Digital marketing is an important aspect of 21st-century life, but your doctorate didn’t likely include a web design or social media class. Doctors miss out on connecting with patients without sufficient online marketing and a robust digital presence. This means losing valuable revenue streams to more savvy competitors.
Maintaining a digital marketing strategy for your practice allows you to take control of your online reputation and craft your online presence. The online world can feel overwhelming, and when you have so many responsibilities as a doctor, small. Here’s why you should maintain a digital marketing strategy for your practice.
Follow our comprehensive guide that’s crucial to your success as a modern physician: 11 Proven Strategies for Growth.
What is Digital Marketing for Doctors
First of all, what is healthcare marketing?
Digital marketing for doctors is the process of providing strategic outreach and communications to attract healthcare consumers. Healthcare marketing guides them through their healthcare journey, keeping them engaged with the health system, so you can more efficiently monitor your patients.
Proven healthcare marketing strategies are highly segmented and integrate omnichannel, targeted online tactics to drive engagement and growth for your clinic or practice. The success of these digital health systems is measured through marketing efforts with specific metrics, such as KPIs and ROIs.
Benefits of Healthcare Marketing
Healthcare marketing has many immediate benefits, including attracting new patients, promoting the benefits of good health, displaying the consistency of your services, showcasing leadership, collecting and promoting patient reviews, sharing patient stories, demonstrating the key knowledge and expertise of the physician, and responding to patient questions and concerns.
In 11 Steps to a Better Digital Marketing Strategy for Doctors
1. Know your Audience
Defining your market should be your priority. Healthcare marketing should be targeted, and the digital marketing agency for your medical practice should be able to easily define its core audience. Too many doctors cast their nets widely, but this strategy can come with its fair share of issues.
By defining your audience, you can create premium, targeted content and select the right communication channels. If you’re a pediatrician, you might want to build relationships with obstetricians and strengthen your referral networks. Geriatricians would want to concentrate on family doctors and nursing facilities, while simultaneously using social media like Facebook to appeal to their older demographic.
2. SEO for Doctors
Website and keyword optimization might be one of the most important aspects of your digital marketing journey, especially if you are starting from zero. Your website needs to look nice and be easy to navigate, but first of all, your target audience needs to be able to find you.
By putting your website at the top of search engine results pages (SERPs) and targeting the right audience through search engine optimization (SEO), it’s possible to further your reach and benefits.
Internal links, schema markup, website structure, keyword research, content creation, website speed, mobile optimization, and improved content quality can improve your page’s SEO. By focusing on creating user-friendly content and optimizing your website for high-traffic keywords, you can strengthen your online presence through backlinks and social media.
3. PPC for Doctors
PPC or Pay-Per-Click is an effective revenue stream, utilizing targeted digital ads to reach a desired audience.
PPC is cost-effective, generating profits far beyond the cost of advertising. Plus, PPC ads offer a wider reach and quicker results when compared to traditional marketing methods.
By using these targeted capabilities, PPC services can narrow a business’s ad targeting using demographics, location, and search intent. This allows you to know exactly who your client base is, which in turn can make you more effective as a physician.
Running an ad campaign can seem overwhelming, which is why it’s important to hire an ad manager or a digital marketing agency. They can tackle that side of digital marketing, running your website for you while you deal with the more important day-to-day.
4. Local SEO
Optimizing your brand, SEO services, and online presence for local searches enables patients to find you more easily. It makes your practice immediately visible, especially if they are looking for healthcare practices in your area.
Ensure your GMB listing is complete, with regular updates and engaging posts that promote your business information, photos, and patient reviews. Then list your business in local directories and push Yelp for visibility.
5. Social Media Marketing
Surely you know of social media sites, including Facebook and Instagram. By utilizing them effectively and sharing information through images, videos, and texts, you can boost your visibility and grow your community.
Social media plays an important role in healthcare digital marketing. When choosing the right platform and creating engaging content, you can share medical news, informative posts, patient testimonials, and educational videos. You can also engage your audience through holiday reminders, milestones, and personal celebrations.
Social media marketing allows you to drive interactions to your most relevant target audiences, from Twitter to LinkedIn. You can also use targeting advertising and PPC options to reach an even wider audience and attract new patients. Social media marketing is a valuable opportunity to educate, create awareness, and empower patients with new or unknown healthcare information.
6. Email Marketing for Doctors
Email marketing can be a powerful campaign—if it is HIPAA compliant. HIPAA marketing rules limit doctor-to-patient marketing communications, allowing only refill reminders, case management, direct or recommended alternative treatments, describing healthcare-related products and services, or recommending an existing plan or benefit.
This means that using email marketing must be HIPAA compliant and reasonable. You must make other considerations, such as the content and frequency of the email marketing communications.
Many states have also adopted strict privacy regulations for patients, such as which individuals can opt in to receiving marketing communications. Outbound digital marketing must take all these considerations into account, and these measures can impact the effectiveness of the campaign.
7. Generate Reviews
A big part of effective healthcare marketing is controlling the narrative. Your online reputation is something you need to be in charge of, as physicians and doctors are significantly impacted by their social management.
It’s believed that upward of 90% of medical patients in America use online reviews to evaluate doctors, while only 75% consider their experience positive enough to rate 4 stars or higher. Over 50% of internet users search for information about health professionals online before booking appointments.
