How do you Increase Patient Volume in a Medical Practice?
Getting the leg up on the competition and attracting potential patients can be difficult and deciding which actions you need to take can be even more daunting.
But if you have found yourself asking, “What are creative ways to increase patient volume?”
Well here are 6 highly effective medical marketing strategies you can implement to increase patient volume and get more patients to your practice.
1. Invest in a High-Quality Medical Website
Your practice website is one of the most critical digital assets of your business, and that is an investment that needs to be taken seriously.
If you think of building a healthcare marketing strategy like building a house, your practice website is the foundation. It is what every other strategy is built upon. Invest in a great foundation, and the program will reap the rewards. On top of that, your website serves as a 24/7/365 salesperson that is always ready to deliver information to potential patients right when they need it.
Justin Knott, President Intrepy Healthcare Marketing
To create a well performing medical website that will drive patients to your practice, you need to communicate a few critical things.
Make sure you tell your unique story
All the awesome conditions and treatments you address
Make it easy and clear how to book a new patient appointment
Blog and video content to engage potential patients
Make sure your medical website is unique to the patient experience of your practice and user-friendly.
Good questions for websites that want to increase patient volume:
-Is your website fully responsive to mobile devices?
Its crucial patients can easily view and use your website while on the go.
Potential patients search for physicians and medical practices on their phones or tablets, making it essential that patients can easily navigate your site, and collect information.
And most importantly, there needs to be a clear and straightforward call to action to schedule an appointment.
-Have you highlighted your featured services/treatments on the home page?
This may seem obvious, but this is your opportunity to promote your high revenue services or procedures. Consider down selecting your services to feature your core high revenue procedures.
Are you an ENT physician that can improve the quality of life for someone suffering from sinusitis with a non-invasive balloon dilation procedure that reduces patient recovery time?
Maybe you’re an Ophthalmologist that helps patients see clearly with Lasik, whatever your specialty take advantage of this sales opportunity.
-Does Your Website Have a Blog?
Ensure that patients visit and stay on your medical practice site with a robust educational blog area. The more original and keyword-rich content on your website, the more love you get from Google search results.
-Do you have a designated staff and provider page?
Patients want to know who will be handling their care and want to learn about their physicians. To boost the medical SEO for your practice physicians; dedicate individual pages for physician bios, credentials, and more that way you guarantee when patients do specific physician search your medical practice website shoots to the top over review sites.
-Do you have the proper SEO & Keyword Research?
This is a biggie! A solid search engine optimization (SEO) strategy for a medical or dental practice starts with the foundation of your website.
-Are your patient testimonials featured?
Patient reviews are a HUGE influencer to generate new patients for a practice.
Potential patients want to hear from others who have been treated at your practice.
Here is an example from a client we do orthopedic marketing for and we have added a simple carousel to showcase new patient reviews.
Simple yet extremely impactful considering 80% or more patients read reviews before booking appointments.
-Do you have lead forms on your medical website that are easy to use for patients scheduling appointments?
A well designed medical website makes it VERY easy for a potential patient to request a new appointment on their website.
-Are you collecting potential patient information with an email newsletter?
Make it easy and clear with a call to action on your website to sign up for the practice newsletter.
A proactive medical practice newsletter that is jampacked with educational info, specials, calls to action, is a great way to keep on going touchpoints with current, past, and potential patients.
-Are you showcasing your before and after cases?
This may not apply to every medical specialty, but it’s essential to find a way to showcase patient case studies for specific treatments you offer.
Patients like to see cases that are similar to their own and view the results.
-Do you have videos that feature your physicians?
Patients prefer video, and it has quickly started to become the preferred way to get information online. According to a 2019 study, an astonishing 85% of online traffic will be generated by videos.
-Is your website optimized for speed?
Avoid high bounce rates and long re-loads with a website built to deliver information rapidly to users.
2. Optimize the Practice Website for SEO
One of the top ways how to increase patient volume is via the growth of your website in local organic search results.
In 2018 nearly 80% of all patients turned online to search for medical information, physicians, and practices.
In 2019 it is imperative that you are ranking high in Google for your main medical services and keywords over your medical practice competitors.
This starts with having well-constructed treatment and conditions pages on your website so you can rank for the things you do best like “hand surgery near me”.
How would you go about ranking for a treatment like that? By creating a really well-thought-out page on hand and wrist surgery. Not just listing the procedure on your services page.
Here is a great example of an orthopedic client that ranks #1 for knee surgery-related searches in their market.
As you see it is a page that is all about knee surgery and the title tag matches.
A fantastic way to promote and share your services is to utilize the world of social media.
Social media platforms are one of the top search results on the web.
For example, search for a local dermatology practice by name, 99% of the time their Facebook page will be on the first page.
Patients love to interact and disseminate information about their healthcare and practitioners on social media.
Get your providers involved and start creating video content that patients can relate to.
Social media can be an easy and resourceful tool not only to attract patients, improve search, but help your practice engage with patients as well.
5. Grow New Patient Referral with Physician Liaison Marketing
Develop a proactive physician outreach program to connect with the referring physicians and practices in your community.
Build strong physician referral relationships with your neighboring physicians by employing a physician liaison or physician relations manager.
A physician liaison will help you connect your medical practice, and its physicians to referring physicians, grow patient referrals, and increase overall practice revenue.
A designated physician liaison can make sure referring practices have all the materials they need to refer to easily.
A physician liaison will also serve as a practice ambassador for the physicians they represent to streamline communication and provide value for referring doctors.
Need help getting started as a physician liaison or training a physician liaison? Check out our physician liaison training course.
6. Protect Your Physician Reputation & Generate Reviews
8 out of 10 patients read reviews before they book an appointment with a new practice.
This statistic will only continue to rise as what we refer to as the “Amazonification” of healthcare continues to take hold in patients.
What that means is patients (unfortunately) now search for healthcare in a similar manner as to how they look for products on Amazon.
They start by doing research and reading other patient reviews.
That means it is critical to protect your reputation as a physician and practice by being proactive in generating new reviews for your practice.
The best way to do that is by leveraging a physician reputation management service to easily integrate it into your existing workflows.
Not only will you get more patients by generating new reviews but you will see a direct relationship in the increase in local search rankings that we spoke about earlier in this post.
That is because your Google My Business is a top local SEO for medical practices ranking factor and what helps your Google My Business rank high? Reviews.
As you can see in the above chart, when you combine Google My Business (GMB) and Reviews on that GMB they result in 40% or more of the local SEO of your practice.
Wrap Up – Increase Patient Volume at Your Practice & Get More Patients
If you have been wondering how to get more patients just following these strategies and you will be well on your way to increasing your patient volume.
Need some help on creating a strategy? Or executing the initiatives discussed in this post? We can help!
We are an agency that focuses exclusively on medical marketing services and has the experience and skillsets to help you reach your goals and drive patients!
Top Healthcare Digital Advertising Tips
Last update: 2/1/21
Reaching new patients is an ongoing challenge for healthcare practices. And with fierce competition, it becomes even harder for you to find new patients that need your help.
Patients today have more options than ever. Almost all of them are online and have access to vast resources of information.
That’s why you need a solid healthcare digital advertising plan for your healthcare organization.
Table of Contents:
Engage new Patients via Paid Search
Social Media Advertising on Facebook and Instagram
Invest in Video Advertising
Geofencing Ads to Target Hyperlocal Patients
Reach Patients with Native Advertising
Increase Conversions with Retargeting Ads
But with the overload of information online today, you may find it hard to decide what works best for you.
In this article, we’ll share with you the best digital healthcare advertising strategies for medical practices. By the end of it, you’ll have a better idea of what strategies work for you and how to implement them.
Let’s get started.
1. Leverage Paid Search
Paid search is a form of digital healthcare marketing where businesses get to display their ads on popular search engine sites such as Google Ads and Bing Ads.
Paid ads are an excellent option for healthcare practices that have a budget to grow and attract more clients. And when done correctly, it always brings quality traffic and high-paying customers.
The reason this healthcare digital advertising strategy works is that it’s straightforward and easy to track. Anyone can start paying for ads and attract new large audiences.
The results can be tracked within the first few days from launching the ad campaign. And that allows you to adjust your ads and improve your content.
The price for this type of ads is often decided by marketers bidding against each other. That explains why the more competitive a word is, the higher its price becomes.
If you search on Google for “best dentist in Atlanta” — the first few results are paid search ads.
According to Google, 5% of all searches are health-related. That’s what makes paid ads so effective. Because unlike other types of ads online, this is guaranteed to get more clicks for specific search terms and queries.
The most popular categories are pay-per-click (PPC) and cost-per-mile (CPM).
Pay-per-click (PPC): You only pay for the clicks your ad gets without taking into consideration views or impressions.
Cost-per-mile (CPM): For every thousand views your ad gets, you pay a pre-determined cost.
2. Social Media Healthcare Advertising to Reach Patients
Social media ads are advertisements served to social media users on different platforms. And they’re an excellent option for healthcare practices due to the endless choices they offer.
With a few clicks, you can log in to your Facebook account, set up a campaign, and enter your payment method. You can expect to see your audience grow within just a few hours.
Facebook also gives you lots of options for how you want your ads to be.
For instance, you can choose to boost a single post, a business page, a product, or a link to your website.
It may take some time for you to master Facebook Ads and get the best ROI. But until then, you can always learn more or seek help from our professional team.
Instagram Advertising
Like Facebook advertising, Instagram ads are a powerful method for growing your business. It will allow you to target the right audience — at the right time — and for the right price.
More than 200 million Instagram users visit at least one business profile every day.
And with more than 800 million users on the platform, your sponsored content is guaranteed to reach your targeted audience.
But there’s something you should now.
Instagram is the leading visual platform on the web today. And it’s all about images and videos.
Also, the majority of its users are young, and females are more present there compared to males.
You need to keep that in mind before taking any further steps.
Ask yourself — what does my regular prospect look like?
Once you answer that question, set up a new campaign to target those prospects. And use pictures and videos to communicate with them and get their attention.
3. Invest in Video Advertising
Video advertising implies the display of an online ad for a product or service in video format. These ads can appear on different online mediums such as Facebook, Youtube Ads, or any website.
Video ads have been around since the early days of TV. And they’re still as effective as they could ever be.
You don’t have to think long to figure out why that is.
Human attention spans are getting shorter.
Your patients are spending hours staring at a small screen every day. They prefer having someone deliver them information rather than them reading long blocks of text.
Videos attract more qualified leads and mobile users
Video ads get higher conversions and social shares
Engaging videos will improve your brand image and enhance customer trust
Once you launch your first few campaigns, start testing to see how your videos are performing. You can work on the tone, content, and duration — then adjust them to get the best results with your ads.
4. Geofencing Ads to Target Hyperlocal Patients
Geofence advertising is the display of location-based ads to a mobile device when it walks or leaves a certain radius. The ads come in the form of display or push notifications. And they notify users about special offers and important messages.
