Ophthalmology Marketing Ideas for 2024
Like any business, an ophthalmology practice needs a steady stream of leads to survive in a competitive healthcare market. Steady leads are not required to generate revenue, but effective ophthalmology marketing ideas and ophthalmology advertising strategies must be executed to convert them seamlessly.
Ophthalmology marketing relates to creating patient-focused marketing strategies specifically for ophthalmologists and ophthalmology practices to help them attract new patients and retain existing patients. The most effective strategies always involve digital marketing including medical website design, medical SEO, and paid advertising.
If you’re here, then you are looking for ophthalmology marketing ideas you can leverage to drive more leads to your practice.
If so, then you’ve come to the right place.
This complete guide to tips for marketing an ophthalmology practice will put you on the right track to improve the performance of your practice and usher in a new wave of profitability.
Table of Contents:
- Video Has Become an Essential Ophthalmology Marketing Idea
- Use Automated Appointment Reminders to Decrease No Shows
- Generate New Reviews for Locations & Providers
- Ophthalmology Advertising with Google Ads
- Leverage On-Page SEO to Increase Organic Traffic
- Promote the Ophthalmology Practice Via Guest Posts & Podcasts
- Unify & Manage Practice & Provider Listings
- Know when to lean on your OD network and when to augment your ophthalmology marketing
- Invest in an Analytics Dashboard
- Wrapping up Ophthalmology Marketing Ideas
Video Has Become an Essential Ophthalmology Marketing Idea
Video marketing is a mainstay in marketing in recent years. Rightfully so, it’s an extraordinary way to reach new patients, build credibility, and naturally refine leads.
One of our top tips for marketing an ophthalmology practice is getting them to focus on creating educational videos.
Just take a look at these lucrative video marketing statistics for businesses.
- 85% of internet users in the United States watched video content on their personal devices.
- 54% of consumers want to see more video content from the brand or business they support.
- 88% of video marketers are happy with their ROI.
- Video marketers receive 66% more qualified leads every year than non-users.
As you can see, there are numerous terrific benefits to video marketing and you can leverage the activity to convert more leads for your ophthalmology 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.
By getting your ophthalmology surgeons on video, you can help build trust in your ophthalmology practice.
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 ophthalmology practice, simply use automated appointment reminders. This ophthalmology 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 to their problem. Whatever the case is, automated appointment reminders can help you steer your patients to your practice on time and refine them accordingly.
Generate New Reviews for Locations & Providers
Your online reputation can make or break your practice.
Don’t just take our word for it.
According to BrightLocal’s Local Consumer Review Survey, the following insights are true:
- 86% of people read reviews of local businesses.
- 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 ophthalmology 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 review generation software to make adoption and adding to your existing workflows that much easier.
Ophthalmology Advertising with Google Ads
You’ve likely seen a Google ad while conducting a personal search for a product or just by browsing some information. Make no mistake – Google ads are pivotal to ophthalmology advertising, and even more so to the refractive surgery markets. Therefore, if you don’t have a Google ad campaign for your practice, then it’s time to develop one.
I would say this is one of the most effective and critical ophthalmology marketing ideas to implement ASAP.
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 high 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
SEO for ophthalmology 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.
- Images – Are your images correctly optimized? This can affect your site speed, which is a major factor in how long people will stay on your site and how search engines will rank it.
- 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 Ophthalmology Practice Via Guest Posts & Podcasts
Another amazing ophthalmology 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.
Receiving a feature on a popular medical podcast is also an effective way of reaching a broad audience. 32% of the population in the U.S. listen to a podcast every month. It’s also a creative way of building your brand online.
Another major benefit to guest posting and podcasting is you gain a high-quality backlink out of it.
Backlinks are if not the #1, the #2 search ranking factor for Google’s algorithm.
So they are critical to grow.
We even wrote an in-depth article on why doctors should start a podcast and how to do it that is worth checking out.
Unify & Manage Practice & Provider Listings
Your Google My Business listing is how your prospects will find interact with your practice. Your Google My Business listing contains important information that has to be accurate. Otherwise, you could miss out on wide-open sales opportunities.
You can see in the graph above that Google My Business has the largest influence over local search rankings and that will just continue to grow in influence.
Often, when marketing ophthalmology 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 Google My Business, Healthgrades, Vitals, CareDash and RateMD.
This will help in ranking for searches like “cataract surgeon near me” which are valuable keywords to rank #1 in local searches.
Also, 89% of consumers read businesses’ responses to reviews. Keeping your listings accurate and properly managed can lead to fewer headaches and more success in drawing prospects from your online presence.
Learn more about our physician listings management process.
Know when to lean on your OD network and when to augment your ophthalmology marketing
A robust OD network is invaluable to any ophthalmology practice, but a strong referral system alone isn’t all it takes to be a stand-out practice.
Some procedures benefit much more from robust marketing than from relying only on referral channels.
The most successful practices will utilize their marketing team’s knowledge in ophthalmology to know which services can make the best use of their referral networks and which services, like the refractive procedures, can make better use of marketing dollars invested in other areas.
Comprehensive eye care practices will get the most benefit from perfecting this balance, but every ophthalmologist can benefit from a cohesive referral marketing plan to promote all of their procedures.
A good eye care marketing strategy can be elevated to a great one when it can make good use of all marketing channels available to the practice, be it their OD network, their online reputation, or targeted patient advertising.
That is why we always recommend having a proactive physician liaison out in the field building referral relationships monthly to generate more “boots on the ground” referral patients along with the digital marketing initiatives.
Learn more about our physician liaison training course.
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.
That is why knowing your numbers is on our list of ophthalmology marketing ideas.
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 ophthalmology marketing ideas & 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 ophthalmology marketing program.
Wrapping up Ophthalmology Marketing Ideas
There are several you can implement for ophthalmology digital marketing, as evidenced above. To put a proven ophthalmology marketing agency in your corner, connect to learn more about how we can help and check out our ophthalmology case studies.
