5 Reasons Your Medical Practice Deserves a Better Digital Marketing Strategy

Running a medical practice takes time, money, and hard work – It's not always easy to scrape up the resources needed to manage the business side of things.

This is particularly true of practice advertising – public outreach often falls by the wayside in the face of caregiving, administration, and other critical tasks. Fortunately, medical digital marketing can make life far easier. Here's how.

How Digital Marketing Works for Medical Practices

The day-to-day of running a medical practice, clinic, or hospital is unpredictable like no other industry. Even when doctors, nurses, emergency caregivers, and other healthcare professionals think they know what to expect, they must be ready to take the unexpected in stride.

By contrast, the digital marketing aspect of practice management takes its cues from tried-and-true online outreach practices. For the uninitiated, these tactics can include improving:

• Site responsiveness: Patients and other consumers who visit your site may use mobile devices and similar platforms. If your content is slow to load or doesn't display properly on small screens, you're not doing yourself any favors. Some statistics say that more than 90 percent of web users judge sites – and by extension businesses – by how responsive their pages are.
• Search engine optimization (SEO): SEO is the practice of designing your brand presence and content to include keywords, metadata, and semantic tags that make it easier for search engines to find your pages. Good SEO also prompts engines to display your sites, map listings, social media profiles, and review pages near the beginning of the results shown to people who do web searches. Both goals are highly important considering the fact that almost 70 percent of all online experiences start with search engines and less than 1 percent of Google users actually make it far enough to click on listings from the second page of results.
• Social media presence: Social media management is a lucrative marketing tool for practices. Posting on Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms can keep people engaged, not to mention potentially expanding your customer base by increasing awareness. Your content also serves to build trust by establishing you as an authoritative source of knowledge and allowing prior customers to show their support.
• Graphic design: The web is a very visual place, and just as with site responsiveness, users are more than willing to judge your business by the appearance of your branding. It's no surprise that almost 50 percent of small-to-medium-sized enterprises rate graphic design as being vital to their success. This is especially relevant for practices, which are highly dependent on building trust and maintaining a professional reputation.
• Digital ad presence: Paid digital ads let consumers know that you offer services in their area, making them essential for building high-value publicity. Ads can also help you target specific market segments and refine your outreach strategy. They're a great way to experiment with different forms of marketing campaigns without committing to huge upfront investments.
• Business listing and review site profiles: Third-party sites such as Yelp, Doximity, HealthGrades, and others act as highly accessible research tools for patients who want to explore their treatment options before taking the plunge. Although you can't erase negative feedback, ensuring that your business info is accurate and responding to people's concerns improves your odds of portraying your practice as worthy of people's trust and hard-earned money. It may not seem like traditional marketing, but this form of reputation management goes a long way.
  

These are just a few of the ways to build brand awareness and advocate for your practice. For example, you might also use emails to reach out to prior patients, offering a more concierge-like level of service by keeping them up-to-date and informed. Or you could focus on site redesigns that revolve around usability, such as adding contact forms, appointment booking tools, and click-to-call buttons.

In most cases, medical practices that successfully leverage these techniques don't do so in isolation. Instead, they combine different strategies as needed to not only determine what works best but also build more consistent marketing funnels. For instance, it's not uncommon to run individually targeted ad campaigns concurrently with your social media blog posting schedule and tie everything together with common medical SEO keywords.

It's worth noting that there's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution or a short-term fix. Some projects indeed feel like one-offs, such as improving your graphic design to make your website, logo, and print branding more cohesive. Your work isn't finished, however, unless you sustain the effort after the fact.

Investing in a comprehensive medical digital marketing plan can make it way easier to manage your outreach intelligently. As we'll soon explore, it can also improve the ROI you derive from individual advertising campaigns.

Five Reasons You Can't Afford to Go Without Online Medical Practice Marketing

Digital medical practice marketing clearly has potential. What you may have overlooked, however, is that its benefits aren't just about what you stand to gain – Just as important is their ability to redefine how you currently operate.

1. Reputation Management Demands Pervasive Presence Management

Not every patient will leave your office happy. Some will even prove displeased enough to launch online attacks against your business or leave less-than-stellar comments and reviews. Regardless of how justified they may or may not be, responding promptly and respectfully is critical to moving forward.

Digital marketing tools can make this a lot easier by helping you subtly support your side of the story. Most consumers are smart enough to know that a single bad review doesn't mean an entire practice is untrustworthy – they're also interested in seeing how you handle such complaints. By expanding your marketing efforts to encompass a broader cross-section of the web, you reinforce the idea that you're reliable even in the face of negative feedback.