This is a great advertising strategy for many reasons.
For instance, healthcare practitioners work most of the time with local prospects. So, they need to find effective ways to target local clientele.
Also, a geofence can be set up easily and for an affordable cost. But at the same time, it helps you target specific prospects based on their location.
You can use geofence advertising in a variety of ways, all of which can bring results to your practice. But it all depends on the healthcare practice and the location.
For example, a walk-in clinic can target local food stores to send reminders to customers about the importance of healthy diets, exercise, and regular check-ups.
5. Engage Patients with Native Advertising
Native ads match the natural form and function of the platform in which they appear. But, they come with a sign that tells users that the content they’ll consume is sponsored.
Native advertising is an excellent marketing solution for healthcare providers.
It gets more views and clicks compared to other types. And it’s often targeted that it drives quality prospects to your business.
Also, native ads are engaging and less tiring for prospects to consume — although potential leads might know they’re consuming an ad.
The most popular native ad examples include:
Social Media Dark Posts:
Dark posts are a type of “In feed” ads that look just like any other regular posts on the platform.
If you’re a regular social media user, you might have seen this on popular social media sites. You’ll also notice that they come with a small hint that the post is sponsored.
Search Result Listings
If you decide to advertise on popular search engines such as Google and Bing, your ad campaigns will be displayed at the top of search results — in the form of native ads.
This type of native ad drives better results due to their highly specific nature.
Content Recommendations
These are recommended articles related to a post the user is interested in. They usually appear next to or below the main content. And they drive online customers to click further and read more articles.
6. Increase Conversions with Retargeting Ads
Retargeting healthcare digital ads allows healthcare practitioners to reconnect with lost patient leads. And it works by placing a cookie into the browser of the user.
Once a visitor leaves, that cookie is going to follow them all over the web. It will notify your retargeting provider about what ads to serve and when.
Retargeting works great because it focuses on prospects that already know you.
Not every prospect leaving your website is a lost lead.
Sometimes it takes some thinking before making a decision. Other times the timing isn’t right.
So, if you focus on those who are familiar with your healthcare practice, you’ll see a much higher ROI compared to any other digital marketing strategy.
Wrapping Up – Healthcare Digital Advertising Tips for Medical Practice
Growing your practice might take some time and effort. But with the right digital healthcare advertising for your medical practice, you’ll have endless possibilities.
If you need help from our healthcare digital marketing agency just reach out and let us know!
Thanks for reading!
Best Medical Marketing Strategies in 2021
Putting together innovative medical marketing strategies for medical practices can be a daunting and often downright confusing endeavor.
With what seems like endless marketing and advertising channel options and oftentimes contradictory information online about what is the best fit navigating these waters can seem treacherous.
The last thing you want to do is end up making a wrong decision and spending time, money, and valuable resources to find out the initiative was a waste of time and ineffective at growing the practice.
That is why I have put together a list of 12 medical marketing strategies for doctors; every practice should not do without.
1. Optimize your practice website for patient experience
Today more than ever, potential patients are searching on the web for local physicians and healthcare services.
Patients are taking their health into their own hands and by doing so care more and more about establishing a know, like and trust relationship with a potential practice before walking through the doors or book an appointment.
Improving your patient’s experience on your website will significantly increase patient leads and retention.
Your website design should have customized features, fast page speed, be mobile-friendly, and interactive.
A. Designed for Mobile Devices
Most searches are done via mobile or tablet devices, so having a fully responsive medical website design is crucial.
Check out this primary care client example. You can see the menu, a clear call to action, and what they do all above the fold on mobile load.
Make sure your website design includes flexible images and website structures.
The practice website should be built for all platforms, so you capture the maximum number of website visitors and not just limited to desktop searches.
Page speed can be the #1 reason for a high bounce rate for your medical website.
B. Speed Matters
Slow website page speed will irritate your online users and deter them from staying on your website.
Websites that are difficult to navigate with slow page speed will give potential patients a negative experience.
A negative experience makes users more likely to leave your website to go to a competitor’s. It is critical to evaluate and put a plan together to improve website page speed to lower bounce rates and increase lead conversion.
C. Make Treatments & Services Visible
Layout practice treatments and services on the practice homepage.
When patients are visiting your practice website, they should find all your services and treatments quickly if your medical practice offers a wide variety of services down select to the main procedures and services that you want to feature.
We do ENT marketing for an otolaryngology practice, and we made sure that their core services are right on their home page.
When deciding on what treatments to promote, think of your ideal audience, key differentiators, and high revenue procedures.
Use lead forms to make it easy for patients to request appointments and to create a call to action for high revenue services.
Lead forms a big for driving leads in your medical marketing strategy.
When designing lead forms on the website, make sure they are accessible and straightforward. Patients don’t want to fill out long and unnecessary forms to schedule an appointment.
Your practice website needs to be built with proper medical SEO and keywords.
To stay competitive and show up in search results, your website design needs to have all the essential keywords and proper SEO structure.
A top-performing website will have a solid SEO and keywords at the foundation of the website design.
Search engine optimization will be built page by page for all aspects of the website through image optimization, accurate meta descriptions, H tags, page structures, and more.
A medical SEO expert will spend their time building out each page of your practice website and do competitive keyword research to make sure your site is on top of local search results.
2. Invest in Social Media Marketing for Doctors
Social media marketing is an essential part of great medical marketing strategies and will help you share content and reach your ideal patient base.
Social media marketing for doctors is a massive contributor to driving traffic to your medical or dental practice website and search engine rankings.
Social media will help medical marketing strategies reach a broad audience and can be used as a critical lead generation tool.
Utilize the available analytics tools that social media platforms provide to track your efforts and modify the social media marketing campaigns for your dental practice.
Did you know that Instagram analytics will tell you exactly what times of day your followers are most active?
That is a BIG advantage for optimizing exactly when to post to ensure the highest level of visibility.
Not all social media platforms are alike, and not all social media is a good fit for your medical practice. Each healthcare social media marketing platform is different and created for a specific audience.
Take the time to evaluate the social media profiles that are the best fit for the medical marketing of the practice based on the target audience and the makeup of the audience that each platform targets.
Check out the age demographics in the graph below for the major social media platforms. What age do you target?
You do not want to waste precious time and energy on profiles that don’t reach your audience. Instagram tends to be a great fit for marketing a plastic surgery practice, aesthetics, or dermatology marketing; however, Instagram may not be an excellent fit for urology practice marketing.
To be successful for medical marketing for doctors on social media, you need to be:
Consistent and organized
Optimized properly
Interactive
Regular Posting
Contain unique images and content for your practice
Create consistent brand continuity
Share content that drives patients to your website
If you are investing in video content, here are some fantastic Youtube SEO tips to keep in mind when posting new videos.
3. Develop a local search engine optimization strategy
Medical marketing for doctors has gone local.
That means that you need to invest time and energy into ranking your website in the 15-20 mile radius around each location for your practice.
A big thing is if you want to rank for it locally. YOU NEED A PAGE FOR IT.
That is a very dumb down version as to say you need well structured and optimized pages for each of our core treatment and services pages.
Take a look at this orthopedic client that we handle medical marketing strategies and local SEO for.
We optimized their orthopedic urgent care page to be well structured and contain local ranking signals such as “Knoxville” on the page.
As a result, they are ranking #1 in search results, and it is one of the top organic traffic generating pages on their website.
Here are some essential tips to remember when creating or optimizing new pages on your website for SEO.
Another critical medical marketing tip for local SEO is to make sure you have individual pages for each location.
If you are a multi-location medical practice, develop a landing page for each dedicated location that you have.
Make sure you include the following items on the page:
The city name in the title tag and on the page several times
NAP – name, address, phone number, hours of that specific location
Providers that see patients at that location
A short write up about that location.
Follow these local SEO tips, and you will be on your way to outranking your local providers in search, which is key to a successful medical marketing strategy.
4. Correct your provider profile listings
Business listings have a significant impact on medical marketing and SEO for doctors.
Your business listings are the business contact information that displays when patients search for you online.
Uniform business listings across all platforms inform Google that the information displayed about your medical practice is accurate.
The more directories and reviews sites that contain the same business information give Google additional confidence to return your data over a competitor’s practice.
Just take a look at the above pie chart.
Citations (a.k.a. business listings) at in the top 5 most important local ranking factors for search.
Popular business listings platforms are Google, Yelp, and Facebook, but there are multiple smaller listing sites that are important to your reputation.
However, do not forget that unlike other industries, in medical marketing, providers also have profiles, and patients search for these as well.
Often, physicians move several times over their careers, which can cause errors and discrepancies in their listings.
It is essential to update and unify listings for your doctors as well.
This will help strengthen your visibility for searches like “orthopedic surgeon near me”.
Medical marketing for doctors relies on a solid healthcare content marketing strategy. Content marketing increases your overall website traffic, grows organic search, improves brand awareness, and positions you as a thought leader in your specialty.
A well structured, well-performing blog can and should generate up to 50% of a websites organic traffic.
Take a look at a women’s health client we have in Atlanta.
Last updated on 5/13/20
They specialize in vaginal rejuvenation procedures, so we created an informational blog post on the Mona Lisa Touch Procedure they offer.
As a result of this blog post, they now rank #2 for “mona lisa procedure” on Google and drive 30+ people per day to the website looking for information on mona lisa touch.
That is the power of content marketing in your overall medical marketing strategies.
Leverage data at the center of your content marketing strategies.
You can use free tools like Ubersuggest to punch in keywords for topics you want to write about.
It will tell you things like:
Keyword volume
Backlinks
Top pages ranking for that keyword.
You can use this information to ensure you are writing about topics people are searching for and take a look at that is already ranking well and make sure you write a more detailed post.
Also, remember that when it comes to medical marketing and content, blog posts are not the only format!
There are dozens of types of engaging content that you can develop to attract and engage patients.
Video is one of our personal favorites.
6. Email is still a viable medical marketing strategy
Stay in front of your patients and website visitors with email marketing! Email as part of your medical marketing strategy is a great way to retarget patients or reach new patients that have expressed interest in a particular procedure or treatment.
Utilize email marketing to create touchpoints with your practice website visitors and share new promotions, specials, blog posts, and the latest practice news. Grow your practice patient email list by encouraging website visitors to sign up for a newsletter.
A newsletter will help you share monthly content about your medical practice and keep your practice in front of mind for patients.
Another powerful way to leverage email as part of your medical marketing strategy is by creating nurture sequences for your lead generation campaigns.
We have a saying here at Intrepy, “you paid for them, nurture them!”.
That means on a good day; you may convert 30% or 3 out of every ten leads to book an appointment.
However, you paid for the other seven, so get them into a 10-12 email sequence that provides value and establishes trust with them.
Doing so can help ultimately get them to book an appointment and walk through the door.
7. Generate new patient reviews
Patient reviews are one of the top 3 most important local SEO factors when it comes to local search rankings.
Let’s go back to this graph again.