Ask your clients and patients directly for reviews on social media channels, including your Google My Business profile, Instagram, or Facebook. Reviews can be left on Yelp, WebMD, ZocDoc, RateMDs, and Healthgrades.
8. Join Professional Networks
LinkedIn is the largest professional network on the internet. It’s an excellent place to begin your healthcare marketing efforts. Connect with other doctors, grow your outreach, and communicate with local physicians.
There are also physician-centric social network sites like Sermo, which provide a dedicated space for connecting with peers. Professional networking is about more than collecting names and amassing a following—you can share insights, knowledge, upcoming events, and more with your peers.
9. Professional Website
Website design is an essential component of your digital marketing. People want to use aesthetically pleasing, streamlined, functional websites that take the fewest clicks to get them where they want to go. The design of your website should reflect your professional practices, showcase your healthcare services, and point your patients in the right direction.
10. Advertise in the Right Way
Advertising is a powerful asset in digital marketing, but it’s important to do it right. A dedicated budget for paid advertising on Facebook, Google, and Instagram can help you reach your target audience, but you need to know where your audience spends their time.
Conversions are more likely with websites that pay for ads to appear at the top of Google searches. Targeting ads based on interests, behaviors, age, geography, and demographics can ensure you reach the patients who fit your practice.
11. Monitor the Effectiveness of Digital Marketing Activities
It’s important to track the effectiveness of your digital marketing efforts to ensure your campaign is meeting ROI goals.
Track your website leads, patient behaviors, and conversion rates to optimize your digital strategies. Adjust your campaign as needed, and improve communications through the dashboards available to you on your website. Based on your data, you can continually tweak your strategies until your digital marketing activities are effectively reaching your target audience.
Future Trends
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
AI and machine learning processes will continue to significantly boost SEO and website visibility by automatically optimizing various aspects of search engine optimization. Keyword research, content creation, and technical SEO tasks can all be accomplished by AI, and by using this technology, you can increase organic traffic, achieve better performance, and boost your website’s visibility in search results.
Online Advertising Will Become More Expensive
The basic theory of supply and demand dictates that online advertising will continue to become more expensive. The demand for online space and a bigger potential market increases, but available ad space is not increasing at the same rate.
Google has not been increasing its supply of ad space, especially at the top of the page. Additionally, quality digital marketing services aren’t a dime a dozen, and these lengthy campaigns are often performed by teams of in-house experts that can only take on a few clients at a time.
Smaller doctoral practices might have a hard time competing with larger practices and hospital conglomerates that have infinite advertising budgets. Consider an affordable organic SEO agency for doctors that can get you onto the first page of Google.
Smartphones Will Dominate Desktops
More and more people of all ages are switching to smartphones over desktop computers. Internet-based actions, such as Google searches, are mostly performed via mobile devices.
This means your website must be mobile-friendly. Mobile-friendly websites are designed to be aesthetically pleasing and functional on smartphones and tablets. Accelerated Mobile Pages are also a factor, and while Google has not explicitly stated that speed is a factor in its algorithm, users want a good customer experience and will bounce off a slow, unresponsive website.
More Augmented Reality
Do you remember Pokémon Go? The mixture of AR and reality has become very popular, and this trend will only continue. As people use smartphones or augmented reality glasses, they expect the “real world” to contain digital additions. Consumer products will continue to implement features that benefit widely used digital components, such as Google Maps. For the elderly and disabled, these functions will make it easier to find necessary healthcare.
Healthcare practitioners can list themselves on programs and apps that use this tech. Make sure you are listed on Google Maps, and ensure that your patients see positive reviews. Try and increase your Google rating above 4 stars.
Conclusion
Digital marketing for doctors is an important, often overlooked aspect of boosting the visibility and effectiveness of a practice. By knowing your audience, utilizing SEO practices, budgeting for PPC ad campaigns, networking, utilizing local SEO, generating positive reviews, and monitoring your advertising and outreach, you can bring in more patients to your practice and bolster your visibility in the community.
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FAQs
How can a medical practice ensure it has good digital communication for its patients?
Ensure good digital communication with your patients by implementing omnichannel strategies across social media, personalized reviews and communications, and prioritizing website functionality and accessibility. By understanding patient preferences and utilizing modern, appropriate technologies, you can regularly evaluate your digital marketing effectiveness.
What are some things a digital-first patient wants from their medical practice?
Digital-first patients are foremost looking for ease of use. Their preferred practice will prioritize convenience and digital communication while protecting their privacy and health information. They’re looking for ease of care and easy access to online scheduling, communication, and relevant info. Practices that understand the needs of their digital-first patients can build stronger relationships overall and will become known for their accessibility.
What is medical digital marketing?
Medical digital marketing is a comprehensive service that involves utilizing online channels to promote healthcare services. Healthcare marketing also caters to products, information for potential patients, and offers services to existing patients. The goal of medical digital marketing is to increase patient trust, loyalty, and engagement by leveraging internet resources.
What are the 5 P’s of healthcare marketing?
Product, place, price, promotion, and people. Healthcare providers can utilize the “5 Ps of Healthcare” to create a more accessible, patient-friendly environment.
