every 28 days.

3. Body Text & FAQs

Arguably the most important on-page SEO ranking factor is the content of the body text itself.

You generally want to make sure that you have at least 400-500 words on a treatment level page to make sure it contains enough relevant content to rank well.

Try and cover many of the common FAQs as body sections as you can related to what the treatment is, recover time, why you need it, etc.

Check this video out for more on-page SEO techniques that you can implement.

Properly Optimize Google My Business

As Google has shifted to a much more localized search experienced, we have seen the rise of Google My Business pages.

Your Google My Business is one of the top local search ranking factors that matters the most to your practice’s local SEO.

What is unique about healthcare is that it is one of the only business verticals that you need to address the Google My Business for not just the practice but the provider as well. Medical doctors are allowed to have a Google My Business.

How to Optimize a Google My Business Profile

1. Claim & Verify your profile with Google
2. Complete the entirety of the profile. The more complete, the better results.
3. Write a killer business description and include the main keyword + city in the first sentence of the description
   1. Ex. Dr. John Smith is an orthopedic spine surgeon in Dallas.
4. Upload photos on a monthly or quarterly basis to keep things fresh
5. Build new reviews on your page (more detail on this to come)

If you want more info, we have put together a step by step guide on what you need to do to optimize your Google My Business.

Practice & Provider Business Listings

As you saw in the pie chart above, ‘Citations’ or Business Listings are a close tie for the 3rd most crucial local SEO factors.

Outside of your Google My Business, there are dozens of directories and reviews sites that you need to ensure your practice and providers are listed on.

More importantly than just being listed on them is ensuring that the information is verified, correct, and consistent across each profile.

Accuracy is critical not just for SEO, but it also ensures a patient is getting the same information every time.

There are three types of business listings that you need to focus on:

1. High Domain Authority: Google My Business, Bing, Yelp, Facebook, Hotfrog, etc.
2. Niche Listings: WebMD, Healthgrades, Vitals, RateMDs, CareDash, etc.
3. Local Listings: Chamber of Commerce, Local Business Directories, etc.

The easiest way to do so is to leverage a Physician Listings Management service, so you do not have to manually claim 100s or 1000s or directories if you are a larger multi-location and multi-provider practice.

For instance, the service we provide to our clients allows us to maintain one master profile for each location or provider and unify all listings we manage.

This also makes onboarding new providers to the practice a breeze.

Commonly, providers have many errors in their portfolio of directories that could include hospitals or practices they have worked at in the past.

Many of these directories will create listings automatically for you, whether you know it or not.

Review Generation for Healthcare Online Marketing

Another critical healthcare online marketing strategy is review generation.

It only takes 1-6 online reviews for nearly 70% of potential patients to form an opinion about your practice.

Is that opinion negative or positive? That all depends on your reputation.

92% of consumers read and leverage online reviews when they are searching for a local business.

Check out the stats below. Between that and the stats above, if you are a surgeon, you can almost guarantee with certainty that 70% or more of your potential patients are reading reviews about you before considering booking an appointment.

You have to prioritize putting a program in place to generate new, positive reviews online in a HIPAA-compliant manner.

Check out this podcast: Do Google Reviews Help SEO? 

As an example of the power that positive reviews can have on your search visibility, just check out the screenshot below.

We rebranded a 25-year-old primary care practice a few months back that had been leveraging the name of the founding provider for years, but they had grown to a multi-provider practice, so it was time to get branded.

As a result, we named the practice and set up a new Google My Business page.

In the second month, we started to focus on a review generation program leveraging our healthcare reputation management software.

They grew by nearly 30 reviews in the first month, and as a direct result, their listing’s visibility jumped by 208% month over month.

The best way to ensure program success is to leverage software that can directly integrate with your EMR system so you can automate the review request process after a patient check out occurs. This allows you to maintain the same checkout workflows are before.

We recommend focusing reviews on these top sites to start.

Which sites should Practices grow reviews on?

1. Google My Business
2. Facebook
3. Industry Site if Applicable (ex. RealSelf)
4. Yelp

Which sites should Physicians grow reviews on?

1. Google My Business
2. Healthgrades
3. Vitals
4. WebMD

Content Marketing & Storytelling

Content marketing and storytelling are powerful components of a successful healthcare online marketing program.

A properly optimized and active blog can and should drive 50% or more of the organic search traffic to your website.

Check out the above spinal surgery practice. Currently, there are four blog posts in their top 10 organic traffic pages on their website.

They collectively drive 26% of all of the website’s organic traffic.

If they can continue to invest in better and better-performing blog content they could stand to 2X or 3X their organic website reach.

This is the power of content marketing. And content marketing is not necessarily only blog posts.

The best way to create impactful content that your patients cannot get enough of is to have a level of involvement from your providers or surgeons.

They may not have the time to write long-form blog posts, but they do have the time to strategize on ideas and create short videos of 1-2 minutes in length.

If you sit down for 30 minutes and write down the most common questions that you receive from patients on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis, I bet you could come up with nearly six months worth of blog and video topics.

And the best part is…you know that patients are already seeking these answers!

Another significant benefit to an active content marketing program for your overall healthcare online marketing is that the more blog posts and video content that you have, the better your social media platforms will perform.

Which, in turn, will drive more traffic and visibility to your website and brand.