You will see reviews are listed at a close 3rd BUT considering that Google My Business is 1st and reviews are a top-ranking factor for GMB; I believe it to be a #1 or #2 most crucial medical marketing strategy to improve local SEO.
We recommend leveraging technology to makes sure you succeed with generating reviews.
Here at Intrepy, we have a HIPAA-compliant review generation software that allows provider practices to integrate sending review requests into their existing checkout workflows easily.
That ensures easy practice adoption and program success.
The more you can automate, the more success you will have in generating new patient reviews.
And the more growth you will see in local search for your medical marketing.
Video content created by your physicians is one of the most powerful and engaging ways to content with potential patients.
Video medical marketing helps physicians and medical practices reach potential patients and easily market themselves.
Video now receives substantially higher engagement rates than any other type of content, including images and blog posts.
On top of that, Youtube is owned by Google and is the second largest search engine online.
Giving you another avenue for search growth for your practice to pursue.
Building a video content marketing strategy will help you, as the doctor promote your practices, talk specifically about medical conditions and your treatment approach and create a know, like and trust relationship with potential patients before they ever walk through the door.
If you are struggling to come up with topics or ideas for your first round of videos, we recommend starting with the low handing fruit: patient FAQs.
Think about it…
As a physician, you probably get asked hundreds of questions per month by your patients.
Just jot those down, and I can guarantee you could very quickly come up with six months worth of topics.
The great thing is…you know people are wondering about this!
I highly recommend you get on the video training as part of your medical marketing for doctors.
9. Create procedure based content that relates to patients
Sharing high quality before and after pictures of actual patient results can be one of the single most important medical marketing strategies, a practice that provides aesthetics services can do.
When it comes to plastic surgery marketing, before and after photos are an absolute must in your medical marketing strategy.
Develop a large before and after gallery showcasing multiple examples of successful patient’s before and after for various surgical procedures and age ranges.
If your medical specialty is not cosmetic based consider working with a patient that is willing to share their treatment journey as a case study for your practice.
Or even film for procedures from the operating room (with patient consent, of course).
Check out this video from our client Tim Tollestrup. He specialized in peripheral nerve surgery. This video is on his Piriformis Syndrome surgery.
It is his top-performing video with 21,000 views, and it is on an actual patient surgery. People eat this stuff up nowadays.
Many potential patients are continually seeking the best treatments for medical conditions and improving their quality of life.
Sharing successful patient stories and educating the online visitors of your experience and expertise will turn online visitors into real patients.
This can be a highly successful part of your medical marketing strategy if done correctly.
Need more tips on how to rank treatment, services and conditions pages high in search results? Check out this video.
10. Generate leads with Google Ads and Social Ads
The digital advertising space is highly competitive but essential for driving leads and generating new patients for high revenue procedures.
Digital advertising has various platforms, but the most popular being, Google Ads and Facebook ads.
These platforms are the heavy hitters when it comes to digital advertising for medical practices. Both Search Ads and Facebook Ads Manager have their advantages for targeting potential patients.
Search based ads allow you to target specific keywords in search and present ads to those people in a particular geographical area if you outbid competitors.
Above is a sample of search ads for a client we do mental health marketing for that is a psychiatrist in Manhattan.
We were focusing on bringing in new telepsychiatry clients for them during COVID.
Facebook Ads Manager allows you to create highly specific audiences to present ads based on the data Facebook ad pulled from their personal profiles.
Above is a sample of an ad from a women’s health clinic focusing on driving in new menopause consultations.
We took into consideration things such as age, geography, and interests when targeting our ads.
Therefore, we were able to target only those people that best fit our client’s potential patient base of a specific procedure we are promoting.
Digital advertising has revolutionized the medical marketing industry with platforms like Facebook and Google Ads.
Both PPC and Facebook advertising allows you to customize your advertisement to reach your exact potential patient base and provide specific tracking and analytics to gain great insights into the success of the advertising program.
Not only can you customize your medical practice ads but also monitor the ROI.
Analytics will help you adjust the ads to improve results based on data that has been received.
Digital advertising can be interactive and allows potential patients to engage with advertisements making it easier to capture contact information and convert leads.
Not only can you use digital advertising to drive in new leads and conversions, but you can also use it to boost your organic reach.
Google Ads and Facebook advertising are considerable drivers in converting new patients, growing high revenue procedures, and increasing overall practice revenue.
11. Grow new patient referrals through physician outreach
Physician referrals can be the lifeline of a medical practice, so developing a physician liaison marketing program is essential for sustaining strong doctor referral relationships.
Successful medical marketing for doctors will include efforts to expand your healthcare network and increasing patient growth.
Physician liaison marketing is hiring a representative for your practice to meet with local referring doctors and medical practices to increase patient referrals for the practice.
As the physician relations representative, they extend the bridge of communication between referring doctors and their medical practice.
Referral outreach can result in a significant increase in patient referrals and overall practice growth.
Physician liaison marketing is especially an excellent fit for hospitals, surgeons, and specialty medical practices because their patient base is majority referrals from general practitioners.
Other medical practices can significantly benefit from having a physician relations manager to help grow their healthcare network and meet with local physicians.
Benefits of a Physician Liaison Program:
Skilled physician liaison representative to promote the practice
Connects medical practice and doctors with referring physicians
Helps introduce new physicians to the healthcare community
It provides a way to streamline referrals for primary care providers easily.
Accessible point of contact for referring doctors for questions, concerns, or any other needs
Marketing director for practice
Increases patient referrals
Increases high revenue procedures
Increases overall practice revenue
Track visits and builds the physician’s network
Provides physician referral analytics
Evaluates practice growth and creates a marketing strategy
12. Depend on marketing analytics to make decisions
Understanding the medical marketing efforts that are most effective for your medical practice requires proper tracking and data and analytics reports.
Tracking and analytics will give you a fully comprehensive report on the progress of the medical marketing for your practice.
With tracking and analytics, you can target and re-invest in the marketing efforts that have proven successful.
We recommend utilizing software or CRM that provides marketing attribution so you can not only track how patients got into your funnel but see all their points of interaction that caused them to convert ultimately.
Dashboards are a fantastic way to see the executive-level health of your medical marketing program quickly.
At Intrepy, all of our clients get access to their very own marketing growth dashboards so they can see where they are at in their program at all times.
Google Data Studio is also a powerful, free option to create visual dashboards.
Medical Marketing for Doctors Strategies Wrap Up
Take a hard look at each of these medical marketing strategies and formulate a plan to either implement or update these tactics in your overall healthcare marketing initiatives.
If you do, I think you will be plenty surprised at the amount of new patient growth the practice will experience.
The beauty is that many of these items play directly off each other, and the effectiveness of one dramatically contributes to that of another.
As we mentioned in many other articles, whenever you add a new digital marketing campaign to your arsenal test, test and retest one more time to make sure you are correctly optimizing all aspects of the campaign.
Give us a call or fill out a form and get a FREE practice assessment where we look at where you are at, what you need to do and what your competitors are doing.
We hope you found these medical marketing insights and tips helpful! Thanks for reading.
Justin Knott, President & CEO.
Instagram Marketing for Doctors – 11 Tips to Get Engage with Patients
Instagram marketing for doctors is one of the top ways to organically engage with potential patients and begin to build a know, like and trust relationship through thought leadership. It has skyrocketed to prominence over the past few years and now it is the place to be when it comes to social media engagement.
With an estimated 864 million user accounts, you can see why there is such a big opportunity for medical practices to reach a whole new set of potential patients.
Whether you are reading this post because you are trying to figure out if jumping into the Instagram game is right for you as a practice, or you have had a profile for a while but are struggling with the growth aspect we will cover the 101s and some great strategies to get you those first 1,000 Instagram followers.
To get things started I am going to go over some of the 101s when setting up your Instagram and creating a killer brand page/profile for your practice right out of the gate.
Setting Up Your Doctor Instagram Profile
Sounds simple enough but I still see doctors on Instagram making a mistake when setting up their Instagram and that is not using an Instagram Business account and signing up for a personal account. If you are not sure if you are using a business Instagram account, it’s pretty easy to find out.
Go to your account and next to “Edit Profile” if you see the “Promote” button then you are utilizing Instagram business. If you are realizing now that you may have made this mistake, don’t fret switching over is simple. Take a look at the screenshots below on how to make the switch.
Once you have made the switch or set up an account make sure to fill out all of your practice information, including: website, bio, category, and ALL of the contact options so it is as easy as possible for people to contact the practice.
Why Do You Need to Make the Switch to an Instagram for Doctors Business Account?
Making the switch gives you a set of really excellent tools to help you grow your medical Instagram account. You will be able to see rolling 7-day insights on impressions, post reach, profile views, website/direction/call clicks and more. You will also be able to view a breakdown of your followers by gender, age range and location, which is important when targeting local patients. It will help the practice stay up to date on who is following you to make sure you are reaching the right target marketing in the right area.
11 Instagram Marketing for Doctors Tips
Now that you have made the switch or got the Instagram profile all set up for the business it is time to look at growing those followers, likes, and engagements to get more patients. Instagram is a naturally visual social media platform, so you want to go in realizing you need to create some visual branding guidelines to keep your wall consistent from a look and feel perspective.
Most successful accounts have a specific theme and overall color that they go for on their wall.
1. Create Posting Templates
To accomplish branding consistency, I was referring to the easiest way is to look at your current brand and develop some high-quality posting templates for different situations.
This will help to streamline the efforts when you are putting something onto the medical practice page that fits a specific template style that you have designed.
Many people forgo this when starting and it creates inconsistent branding. If you want to build patient engagement loyalty over time, then create a theme and stick with it for the most part.
2. Using the Right Instagram Hashtags
Hashtags are one of the lifeblood of the Instagram platform. They are how people find new content, engage with the things they love and connect with new people. For medical practices, it is no different.
You need to find the Instagram hashtags that are in line with what your potential patients are looking for content wise. Make sure to find a right blend of very popular hashtags, branded hashtags, local hashtags, and industry-specific hashtags.
Using #love #fun #happy in all of your posts may get you some likes because of their overall popularity, but it won’t get you where you need to be regarding customer loyalty and sustained local engagement. You will be drowned out by all of the other noise on those hashtag feeds.
There are a ton of hashtag research tools online both free and paid options to help you find out what your target demographic is using to maximize your reach for each post. Here are a few of the most popular:
All Hashtag
Ritetag
Instagram Hashtag Generator
Hashtagify
3. Use a Killer Photo Editor
To be truly successful and grow your medical practice Instagram following you need to think of everything you post as art. Whether it’s a graphic of a new special, the practice is running, or a photo of the surgeon in the operating room make sure you take the time to edit and add graphics.
This again goes back to the importance of developing some posting templates because if it takes you forever to post every time you may eventually be very discouraged to do so so make it easy on yourself.
Certain Instagram filters have even been showing to lead to higher engagement rates. Hubspot did an in-depth article solely focused on Instagram filters. Check it out it is worth a read during your research.