2. Building Authority Helps Boost Business

According to the Bulletin of the American College of Surgeons, trust is integral to improved patient-doctor relationships. It's easy to forget, however, that such trust isn't just a result of interactions that transpire in the clinical environment. The communication that builds good faith begins before patients ever set foot in your practice, and more increasingly, that journey starts in the digital arena.

Comprehensive digital practice marketing helps boost your authority. For instance, the things you say on social media and publish on your site or in marketing emails can influence people to view your practice as a reputable source of good information that they can depend on. With that groundwork laid, it doesn't require as much of a mental jump for patients to seriously consider patronizing you.

Remember, you need to set yourself apart from other practices. Online marketing can help you accomplish this tricky task without actively seeming to be competing for attention.

With digital marketing, you can flex your knowledge in a useful, nonthreatening way. Posting blogs or social media content not only demonstrates your expertise but also reveals your willingness to help people make informed decisions about their caregiving choices. There are few better ways to promote positive engagement that actually helps the community you serve.

3. Your Competitors Are Online

As consumers become increasingly reliant on the internet as their primary or even sole source of viable care information, more practices are working to build up their digital presences. Failing to do so yourself might not seem like such a faux pas, but it leaves a business-sized void in the space your brand ought to occupy.

Patients notice these kinds of absences when they're on the hunt for dependable care options. If they notice that all of your local competitors have well-made websites and expertly crafted blog posts while you don't, they're almost certain to ask why.

Allowing such space for doubt isn't a good idea. Even if you simply haven't gotten around to building a proper website or posting on your as-yet-untouched social media account, patients and other consumers are liable to think the worst: Were you censured? Does the quality of your caregiving not merit publicity?

Getting online isn't merely a matter of creating a serviceable web page, and it's not about jumping on some social media bandwagon just because the hospital down the road did it first. It's about taking a measured approach to outreach that lets you create and sustain a universal brand presence. Digital practice marketing empowers you to stay competitive without having to scramble to keep pace when other providers switch things up.

4. You Never Know Where Your Next Patients Will Come From

As we mentioned earlier, patients have no shortage of digital avenues for researching and contacting practices while they're shopping around. This is great for consumers, who certainly deserve to have options, but it's not quite as convenient for your business.

For example, let's say you're an ENT. Someone might discover your website after searching for anything from "hearing loss doctors" to "allergy treatments" or simply "snoring". Although anything that prompts a user to engage with your brand is great, you can't reliably depend on these funnels unless your marketing plan proactively targets the appropriate SEO keywords and topics.

There's also the fact that relying on chance encounters with users won't help you improve your marketing strategy. For instance, even if someone happens to find you through your Google Maps profile today, there's no guaranteeing that your next potential patient will follow the same path tomorrow – It's impossible to replicate these minor victories without a concerted approach.

Effective digital marketing clears up some of the uncertainty by providing feedback data that exposes how people reach you. It tells you which links visitors followed to get to your site and how long they spent interacting with the content you've published. Most importantly, it reveals which types of content are the most successful at funneling users into converting into patrons.

Gathering this kind of data lets you make more informed campaign management decisions that end up increasing your advertising ROI. Digital marketing platforms that integrate seamlessly with your social media profiles, Google ad projects, and other outreach venues give you a bird's eye view of how best to spend your time and money.

Think of it like going from operating in the dark to suddenly gaining clarity of vision – It's much easier to cater to the needs of prospective patients if you have the insight to know where they're coming from and what motivates them.

5. You Don't Have Time for Managing Marketing In-house

Running a practice is a full-time job – If it wasn't, hospitals wouldn't need administrative staff!

The big problem is that digital marketing is also a full-time undertaking. Even if you're just a small community clinic, conducting outreach can be a major schedule drain. Ironically, digital marketing can become even more time-consuming as you expand your operations.

Working with an independent digital marketing team is the smartest solution, particularly if your outreach partner offers tools that streamline the tasks only you can accomplish. For example, HIPAA-compliant dashboards that let you respond to patient reviews in context make it possible to address issues before they become PR disasters.

Good medical practice marketing systems also offer a broader perspective on your outreach efforts. Unified ad management portals let practitioners launch new marketing projects that promote a cohesive brand presence – and iterate on what works without devoting hours or days to the effort.

Equip Your Medical Practice for Sustainable Expansion With Superior Digital Marketing

Medical digital marketing is just one aspect of running a practice, but it's the lynchpin of your success as a business. From medical SEO to web design and social media branding, your power to connect with people and keep them engaged depends on how well you're able to establish a cohesive footprint online.

Remember that not just any marketing tool will do – Yours ought to be geared towards the realities of caregiving, such as adhering to data privacy regulations and advertising rules. In short, it pays to find a combined medical web design and marketing solution that's tailored to practices.

Want to learn more about enhancing your outreach and powering your practice growth the smart way? Get in touch with an expert at Clinician Box today.