Engaged Social Media Platforms

This is a perfect segway into creating an engaged community on your social media platforms.

All too often, medical practices have this mentality that all it takes is setting up a few social media profiles and postings links to their website, and engaged patients will just arrive.

This could not be further from the truth. It ain’t gonna happen. No way, no how. 

Patients have way too many options and distractions on social media, so if you are not providing real value and being authentic, you will be drowned out. 

The best content medium for engagement is video.

Long term, if you want to connect with your audience and refine your storytelling process, you have to do so with video, and your physicians need to by into the process.

If you do this, you are well on your way to growth compared to your competitors.

We practice what we preach here at Intrepy Healthcare Marketing, and it shows. Between our social platforms and our founders, we have a reach of nearly 100K followers and generate 10,000s of views and site traffic on our content weekly.

This is a video post our co-founder, Kelley Knott, put on her LinkedIn. It has already amassed 197 Likes, 80 Comments, and 2,342 views. No paid ads, all organic.

There are plenty of providers and practices crushing on social media, and you can too.

There are a few main tips when building a social media program you need to keep in mind:

1. Be authentic.
2. Bring people into your practice (i.e. show them what you do behind the scenes or in the OR)
3. Leverage video as much as possible
4. There are no shortcuts. It takes time, and it takes real engagement. You get out what you put in.
5. Vary the messaging and follow the 80/20 rule. 80% focus on providing real health-related value. 20% focus on the “hard sell” or driving appointments or other actions
6. Have fun and collaborate it is called “social” media for a reason

These are the most important platforms to spend time on. We, however, always recommend focusing on becoming a master of one platform, and you can disseminate the content to the other platforms.

1. Facebook
2. Instagram
3. Youtube
4. LinkedIn

If you are looking for more social media resources check out this blog post on Instagram marketing for medical practices.

The Right Blend of Digital Advertising

Digital advertising in healthcare is a powerful way to hyper-target your demographic and geographical area. If leveraged properly, it can be a fantastic way to drive new patients and revenue to your practice.

However, you have to understand what works best on each platform.

Google Ads

Google Ads is an advertising platform where you bid on keywords and create ads to show to people who search for those specific keywords.

Example of a psychiatric client. We are promoting the fact that they do virtual visits. 

Research is critical before jumping into any Google Ads campaigns.

You want to either alter your services pages that you are driving the ads to or creating specific landing pages to make sure it is easy for patients to fill out a form or call the office.

Additionally, you want to make sure you are not only tracking the form submissions but have call tracking active on your website so you do not miss out on lead-related call data.

Social Media Ads

Facebook and Instagram Ads are the most commonly utilized social media ads for healthcare organizations.

They are great for driving new leads and retargeting website traffic with social based ads.

The ads that work best on social media are value-based. They are not hard selling ads.

For instance, we have a women’s health practice that we run Facebook ads to grow their menopause treatments and initial evaluations.

While we are running “Book Now” style ads, we are also leveraging a menopause quiz that we developed that has delivered amazing results.

We have been able to generate 250+ quiz leads per month for around $2 per lead.

Then we get the leads that are not ready to book an appointment into an email nurture sequence and deliver some highly valuable content (that we talked about earlier in the content marketing section) to get them warmed up and ready to book an appointment over the next 30-90 days.

Check out this article on Facebook Ads Tips for Medical Practices.

Email Marketing Automation

Last but certainly not least is leveraging email marketing automation in your healthcare online marketing program.

As we just alluded to not ever lead, whether it is from organic search, paid ads, or social media is going to be ready to book an appointment.

In fact, on a good campaign, you may only get a 20-30% conversion on leads ready to walk through the door and see a provider.

That is why it is critical to get the other 70-80% into a personalized and segmented email nurture campaign.

As we say here at Intrepy: “Don’t Leave Your Leads Hanging. You paid for them, so convert them by nurturing them!”

A good funnel example could be this.

Say you are an orthopedic practice looking to drum up more spinal surgery patients.

You could look at running ads for an interactive back symptom/back pain evaluation tool that asks the patient a series of questions.

At the end of the survey, they fill in their info and are asked if they would like to book an appointment to see a spinal specialist.

The portion that is not ready to do so would be added to an email nurture sequence where they would receive a series of 12 patient-centric, value-based emails focused on topics, content, and videos related to back pain.

In the middle and end of the sequence, we will insert a “hard ask” to schedule an appointment. If we get even 10-15% more patients through the door, that could increase the overall ROI of the advertising program substantially!

Wrapping Up: 10 Proven Healthcare Online Marketing Strategies

In closing, there are a few pieces of the digital marketing puzzle that are the most important to spend your time, focus, and money on.

When you get these components working together in harmony, they can produce amazing results for your organization.

If there is any way we can be of help, reach out and let us know! If you are not sure where to start, we offer a Free Practice Assessment that includes a 15-minute review call with a healthcare online marketing specialist.

Intrepy Healthcare Marketing is a medical focused marketing agency that develops patient-centric healthcare marketing programs for our partner organizations to help them grow and reach new patients. We provide medical website design, medical SEO, digital advertising, listings management, and review generation.

We also have a new service that we have developed since the rise of COVID called Telemedicine Marketing, where we can help your organization quickly onboard telemedicine and get the word out to patients quickly and efficiently.

Thank you for reading, and we hope you find these tips helpful in growing your practice or hospital.