4. Post High-Quality Content Consistently
Point #4 in Instagram marketing for doctors is where the rubber meets the road when it comes to having patient engagement and growth. It starts with consistent, high-quality content. Now that you have a good photo editor and a few posting templates the high quality should not be tough.
It is the consistency that gets most people. Most Instagram experts agree that it is the more the merrier when it comes to posting. The minimum goal should be every day with a sweet spot of 3X per day. Tons of studies show posting 7+ times per week triples likes, engagement and follower growth.
When clients come to us to grow their practice Instagram account or ask me to audit their profile this is consistently the #1 reason for growth problems for medical practice: lack of posting frequency. To keep your audiences engaging you need to provide content, lots of material. You have targeted potential patients now it’s time to show them what makes you the best in the industry.
The more consistency you gain in likes the more your Instagram posts will appear on their feed. If you are posting 3 or more times a day, you are increasing the possibility to gain more likes and engage with your audience. Posting on Instagram with high-quality posts multiple times a day requires time and monitoring. This is the challenge that most doctors quickly learn when trying to grow their Instagram.
Instagram involves a lot of time and attention. Posting multiple times a day is only successful when your Instagram has fresh and captivating visuals. Simply reposting or recycling content just to hit the daily quota of posting will not grow followers and likes.
5. Proactively Follow Patients That Fit Your Target Audience
To get to that 1,000 Instagram followers mark quickly for your medical practice, you need to be actively following people on Instagram. However, it is easy to grow fast by following 1,000s of people at random (or buying followers which I strongly discourage) but what does it matter if the people following you have no interest in what you do or are located five states away? More than likely someone in Texas is not going to make the trek to Florida to visit your OB/GYN practice. You need to focus on targeting people in specific geographical locations that fit your target market of potential patients.
There are a few different ways to find local people. Start by using popular places located in your city by doing a search and swapping over to the “Places” results and click on the best options. You will see photos from people that have tagged that place in the photo.
For example, a popular local yoga studio or women’s clothing boutique could be a great search to find local, health-conscious women to follow if that is your target.
6. Engage with Your Patients
If you are consistently following people, you need to utilize your main news feed and like, comment and engage with the people you are following. Especially the people that show you love on your posts.
It can be time-intensive, but you will be happily surprised at the growth and reciprocated engagement you receive when you show a little love on Instagram. Social media is inherently selfish because your feed is filled with people talking about themselves or taking selfies.
Like their photos and many will return the favor. This works to help get your posts out to more people because on of Instagram’s algorithm factors is the number of likes so the more you receive the more you will increase your overall impressions and brand exposure.
7. Bring Your Instagram Followers Into The Operating Room
Many doctors and medical practices that have developed a large following on Instagram have a common theme. A large portion of their wall features their physicians doing what they do best: surgery. People want to see awesome and unique on Instagram and placing tons of stock photos of pretty models will bore your followers to death.
However, show your doctor in action performing a rhinoplasty or liposuction, while grotesque to a point, will draw in a large amount of interest and eyeballs. It also allows people to build a little bit of a relationship with the physician who will handle their patient care if they decide to come into the practice.
8. Run Contests and Promotions
Contests and promotions when done correctly are a great way to grow your following and engage with new people in your community.
Plan a promotion for the practice that will be of substantial value to potential clients and get them into the office to see what you do. I have seen some doctors do giveaways and a person on the other side of the country wins their skincare line.
How does that help grow the practice? Be creative with your promotion but also ensure that claiming the prize involves being involved in some level with the physical practice.
9. Cross Promote to Your Target Audience
Especially when the practice Instagram is early on it can be difficult trying to get people to follow you back. When you have 100 follows people are more reluctant to see the value in following your verse if you have 10,000 followers. There is psychological and social validation factor that says hey 10,000 other people found something interesting here I am sure I will too.
Therefore, it can be of great benefit while your Instagram is growing and gaining traction to team up with a brand, product, or influential person in your market to cross-promote to their followers.
This practice has rapidly grown in popularity with many people making their living helping brands and products reach more people and sell more. This is referred to as influencer marketing and can be a highly effective way to accelerate your Instagram account by leveraging someone’s already established audience.
Pro Tip: Influencer marketing generally comes with a cost, either monetarily or in-kind trade of services so be prepared. Make sure there is skin in the game for both parties so they are incentivized to promote your brand but you know exactly what you are getting out of it in return. Secondly (most importantly) is to do the research to make sure you are reaching the right audience. There are tools online that can breakdown an account’s followers on a demographic and geographic basis. As well as, engagement rates. You want to make sure that you will not only get your message out to the right potential audience but that they are “listening” to what the influencer has to say.
10. Promote Your Instagram Profile Everywhere
Utilize all the other places on and offline that you can to make current and potential patients aware that the medical practice has an Instagram profile. Make sure the icon is prominent on the practice website at the top and bottom of the site.
Create graphics for the other practice social media accounts to remind people to follow on Instagram too.
Finally, your current patient base can be a conduit to reach new patients so put a stand at check out and in the patient rooms letting them know Instagram is where it is at!
11. Showcase Patient Success Stories or Before & Afters
People want to see other people who have had an excellent experience at the practice. They do not care about a stock photo or a before and after provided by the manufacturer of your laser machine.
Patients are inundated daily with before and afters and they are smart enough to read between the lines and know what’s real and what is suspect. Reach out and ask patients that are happy with their experience if they are willing to participate in a social media campaign. Tell their story because it is a great way to create an emotional connection with your audience when they can relate to another person.
On the before and after side, if you are a cosmetic or aesthetics practice, be diligent in collecting and distributing these. Keep them consistent and focus on a wide range of ages, both sexes, and different skin types. People want to relate to someone as close to their type as possible when it comes to procedural results.
Do not forget to watermark your images to reduce the risk of them being stolen or used elsewhere around the internet. Unfortunately, this occurs on a daily basis so be diligent in protecting your property by watermarking photos with your logo.
Instagram Marketing for Doctors Wrap Up
Instagram for medical practices can be a powerful tool to connect with your current and potential local patient base. If you follow these steps and focus on posting and brand consistency, you will be surprised at how Instagram can turn into one of the top healthcare marketing strategies for your practice. Be different, be creative, and get the whole practice involved.
Medical practices are a dime a dozen on social media do something to separate you from the crowd and engage with patients.
Doctor Marketing Agency Guide for 2021
Physicians are inundated with options and decisions for the best route to go when marketing or advertising their practice.
There seems to be endless strategies and platforms and countless agencies to help them execute these tactics. When shopping for a new agency why should you consider hiring an agency that exclusively focusing on health, medical and dental practice?
Is there a real advantage to hiring a doctor marketing agency? We explored 10 reasons why they can be the best fit to grow your practice and generate new patients.
1. Unique healthcare market insight
A doctor marketing agency has the expertise in all channels of marketing but also the direct, high-level knowledge of the healthcare industry. A professional healthcare marketer understands the medical space, physician competition, and the patient journey.
Medical and dental marketing requires a unique approach and knowledge of the current healthcare ecosystem. A healthcare marketing agency recognizes the role insurance companies and healthcare laws play in crafting the overall medical marketing strategy for your practice.
Healthcare marketing agencies understand the competitive marketing needed for small privately owned physician practices as well as large hospital systems.
Market insight is key to executing a successful medical marketing plan and attaining knowledge of the local physician competition. A healthcare marketing agency will attain market research to understand competing doctor’s marketing campaigns’: budgets, rankings, advertising channels, and promoted services.
The doctor marketing agency’s insight gives the physician a comprehensive competitive analysis and helps navigate marketing efforts moving forward.
2. Understanding Patient intake process and flow
The best doctor marketing agency understands the patient journey from what information they are looking for on your website, differentiators that matter, where they go to read reviews to make decisions to the importance of streamlining the appointment scheduling process.
This is critical because developing effective marketing and advertising strategies to target the exact potential patient base for your practice requires a vast knowledge of what the patient’s journey looks like and what, where and how to communicate an effective message to them that converts.
Not all patient scheduling and treatments are the same, so working with an agency that understands value per patient is a huge advantage. Some patient treatment options are one-off and some are returning patients for continuous care.
A marketing agency for doctors uses this information to develop marketing initiatives most effective for driving in new patients, increasing high revenue procedures, and staying in front of current patients.
3. Increasing Patient engagement
Direct patient engagement is a great way for physicians and medical practices to set themselves apart from the competition.
The most successful agencies develop marketing strategies, generate content and build advertising campaigns that drive new patient engagement and deliver value to potential patients.
A physician like Dr. Pimple Popper has mastered the art of delivering content that their target patients base cares about and therefore wants to engage with.
The result is building a large audience, extending the brand reach, and driving new patients into the practice.
4. A Focus on Patient Referral Volume
Patient referral volume is simply the process of gaining and obtaining patients through physician referrals and tracking that growth. Doctor referrals are the foundation of a majority of specialty medical practices and maintaining a solid patient base may rely on the volume of those patient referrals.
Building strong relationships with referring doctors is critical in growing your medical practice and gaining new patients.
A healthcare marketing agency should understand the value of not just digital marketing initiatives but the role that physician referral plays in practice growth. One should complement the other as even when a patient gets referred to a practice often times they will go online to research the practice and physicians.
Therefore, it is critical that you have positive reviews, your website is performing well in search so it’s easy for patients to find you and the right information to educate themselves once they do find you.
5. Doctor Marketing Agencies have experience working with physicians
A doctor marketing agency, with some exceptions, works exclusively with healthcare-focused organizations, vets, dental and medical practices.
Therefore, physicians can have confidence that the healthcare marketing agency understands the medical and dental industry and what marketing will be most effective for their practice.
Healthcare focused agencies also understand the life of a provider and have the flexibility to work around a doctor’s schedule. Deciding to go the route of higher an outside agency instead of an internal marketing employee should make your life as a provider easier, not harder.
Unfortunately, we all too often hear from providers that higher an agency that it just created unnecessary headaches for them because they were constantly telling them what they legally can and cannot say or how to reposed to patients in a HIPAA compliant manner.
These are things that are streamlined with an agency that focuses on health and medical marketing.
6. Knowledge of the major medical marketing channels
A marketing agency for doctors is dedicated entirely to improving healthcare organizations by enhancing practice reputations, drawing in new patients, and amplify their overall practice success.
They use customized and data-driven strategies to drive their marketing and advertising campaigns. Working closely with physicians and hospitals, an agency identifies benchmarks and goals needed for success and defines metrics to track progress.
Not all marketing and advertising channels are the most effective for every healthcare organization. Healthcare marketing and advertising agencies know from experience and data which channels and services will deliver the best results for your given demographic or specialty focus.
Below are some of the channels often used by a doctor marketing agency to cultivate new business for physicians and hospitals:
Stark and HIPAA law violations are very serious risks for hospitals and physicians in their marketing efforts. Having a marketing and advertising agency focused on the healthcare industry ensures physicians and dentists their agency is well versed in the parameters of Stark and HIPAA requirements.
This prevents providers from violating laws in their marketing campaigns and that all marketing and advertising is done within the strict guidelines of Stark and HIPAA.
8. Importance and Realistic Pain of reputation management and reviews
Research shows it only takes 1-6 online reviews for 68% of potential patients to form an opinion about your practice. What this means is potential patients are making decisions about what doctors they want to see based on the reputation your practice has online.
When you perform a Google search and the local “Google 3 pack” is returned (the map and the three listings) the top ranking signal next to proximity is the number of reviews and the quality of those reviews as compared to your competition.
Therefore, it is critical to put a high-level emphasis on collecting reviews on Google as well as other third party websites such as Yelp, Facebook, Healthgrades, Vitals, etc., as well as, on your website.
A marketing agency for physicians knows that developing a medical marketing plan that focuses on generating reviews is often a pain point for physicians despite it being such an important component of any local SEO strategy.
Physicians are hesitant to put an emphasis on collecting new patient reviews because of the possibility of receiving negative reviews. This is not because physicians are not confident in their level of quality when it comes to patient care, but because patients can put blame on the practice for things that are oftentimes unrelated to patient care.
Basically, physicians can receive negative reviews because patients do not understand copays and insurance reimbursement for their treatment or if it was completely covered by their insurance plan.
Despite a practice’s best efforts to communicate all charges with a patient, it can still result in a bill from the insurance company and a disgruntled patient taking it out on the practice.
Most negative reviews given by patients are centered on treatment costs and not understanding their insurance coverage. These are circumstances that are not controlled by the medical provider or practice, but they are the ones who receive the blame.
With this being an unfortunate reality of patient care doctors, for obvious reasons, are hesitant to further encourage leaving reviews because of the potential for these types of occurrences.
The truth is, unhappy patients, are going to leave a review whether you ask them to or not and it is a proven fact that reviews are one of the top 3-5 most important ranking factors for local SEO for doctors.
Therefore, it is absolutely critical to push forward and generate positive, well-distributed reviews across medical and non-medical focused reviews platforms.
We recommend leveraging a physician reputation management solution to help streamline the workflows and be able to seamlessly send text and email requests out to patients.
9. Budget Conscious
Marketing budgets frequently decide the marketing channels and efforts that medical practices will use. A healthcare marketing agency is familiar with reasonable marketing budgets for all sizes of medical practices and healthcare organizations.
By understanding the reality of marketing budgets for single provider privately owned practices all the way to large hospital systems, healthcare marketing, and advertising agencies can select the initiatives best suited to maximize patient growth and results.
10. Patient experience on your medical website
Your practice website is the foundation and most essential digital marketing asset for growing your practice. It is the “digital billboard” that represents your practice and engages with your potential patient base.
That is why it is so critical when a physician is going through the medical website design process that they concentrate on some fundamental design elements that will attract potential patients.
A healthcare marketing agency knows the critical components of UX/ UI for patients and how to build a responsive website that increases engagement, traffic and patient conversions.
Doctor Marketing Agency Wrap Up
There are many options to choose from when selecting an agency to market or advertise your practice. A healthcare marketing agency can provide a high level of expertise that may be hard to find from other marketing agencies.
They can understand your pain points, the patient journey, and what will work best to generate new patient traffic to the practice.
If you are looking for a doctor marketing agency to help you grow your practice or improve your marketing and advertising efforts, we are here to help! Intrepy Healthcare Marketing is an award-winning doctor marketing agency that offers a wide range of medical marketing services.
Medical Practice Marketing Tips to Reach New Patients
Practice marketing has evolved to a more digital landscape over the last 3-5 years are patients have become more involved in their own health journey.
This rings even truer during a crisis like COVID as patients are now forced to turn to digital avenues like telehealth and online content for their care.
Unfortunately, many practices have struggled to make the transition and become better digitally integrated to improve patient adoption to digital technologies.
This has cause practices to keep their “virtual” doors closed for longer and miss out on much need patient care and revenues.
However, it is not only possible to grow and reach new and existing patients through effective medical practice marketing but it should shine a light on the importance, moving forward, of growing an engaged online community of patients.
In this article, we are going to look at some medical practice marketing tips that you should be looking at to reach new patients as we move into a “new normal” over the remainder of 2020 and beyond.
1) Evaluate and Adjust Marketing Campaigns
The first thing to do is to evaluate your current medical practice marketing plan. During these sensitive times, it’s crucial that your medical marketing and messaging be helpful and focused, rather than self-promotional. The medical industry prides itself on trust, so it wouldn’t be responsible to turn a blind eye to the pandemic in favor of self-promotion.
The first thing you need to do is to re-examine your content marketing. Comb through your current content and decide if you need to re-write current content to be more responsive or sensitive to the pandemic.
For example, let’s say your practice specializes in elective surgeries but has suspended them during this time. You can incorporate relevant content that alerts potential patients of the changes in service. You can also directly link them to the Centers for Disease Control website for further information on the pandemic, even if you don’t have additional information.
We will get into more in-depth on it later but you also need to make sure there are ample amounts of content on how your practice is handling COVID and patient safety.
In this regard, it is better to over-communicate through content marketing across an omnichannel approach on your website, social media, video, email, etc.
Check out this hyperbaric medicine facility that is a client that we developed a COVID-19 landing page and pop up on their website so patients can easily locate more information on how they are handling the crisis.
2) Introduce Over-the-Phone or Video Chat Medical Services
Telemedicine can be beneficial for keeping existing patients and acquiring new ones for practices closed to in-person visits. Talking with patients over the phone or a video chat allows your practice to continue patient care even when the physical office is closed.
In turn, your patients feel cared for during a very confusing and stressful time.
You can advertise these new video chat services to your patients (and potential new ones) via several methods:
Create a prominent banner or pop-up announcement on your website
Email current and potential patients
Promote your new service on social media
Add the information to your site’s landing and contact pages.
If you use over-the-phone or video chat medical services, your practice can adhere to CDC guidelines and address your patients’ health concerns. Remember to communicate with your patients through your website and other digital channels to keep your patients well-informed of this new feature.
Fortunately, many of these mediums of video and chat communication are reimbursable by insurance so it is a great way to continue to bring in revenue in a digital setting.
3) Update Your Practice’s Website
Your practice website is arguable your most important medical practice marketing asset.
The first thing you need to do is make sure that your website is communicating easily and clearly the things that matter most to patients.
Are you open and seeing patients?
How do patients book appointments right now? Online? Over the phone?
If I book via telehealth, how do I get into the telehealth visit?
What are you doing to follow safety measures if you are physically open?
Resources
One of the best things you can do is create a page exclusively dedicated to resources. Patients and other site visitors will find solace in having a list of local and national resources they can use for information. This resource page can contain a short introduction and a list of resources, such as:
A direct link to the CDC’s website
Coronavirus FAQs
Insurance policies
Sanitation guidelines
Update Practice Info & Office Hours on Listings
You also need to update your office hours if they have changed due to COVID-19. Make sure you post your changes on your website as well as local listings and all other channels (Yelp, Google, etc.).
Google My Business has added some additional point of care fields that you need to make sure are completely filled out including “COVID-19 Info Link” and “Virtual care link” for specific info pages you have on your website.
The more of these features that you fill and complete on listings like Google My Business the better you are going to rank in local SEO and the more patients will being able to find helpful information to book with you.
4) Leverage Email Marketing to Improve Patient Communication
If you’re not already doing email marketing, now is an opportune time to start. Email marketing is one of the most effective digital marketing strategies to get new and existing patients to visit back in the practice (in person and virtually).
People have been at home due to stay-at-home orders and are consuming information through digital channels, including email. News and updates on COVID-19 are happening quickly; the best way to stay connected with your patients is through email marketing.
Along with updates on your operations, you can send helpful information on COVID-19 from reputable sources. These updates can show your patients that you’re there for them while keeping your practice in their minds.
They will trust you as a valuable resource not only for healthcare but for information as well.
Investing in growing your practice email list will prove invaluable over the coming months and years.
A few of the best ways to do so is by offering downloadable resources, free webinars, and exclusive content.
Patients eat up provider level content and are happy to give away their email address in exchange for relevant, value-add resources to make them happier and healthier.
5) Share Info and Updates on Social Media
Have you been investing in social media as part of your medical practice marketing strategy?
If not, you may have missed out on a big line of communication and engagement after the physical doors of your practice closed.
During the stay-at-home orders, more and more people are browsing through social media to get updates on the COVID-19 situation.
This is a perfect opportunity to begin to invest in a content and storytelling program to develop videos and blog posts about what you do, how you help patients and interesting FAQs surrounding your specialty or practice type.
In order to found out what platforms or content medium would be the most effective, start by evaluating your existing patient base.
This will tell you if Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Youtube, or LinkedIn would be the best avenues.
Generally, consistent video content is always a winner with your target audience if you can get into a rhythm of producing high-quality videos 2-3 times per week and post it on social media.
Struggling with content ideas? Start with the low handing fruit by asking yourself what are the common FAQs that patients ask me on a monthly basis?
Start there and I bet you can come up with months worth of video ideas.
The best thing is? You know patients are asking those questions.
6) Utilize Local Search Engine Optimization
During and after the pandemic, you’ll need to rely on growing local organic search for your inbound marketing strategy.
It is an investment well worth making as it puts you more in the driver’s seat for attracting new patients versus relying on the costs of advertising to keep leads flowing in.
The chart above gives you a peek into what Google’s algorithm deems most important in terms of ranking well in local search over your competitors.
One of the most important factors in addressing on-page website optimization.
On-page SEO refers to the structures of the pages on your website to ensure they are following Google’s best practices.
That includes your title tag, URL, H tags, body copy, website speed, on-page time, and several other factors.
We generally start with auditing the existing pages on a new client’s website to identify areas of improvement and running an audit on the top 5 competitors to find out what is driving the more organic traffic to their website.
That allows us to utilize data to determine what needs to be done versus guessing what patients are searching for to find your services.
Want more tips? Here are 7 of the top on-page medical SEO strategies you need to keep in mind.
7) Get started with Video Marketing
Video is one of the most powerful mediums and medical practice marketing tools you can leverage.
It is the preferred way patients want to consume information and it helps to establish a know, like, and trust relationship with potential patients before they ever walk through the practice doors.
Getting involved as a provider in the video content creation of the practice is critical to the overall success of the program.
Patients want to hear from the point of care providers talking about their knowledge and expertise as it relates to their health and wellness.
Make sure you are not only postings these videos on your website and social media but getting them up on Youtube and properly optimizing them for Youtube SEO.
This will ensure you get the biggest reach out of each video and go back in and insert them into related blog post articles.
That not only increases on-page time for each blog post as patients watch the videos while they read, but it also increases the number of video views.
A win-win scenario.
Not sure where to start with Youtube SEO? Check out this video with the top tips.
8) Know Your Responsibility
The most crucial point is to remember your responsibility as a medical practice during a global pandemic.
Prioritize everyone’s health and safety and avoid instilling fear in people or adding to the information clutter.
You can build your practice’s credibility by providing truthful, relevant information, and reinforcing your position as a trusted authority in your specialty.
You also need to remember to have empathy when marketing and communicating with patients.
In this sensitive time, people are looking to healthcare organizations for assurance. Remember to keep your tone delicate, positive, and empathetic. Take care with the language you use because everyone is dealing with the pandemic differently.
Wrapping Up Practice Marketing Strategies
As we continue to navigate the waters of a new normal that COVID has created it is important to continue to look to digital strategies and software that your practice can leverage to connect and grow your patient population.
Telehealth tools are only a portion of the fix. What good are tools if patients don’t know how to find them, leverage them, or connect with you on them?
If COVID has taught us one thing in the marketing world I hope it is the value of growing an engaged “tribe” of patients that you can communicate with, teach and care for no matter what time we are in.
Top Orthopedic Marketing Strategies for 2021
Like any business, an orthopedic practice needs a steady stream of leads to survive in a competitive healthcare market. Steady leads are not required to generate revenue, but effective orthopedic marketing and orthopedic advertising strategies must be executed to convert them seamlessly.
Orthopedic marketing relates to creating patient-focused marketing strategies specifically for orthopedic doctors and practices to help them attract new patients and retain existing patients. That generally involves digital marketing including website design, medical SEO and paid advertising.
If you’re here, then you’re wondering how you can drive more leads to your practice with precise orthopedic marketing techniques. If so, then you’ve come to the right place.
This complete guide to marketing an orthopedic practice will put you on the right track to improve the performance of your practice and usher in a new wave of profitability.
Get Your Orthopedic Surgeons on Video
Video marketing has become extremely popular in recent years. Rightfully so, it’s an extraordinary way to reach unique audiences, build credibility, and naturally refine leads.
One of our top tips for marketing an orthopedic surgeon is getting them to focus on creating educational videos.
Just take a look at these lucrative video marketing statistics for businesses.
As you can see, there are numerous terrific benefits to video marketing and you can leverage the activity to convert more leads for your orthopedic practice.
In the field of healthcare, it can be difficult for people to trust physicians. After all, there is a rigid degree of trust that must be maintained before someone entrusts a doctor with their health.
Videos that introduce your providers, provide important information to prospective patients, and answer frequently asked questions, can lead to increased brand trust.
Having prospects see the human side of your providers can make your practice more likely to retain quality leads.
Do not forget that Youtube is owned by Google and is the second largest search engine.
That can yield big benefits in search visibility if you follow the right process for Youtube SEO when uploading your videos.
Check out these simple tips to get the most reach out of each video.
If you are struggling to get started with topics just write down common questions that patients ask you week in and week out.
That will help you come up with dozens of content topics that you know patients are looking for the answers to.
Use Automated Appointment Reminders to Decrease No Shows
Every year, millions of people miss their doctor appointments. There are several reasons why this is, but the fact of the matter is that your practice literally can’t afford to bleed through new business.
To decrease no shows for your orthopedic practice, simply use automated appointment reminders. This orthopedic marketing hack, allows you to remind your patients about their scheduled appointment times – because let’s be honest – people naturally forget about things.
Although appointments are important from a health perspective, people may forget they have one, leading to potential health risks. Also, automated appointment reminders are instrumental from a sales standpoint.
If you notice that a person keeps missing appointments, you can follow-up with them to formulate a solution for their problem. Whatever the case is, automated appointment reminders can help you steer your patients to your practice on time and refine them accordingly.
80% of patients read reviews before booking appointments with practices
People typically read an average of 10 reviews before they feel ready to trust a local business.
57% of people will never work with a local business that has less than 4 stars on Google, Facebook, or Yelp.
91% of 18-34-year-olds trust online reviews as much as word-of-mouth recommendations.
As you can see, generating reviews for your locations and providers is extremely important to your status as a credible practice. The most effective way of generating new reviews for your orthopedic practice can be by simply asking your patients and their families to leave honest reviews on Google, Facebook, or Yelp.
The more reviews you receive, the more prospective patients will be able to trust you.
We always recommend leveraging a review generation software to make adoption and adding into your existing workflows that much easier.
You’ve likely seen a Google ad conducting a personal search for a product or just by browsing some information. Make no mistake – Google ads are pivotal to orthopedic advertising. Therefore, if you don’t have a Google ad campaign for your practice, then it’s time to develop one.
Setting up a Google Ads campaign can help drive targeted keyword search engine traffic to your website. With the correct research and landing page optimization, it is possible to drive highly-qualified surgical and non-surgical leads to the practice.
The advantage of Google Ads over social media ads can be the fact that the searcher already has a highly level of purchase intent because they are already on the search to some level for the solution that you provide.
You just need to ensure that you are striking the balance on your landing pages between a simple focus on conversion and proving enough content value to convert them.
Leverage On-Page SEO to Increase Organic Traffic
On-page search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of making your website ready to rank online. Here are the following areas of on-page SEO that mean the most to your web ranking:
Metadata – Including keywords in your URL, title tags, and meta description can help your website show up for relevant searches.
Keywords – Keywords are search terms people use to find information. Embedding keywords properly throughout your website will improve your overall SEO ranking.
Value – Do you have an FAQ section to answer your prospects’ questions? Is your site structured well from your navigation bar to your footer? The value of your website will be determined by search engines and play a large role in your web ranking.
The best way to gauge the viability of your medical search engine optimization performance is by performing a practice assessment of your website. An audit will provide you with diagnostic insights on the issues that exist on your website and how you can improve it.
Check out this video for more tips on SEO strategies for your website’s pages.
Promote the Orthopedic Practice Via Guest Posts & Podcasts
Another amazing orthopedic marketing strategy is leveraging content marketing. It is a proven method of establishing your business as an authority and growing organic search traffic.
This is also true for healthcare organizations. If you want to spread your expertise online, publishing a guest post or column on an authoritative website is a great way to start.
Prospects will be more comfortable to business with you if you have published thought articles on popular websites like WebMD and Science Daily.
Your doctor listing is how your prospects will interact with your practice. Your listing contains important information that has to be 100% accurate. Otherwise, you could miss out on wide-open sales opportunities.
Often, when marketing orthopedic practices they make the mistake of having multiple listings that contain the same information. This can confuse prospects. Therefore, unify duplicate listings if any exist.
More importantly, you’ll need to manage your provider listings to ensure that your information is always correct.
Start with the most important provider listings sites like Healthgrades, Vitals, CareDash and RateMD.
This will help in ranking for searches like “knee replacement specialist near me” that are valuable keywords to rank #1 in local search.
Also, 89% of consumers read businesses’ responses to reviews. Keeping your listings accurate and properly managed can lead to fewer headaches and more success with drawing prospects from your online presence.
You may think geofencing ads are something out of a sci-fi book. However, the concept is quite simple. Geofencing in orthopedic advertising is the process of using a virtual boundary around a specific region to deploy targeted ads inside of that geographical area.
Let’s explain that even further. With geofencing ads, you can send customized ads to prospects based on a predetermined area they enter. For example, if you’re an orthopedic doctor in Atlanta, you could choose to geofence CrossFit gyms or trampoline facilities because unfortunately people get injured in these places often.
Geofencing ads give users the ability to send laser targeted ads with high success rates.
This is a highly effective orthopedic surgeon advertising technique.
We have seen it used in great effect for the client mentioned above that has orthopedic urgent care locations by targeting sports fields, trampoline and play facilities, and more.
Invest in an Analytics Dashboard
Marketing is a numbers game. You won’t win if you make premature judgments about your strategy without the numbers to back it up.
Investing in an analytics dashboard will put all of the important metrics of your website right in front of you.
This way, it’s much easier to track the ROI of your orthopedic marketing campaigns and get more money from your marketing spend.
And you do not have your analytics spread across multiple websites like Google Analytics, Google My Business, lead forms, and more.
That is why we make it a point to ensure all of our clients have access to our marketing analytics dashboards so they can quickly make executive-level decisions about their orthopedic marketing program.
Wrapping up Orthopedic Marketing Strategies
There are several you can implement for orthopedic digital marketing, as evidenced above. To put a proven orthopedic marketing agency in your corner, connect to learn more about how we can help and check out our orthopedic case studies.
And social media offers different platforms for you to reach new and potential patients, offering you endless ways to connect and share.
Each social media platform is different, and each platform has a diverse target audience, so depending on who you are looking to get in front of, you can explore using some more than others.
A social media platform that is on the rise and gaining more and more popularity is Linkedin. Linkedin is a social media networking platform designed for business professionals and encourages content sharing and networking connections.
The LinkedIn platform is excellent for sharing relevant and professional content to your practice and only interacting with colleagues and potential patients.
So you can avoid the pet, baby pics, and politics (for the most part).
The Benefits of Using Linkedin Marketing for a Practice:
Attract new patients and drive leads
Target your ideal audience
Share information about you and your practice
Connect with local physicians
Engage with your target audience
Encourage your staff and team to support and share your content
Become a thought leader in your space
So now we know why using LinkedIn can bring value to your practice, the question now is, how?
How can doctors develop a LinkedIn marketing plan to help them grow and attract new patients?
1. Customize Your LinkedIn Profile
LinkedIn offers numerous ways you can customize your profile to your practice and specialty.
A profile that is customized to your brand shows other LinkedIn users that you are an active user, and you can display your practice information.
As a physician post, an updated and professional headshot (whitecoat preferably) and customize your background to the — branding of your hospital or practice.
Be sure to include your logo and tagline and make sure it is to the LinkedIn size standards to avoid your profile picture covering it up.
Without a clean, professional headshot and customized background, other LinkedIn users may be hesitant to connect because your profile looks stagnant. A stagnant profile means that they are unlikely to get any value out of the connection or engagement.
So make sure you’re sending the right message and customize your profile.
You will see that you will receive and have more connections accepted just with those simple customized updates.
Make It Clear What Kind OfPhysician You Are & Where You Work
LinkedIn was built to create an online professional networking system, so make it clear in your title description, what type of medical doctor you are, and where you work.
This way, it makes it easy for those searching to find you, and you appear in search-related terms.
Attach your medical practice or hospital profile on LinkedIn to your profile under experience. That way, they can connect you to where you work, and you get connected with your colleagues, which improves visibility.
2. Post Original Content on Social Media and LinkedIn
Linkedin is a lead generator, so your content needs to be in front of the right audience, providing unique value to what they want to see, and drive them back to your website or practice.
Don’t waste views and impressions re-purposing someone else’s content like WebMD and other health-related articles. Share the content, physician videos, patient journeys, and — blogs from your website.
Not only does that make it unique to you, but you position yourself as a thought leader. Original content drives leads and traffic to your website and increases the likability of them reaching out for an appointment or consultation.
3. Post Valuable & Relative Content on LinkedIn
So we discussed that original content increases the likelihood of converting new leads in your LinkedIn marketing strategy, now it’s about creating value in your post.
The Linkedin-verse wants to see new, fresh, and valuable content featuring the professionals. That means you want to post content that your audience wants to see and finds value in, so as a medical doctor, you want to feature your thoughts on your medical specialty.
So many times, I run across physician LinkedIn post that does not have much if any interaction (likes or comments) this is because it misses that “human factor.”
It is obvious when a physician or practice has someone else posting for them like an office manager or marketing department.
These posts usually have a similar format; It features the title of the article, often the post is promotional for a service, has so many hashtags, and a link.
Similar to this example
What is wrong with this format is…
A. ) It is not their original content
B.) It is obvious that the physician was not the one who posted, so, likely, they won’t engage or interact with you as well.
C.) It is missing the physician’s medical viewpoint, opinion, or what I like to call the “human factor,” or you can call it the VALUE
D.) The post is 24hrs old with one like
Here is an excellent example of a physician adding that valuable human factor, and you can see the difference in engagement and likes.
The point is that the audience wants to know your viewpoint as the professional, not a generic blog title riddled with a million hashtags.
4. Interact & Engage On LinkedIn
Stagnant social media profiles are worse than not having one at all. LinkedIn is a social networking platform built to take the professional networking model and put it online.
You wouldn’t attend a networking event and stand in the back of the room and not speak to anyone or allow them to talk to you, right?
Well, that is what it is like if you don’t engage and interact with others on LinkedIn. You will not see growth or attract leads by expecting them to seek out and found you.
Don’t be shy! Like, comment, and share content from others that you want to add to, discuss, or find valuable.
The physicians that interact and engage have more views and engagements themselves.
5. Build New LinkedIn Connections
Get social and start connecting and networking on LinkedIn. Use LinkedIn to research colleagues, referring physicians, and connect with other medical or marketing professionals.
The more extensive your network, the bigger the audience, and you increase your chances of driving new leads and post visibility.
6. Be Consistent with LinkedIn Marketing Plan
Consistency is critical, and this goes for any social media profile. To keep an active audience, attract new patients, and increase engagement, you need to create consistency on LinkedIn.
Develop consistency in creating connections, engagement, interactions, and posts.
Wrap Up: LinkedIn Marketing Tips for Doctors
LinkedIn is very similar to its face-to-face counterpart. The more “you” and authenticity you put into LinkedIn networking, the better the results. What you put into it is what you can get out of it.
There is nothing like good ol’ “elbow grease” in order to grow a successful LinkedIn profile that actually drives new patients. Leverage the LinkedIn marketing tools at your disposal to engage with your community!
Tips for How Doctors Can Use Social Media to Connect With Patients
Let’s connect, friend, like, tweet, post, and share! In this digital era, these words have taken on a whole new meaning. This new digital vocabulary is connecting people all over the globe. According to a study conducted by LinkedIn, 81% of small and medium business owners use social media to drive growth. Social media is bigger and better than ever and healthcare professionals want a piece of the pie.
If you have been dragging your feet or underutilizing social media to reach new patients the worst thing you can do is to do it for one more day.
Social media is an incredibly powerful way to develop a direct know, like and trust relationship with patients that it would have been difficult to reach in the past. Now you can bring them into your office and show them your exact approach to patient care and your key differentiators.
All of this can be done hyper-local and targeted without having to spend thousands of dollars on advertising.
I like social media growth and impact to that of a snowball rolling down a hill, you need to follow specific steps, strategies and a little “elbow grease” to build engagement and a targeted following but once you do its powerful stuff.
So with that said, there is no denying the importance of Social Media but here are the top 6 ways doctors can utilize social media:
1. Establishing Your Practice Brand in the Community
This is a no-brainer, claim your business online and take back your digital reputation. Allow patients to easily find out the basics of your practice. For example: where are you located, what is your specialty, hours of operation, are there multiple locations? These questions can be easily be answered by creating practice profiles.
Social media profiles are one of the most important local ranking signal for search engines and local SEO.
Put it to the test. Do a local search for a business (by name) and 9/10 times if they have properly optimized social media profiles their Facebook will be in the first few search results.
Check out the result pictured here. I searched for a local medical weight loss facility down the road and viola take a look at the 5th organic search result. Their local Facebook page.
That will ring true for your practice too. Therefore, take the time and claim, complete and optimize your social media platforms, especially Facebook.
If you need additional assistance choosing which social media platforms are right for you based on the demographic you are trying to reach we wrote an article recently for just that!
2. Drive New Patient Traffic to The Practice Website
Doctors could all use more traffic to their practice website, right? Well, social media is one of the most powerful ways to do so.
However, we all too often get pushback when we bring this up to potential clients. They will say we have been using social media for years and we never get patients to the website from it. What is the deal with that??
Well, often times the hard truth is the content they are sharing on their social sites sucks and lacks consistency. Social media is not the “Field of Dreams”. You cannot just build it and expect them to come.
If you get this tip and this tip only from this article it will be well worth it: your social media platforms are only as good as the content you put on it.
This is the only way to get new potential patients on your platforms, keep them engaged and convert them into a new patient. There is so much noise out there that you need to create something unique to stand above the rest.
There are 59.3 Million blog posts posted on WordPress based websites along each month or 2 million per day
With that level of content and social media being produced daily, weekly, monthly, yearly you need to work exact hard to produce pieces that people want to engage with on social media.
3. Improve and Streamline Patient Engagement & Customer Service
Gone are the days waiting on hold or leaving a message. Patients can interact effortlessly and ask questions with a reliable and speedy response. When it comes to our health we have a lot of questions and most don’t want to wait for someone to get back to them.
Patients are more likely to move on to your competition than wait for a callback. Social media bridges that gap and connects doctors to their patients. Practices can connect users to the proper tools, links, and help answer any questions.
People are now turning to the internet to research health and medical-related problems and engage with providers directly. Of all internet users, 66% look online for information about a specific medical problem or disease.
Also, your current patients walk out of the office and sometimes they still have some questions. Social media can be a great way to continue to offer a streamlined way for them to communicate without having to pick up the phone every time.
The caveat here is NEVER giving direct medical advice over social media. If the question becomes too medically focused either direct them to materials on their website to help them or direct them to reach out to the office directly. This is a critical process to keep in mind.
4. Join the Conversation and Connect
Connect with your local medical community who share your passion. Social media can be a great way to position yourself as a practice or individual physician as a thought leader in your community and specialty.
If you do this successfully you can have patients seeking you out from all over the world for treatment simply based on what they have seen on your social media profiles about your approach to patient care and successful cases.
Also, social media can be a great way to connect with physicians to grow your new patient referrals. It’s all about relationships and social media marketing can be a powerful way to grow strong referral relationships.
5. Show Patients & Colleagues You’re the Expert
This is a little bit of a repeat of what I mentioned above but we have seen such amazing results it warranted a more focused discussion on just becoming a thought leader.
You didn’t go to med school for the hospital food. You’re a specialist share your knowledge! Inform your patients about your training, degrees, and a unique approach to specialization with their care.
Many physicians have gained massive practice success by utilizing Youtube to educate patients and physicians on procedures or health techniques. A great example of this is Dr. Sandra Lee aka “Dr. Pimple Popper.” Dr. Sandra Lee utilizes Youtube to educate the public as well as colleagues. Her Youtube fame has allowed her to create her own unique brand and she is recognized as an expert in her field.
We have found video can be a great way for a doctor to get involved in social media and share their expertise without having to sit down and write a 2,000-word blog post.
Once you get down your voice, style, and templates it should not take that long to pump out 60-90 second videos on interesting topics in your field. Patients will soak this information up and can even be used as a springboard to land speaking opportunities.
6. Keeps Your Practice Competitive
You may be the best in the biz but you’re not the only one in town. Your competition is out there and they are using social media to reach patients and gain exposure.
Like I mentioned in point number two, patients are using Google more than ever to find the right healthcare professionals. You don’t want to get left out, an active and well executed social media strategy keeps you ahead of the game.
Learn from what your competition is doing successfully. Take some time and do a little research. Is there a local doctor that you think does a great job on social media? Are there things you can emulate or implement your own strategy?
Also, do not waste your time trying to be the biggest and best on every single platform. I mentioned it briefly near the top of the article choose wisely and focus your time and effort on those social media platforms that best fit your target market and the type of content you wish to create.
Conclusion
It cannot be emphasized enough how critical it is for physicians to have active and engaging social media platforms.
Take the time to research and create a well rounded and healthcare content marketing strategy so that you have powerful content to distribute on your social media platforms.
Intrepy Healthcare Marketing is a medical marketing agency that provides social media marketing strategies to grow practices. If you are looking to revamp or create a dynamic and effective social media marketing strategy for your practice give us a call 678-250-4757 or fill out our form.
Which Social Media Platforms are the best fit for Your Practice?
Social media marketing is a popular healthcare marketing tool used in the dental and medical world and can be very effective when marketing for doctors and medical practices. Social media marketing for doctors can greatly improve their marketing results and drive new patient leads.
There can be some stigma associated with social media marketing for physicians and this is because often times it is done incorrectly and inconsistently with limited to no tracking for measuring success or improving initiatives.
Physicians may have a difficult time utilizing their social media profiles and tracking progress.
The truth is social media is a vital component of digital marketing and SEO for medical practices and dentists.
A strong social media marketing strategy can help increase patient engagement, drive new patients, advertise healthcare services, share practice updates, expand physician exposure, improve physician credibility as a top healthcare expert, and build relationships with patients.
When implementing a successful social media marketing strategy for your practice you need to first understand the different social media channels and which are the best fit for your medical or dental practice.
Factors such as specialty type, target demographic, geography, content you create, etc play an important role in deciding which social media platforms are worth the time an effort to reach your ideal patient.
Facebook
Facebook is one of the top healthcare marketing strategies and should be included in every marketing campaign for physicians.
Some Facebook Statistics:
Facebook has over 1.3 billion users and has unique capabilities to target and track your ideal audience.
60% of Facebook users are female and the average age range is 25-54.
Facebook Marketing is Designed To
Facebook is designed to increase brand awareness, patient engagement, and has a strong impact on local SEO for a practice.
Facebook is one of the most important search engine optimization listings for local search because typically if you search a practice their Facebook is one of the top search results returned.
Advantages of Facebook Marketing for Physicians
Facebook advantages are building brand loyalty, local SEO, patient reviews and engagement, lead generation, and driving new patients to your medical practice.
Facebook allows for an incredibly high level of targeting because of the data they have on their users. This allows you to target in organic or paid posts exact geo, age, interests, income levels, etc. to make sure your message is delivered to the exact audience type you are looking to attract.
Which Doctors and Medical Specialties Are A Good Fit for Facebook?
All medical practices and specialties are a great fit for Facebook and should utilize Facebook in their marketing strategy.
Downside of Facebook
A con to Facebook is that without a large number of likes your audience and engagement can be limited so it can be more of a pay to play, initially.
Since Facebook went public there has been an inverse relationship between organic reach (non-paid reach) and their stock price. Meaning: Facebook has a fiduciary responsibility to its shareholders to earn revenue so they have cut back a Facebook Business page’s organic reach to force you to utilize their Ads Manager to reach the same number of people you use to.
This is a cold truth to advertising and marketing on Facebook.
Therefore, to make your Facebook marketing strategy more successful for your medical practices consider creating a Facebook advertising budget and likes campaigns.
Tips for Facebook Marketing for Doctors & Dentists:
Create a Facebook business profile
Optimize practice information so it’s available and up to date
Appoint a Facebook marketing manager
Clean, consistent and engaging posts based on your medical specialty
Share content that is unique to your medical website to ensure click through to your site
Quick response times for notifications and patient engagement
Never give medical advice
Instagram
Instagram is one of the fastest-growing social media platforms. Instagram is inherently image and video-heavy because users share pictures and videos to engage and connect.
Instagram Statistics
Instagram has 800+ million active users
59% of users in the US are under 30 years old
80% of users follow a business on Instagram
Instagram Marketing is Designed To
Instagram for physicians is designed to engage with patients and share images of procedures, results, and the practice.
Advantages of Instagram Marketing for Physicians
Instagram for physicians is best for lead generation, targeting local potential patients, any medical retail, healthcare events and conferences, cosmetic services, aesthetics, beauty, surgery, and search.
The Downside of Instagram Marketing
In order to have a successful Instagram marketing strategy, it is very time-intensive. Instagram involves daily custom graphics, posting, interactions, advertising, search and hashtag optimization, and building a relevant and engaged audience.
Which Doctors and Medical Specialties Are A Good Fit for
Instagram is visual so it tends to be a better fit for surgeons, but not limited to, some recommendations are:
Instagram allows surgeons and dentists to share before and after patient results, engaging surgery videos and images, testimonials, and promote retail products.
Tips for Doctors Building a Strong Instagram Marketing Strategy:
Assigned Instagram marketing director
Optimize profile
Create a medical practice or business profile
Monitor interactions and have quick response times
Daily Postings
Share patient “before and afters” and results
Custom graphics
Edited and engaging images and videos
Daily interaction with new and existing users
Target local or new patient leads
Hashtag research and planning
Twitter
Twitter is a fantastic way to share original content and lead visitors back to your medical or dental practice website.
Some Twitter Statistics
Twitter has over 600 million users ranging from ages 18-29.
Twitter Marketing is Designed To
Twitter is designed to share news, articles, information, and conversations quickly and efficiently with hashtags used for direct search capabilities.
Hashtags help users and doctors find content related to their search and group information according to your medical field. Twitter for physicians can help doctors share content and connect with potential patients and other medical professionals.
Advantages of Twitter Marketing for Physicians
There has been a lot of talks lately that Twitter is a shrinking or dying platform so users should be careful about investing time and effort into it as a viable social media marketing strategy.
I disagree with this notion and believe it all boils down to how you approach the Twitter marketing strategy for your practice. Twitter is by no means a passive social platform.
It takes consistency, engagement and high volumes of content to produce a “well-oiled machine” that drives patients to your website and into your practice. However, if you invest and stay active it will become one of your greatest and most effective social media marketing strategies.
Downside to Twitter
The con for Twitter if you want to call it that, is the “Tweet” or message is limited to a specific word count.
Essentially, Twitter doesn’t allow for oversharing and encourages getting straight to the point.
In addition, a Tweet has a limited shelf life considering there are about 5,700+ Tweets every second and 500 Million per day so to get above the noise you need to get a high amount of tweets out daily to be seen.
via Meet Edgar
Which Doctors and Medical Specialties Are A Good Fit for Twitter?
All medical specialties are a good fit if they are generating unique and consistent content on their website to share.
If a physician is or is looking to be a respected speaker or thought leader in their field Twitter can greatly help increase impression shares, drive new visitors to your medical website, and further public relations success.
Twitter Mistakes Doctors Should Avoid:
Direct posting from Facebook (lazy posting).
Stagnant profiles.
Not properly optimized.
Only sharing third-party information.
Not having an assigned account manager to handle notifications, shares, likes, tweets, comments, and posting in a timely manner.
Only advertising your medical practice.
Not utilizing the platform to connect and engage with other medical professionals in your field.
LinkedIn
Many healthcare and business professionals are currently using LinkedIn as a digital networking platform.
Some LinkedIn Statistics
LinkedIn has 600 million users ranging in ages 30-49.
57% of all LinkedIn traffic is mobile.
71.5 % of LinkedIn users are located outside the U.S.
44% of LinkedIn users earn more than $75,000 in a year
LinkedIn Marketing is Designed To
LinkedIn was designed as a business networking and development platform for B2B relations. Therefore, it is a great way for doctors, dentists, and practices to directly connect with colleagues and potential patients.
Advantages of LinkedIn Marketing for Physicians
LinkedIn’s social platform helps the healthcare community share related medical business news, articles, and promote interactions and relationship building.
Physicians, hospital systems, and other medical professionals can interact and engage by operating LinkedIn as a digital networking platform. Physicians can also use the platform to search for new hires and quickly review resumes, experience, credibility, and recommendations.
In addition, LinkedIn helps with local search and building networking communities targeted to your healthcare industry.
The Downside to LinkedIn Marketing
The drawback to Linkedin marketing for physicians is that from a personal profile level it is highly personal and needs to involve the provider in some capacity to be successful. When reaching out to a doctor you need to make sure you are representing their voice and approach to patient care consistently which can be tricky.
Which Doctors and Medical Specialties Are A Good Fit for LinkedIn?
All physicians are a good fit for LinkedIn due to the advantages of direct networking with the healthcare community and potential patients. You can do a great deal by positioning yourself as a thought leader in your specialty.
But, physician-owned medical practices benefit greatly because of LinkedIn’s business profile option. Creating a LinkedIn company profile will help your local search rankings and suggested connections.
Tips For Doctors using LinkedIn Marketing:
Create company (medical practice) profile
Optimize profile
Utilize LinkedIn groups
Unique content posting
Consistent posting
Use targeted search capabilities
Don’t spam connections
Youtube
Youtube marketing is extremely effective for healthcare and providers marketing their practice. Youtube allows physicians to record and share original content and medical procedures.
A Youtube marketing strategy can serve as a significant outlet for providing medical information directly from the physician and allows the website to have a multitude of videos without the burden of hosting video directly on the website and weighing it down (from a speed standpoint).
Youtube statistics
Youtube has 1 billion users ranging from all ages.
The number of hours people spend watching videos (aka watch time) on YouTube is up 60% year-over-year, the fastest growth we’ve seen in 2 years.
Youtube is the second largest search engine behind Google
Youtube Marketing is designed To
Youtube is a video-based social platform. With is being the second largest search engine it is an amazing way to reach a new and engaging audience for your practice.
Advantages of Youtube Marketing for Physicians
Youtube is best for physicians that want to share and create videos and showcase specific medical services, testimonials and more. Youtube also serves as a great SEO and search tool for potential patients looking for medical services.
It is a fantastic way to get the practice providers involved in the marketing strategy by creating short videos, 101s, educational pieces and more. We find it is a lot easier for a doctor to jump in front of the camera and make a 90-second video than sit down and create a long-form blog post with their busy schedules.
Downside of Youtube Marketing
Video can be inherently expensive and resource-intensive to create consistent, high-quality videos. Therefore, you need to plan out a video healthcare content marketing budget and look for ways to streamline the production cycle to make it easier and lower costs.
Which Doctors and Medical Specialties Are A Good Fit for Youtube
Youtube is the perfect tool for all physicians to share content, medical procedures, patient journals, and involves less time than constantly writing content.
Tips for Physicians to Building a Strong Youtube Marketing Strategy:
Optimize profile
Create playlists
Use search related tags
Make sure there is a CTA
Custom branded templates
Videos are professional, cleanly edited
Share patient journals
Consistent posting
Professional recordings
Not too lengthy
Pinterest
Pinterest is a social media profile designed for only image sharing or “pins” on “boards”.
Pinterest Statistics
81% of users are female on Pinterest
Millennial are as active on Pinterest as Instagram
Medium Pinterest user age is 40 but most active group os below 40 y/o
87% of Pinners have purchased a product because of Pinterest.
Pinterest is a social media platform designed as a digital cork board and “how to” platform. Pinterest images are carefully designed to advertise and encourage click through for websites.
Pinterest is a great way to share DIYs, health ideas, and more for people to repin and distribute.
Pinterest is a selfish platform (though it can be argued all social media kind of is). What I mean is most people are searching for content they can add to their boards, for themselves, to use at a later date to them.
Therefore, you have to come up with a content strategy that makes people want to share and repin what you are posting to their own wall.
Which Doctors and Medical Specialties Are A Good Fit for:
Pinterest’s audience is 80% female so medical practices and healthcare organizations looking to appeal to the women of the household tend to benefit the most.
Internal Medicine
OB-GYN
Senior Care
Pediatricians
Aesthetics Physicians
Cosmetic surgeons
Plastic surgeons
Weight loss clinics
Bariatric Surgeons
Dermatologist
Tips for Physicians Building a Strong Pinterest Marketing Strategy
Sharing content to drive traffic back to your medical practice website consisting of women’s health such as food and cooking, exercise, common health issues, and family care are great ways to optimize your profile for your practice.
Share original content to lead visitor’s to your site
Share services
Share ongoing wellness and quality of life
Share family care
Optimize profiles
Engage with other profiles
Social media marketing for physicians should be properly optimized, consistent and organized. Daily interacting with users will help with growing your audience and sharing content.
Regularly posting of unique images and content for your practice will create consistent brand continuity. Share content that drives patients to your website to increase patient leads.
Conclusion
With so many different social media platforms available to be leveraged as part of a medical marketing strategy for a practice it can be difficult to know which is the best fit to reach the correct audience.
The key is taking the time to research the best uses and the target market that is the most active on a given platform.
Once you have identified the ideal social media that is the best fit then the next step is to hone in on a consistent content marketing strategy and growth tactics to drive engagement and website traffic from the platforms.
If you are looking to grow your social media platforms and create a dynamic, powerful, trackable and effective healthcare marketing strategy give us a call 678-250-4757 or fill out our contact form.
Intrepy Healthcare Marketing is an award-winning healthcare marketing agency that provides a wide range of medical marketing services.
We Build Innovative Patient-Centric Marketing Programs
Simple yet extremely impactful considering 80% or more patients read reviews before booking appointments.
As you see it is a page that is all about knee surgery and the title tag matches.
Check out the results of that strategy in the urology case study.
That is because your Google My Business is a top local SEO for medical practices ranking factor and what helps your Google My Business rank high? Reviews.
Once you have made the switch or set up an account make sure to fill out all of your practice information, including: website, bio, category, and ALL of the contact options so it is as easy as possible for people to contact the practice.
