Building a great foundation is critical if you desire to win in the long run. Just like constructing a home, without a strong foundation, you’ll likely face challenges and more expenses down the road. A strong marketing foundation should include building a great website, claiming business listings and social media channels, and creating a cohesive brand that resonates with your ideal customer profile.
Digital marketing for doctors is a set of tactics that attract, convert, and retain patients on the internet. Since the majority of patients search for medical information and look for doctors online, the virtual realm is the best place to implement your marketing efforts.
Developing a comprehensive marketing plan for your medical practice can be daunting. With so many marketing and advertising channels to consider, many find it hard to simply get started.
High Level Marketing is a top healthcare digital marketing agency that helps medical professionals build a better-branded website for you and a better user experience for their patients.
When patients need medical information assistance, the majority of them:
- Research their symptoms online
- Look for the nearest practice online
- Read reviews on doctor review websites
- Check the list of services or working hours of the medical practice online
- While some potential patients may respond to flyers and TV ads, the majority still goes online for more information about your doctors and practice.
Digital Marketing for doctors is cost-effective because of the reasons:
- It gives you an opportunity to evaluate your efforts continuously and in real-time.
- You gain access to a huge variety of tactics, many of which aren’t expensive.
- There are many free or inexpensive digital marketing tools available online.
- You can choose digital marketing strategies that suit a specific budget and achieve a high ROI.
Online Marketing Allows You to Interact and Engage with Patients
With offline marketing, it can be hard to communicate with your patients outside the clinic. Digital marketing gives you a unique opportunity to speak with your patients, hear their concerns, and explore their pain points.
You can learn more about your target audience and design highly effective personalized offers that bring patients to your doorstep.
Digital medical practice marketing includes several essential elements that allow your team to achieve a high ROI:
1. Web Design for Doctors
Any digital marketing strategy starts with a website. All online marketing efforts revolve around this digital calling card. That’s why it’s imperative to create a functional, aesthetically appealing, and search engine optimization (SEO)-friendly website.
2. Search Engine Optimization for Doctors
When a patient enters a query, Google and other search engines use complex algorithms to determine which websites contain the most valuable responses.
Search engine optimization is a strategy that brings your website to the top SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). It involves making your website appealing to both the target audience and search engine crawlers.
To create an effective SEO strategy, you need to:
- Do keyword research
- Build internal and external links
- Add citations through business listings
- Create valuable content
- Monitor Google algorithm updates
SEO is an excellent way to bring organic traffic to your website where you can use other tactics to convert visitors into leads.
3. Pay-per-click (PPC) leads the generation:
PPC ads are a part of paid advertising strategy. This allows you to bring digital ads to your target audience when they are highly likely to see them.
PPC refers to the pay-per-click payment method, which involves paying for the ad only if the user clicks on it. However, marketers often use it as a broad term to describe paid ads, including:
- Paid search ads – ads that appear on the SERPs in response to the user’s query.
- Google display ads – ads that appear across the Google display network in response to the user’s prior online activity.
- Social ads – ads that appear on social media platforms according to the user’s preferences and activity.
PPC ads are an excellent lead generation tool since they target potential clients based on their needs. This digital tactic is more expensive than organic strategies. However, it usually yields faster results.
4. Social Media Marketing (SMV)
SMM is a set of tactics that you can use to attract, convert, and retain patients on social media. They include:
- Posting valuable content (make sure not to share PHI in your feed)
- Leveraging social ads
- Researching the target audience’s preferences
- Engaging with your audience
- Soliciting reviews
The key platforms for medical SMM are Facebook and Instagram. However, the organic reach of posts is currently declining. To reach new prospects, you would need to implement paid marketing options.
5. Content Marketing
You may have heard that content is king. When it comes to healthcare marketing, it’s the entire royal family. Content allows you to generate leads, retain patients, and demonstrate your authoritativeness and trustworthiness.
Healthcare content marketing can:
- Help with SEO tactics
- Attract backlinks
- Generate feedback
- Educate patients
- Increase brand awareness
When the internet is available, people who experience symptoms don’t call the doctor immediately. They search on Google. By implementing strong content marketing tactics, you ensure that your website is the first source of information they find.
The most common content types that doctors use include blogs, infographics, videos, and podcasts.
6. Reputation Management for Doctors
Online reputation management is monitoring and shaping how patients view your practice. With proper reputation management, you can streamline word-of-mouth marketing, build brand awareness, and enhance your clinic’s trustworthiness.
One example of reputation management for doctors involves:
- Claiming or creating Google business profile
- Filling out all the necessary information
- Soliciting reviews from patients
- Replying to reviews (both positive and negative) immediately
- Google reviews aren’t just a ranking factor. They help potential patients choose your clinic over the competition.
7. E-mail Marketing
E-mail marketing has the highest ROI of all digital marketing tactics. Once you have a potential patient’s e-mail, you can nurture the lead by sending out personalized offers that address their pain points. Additionally, you can use e-mail marketing to keep existing patients engaged and bring them back to your clinic.
Let’s dive into some specifics that separate the average website and a great website.
- Design– Your website has to look great. It is a representation of your practice and it needs to showcase your services and personality as accurately as possible.
- User Experience– While the design is incredibly important, the best practice is to group content and pages in a logical and efficient manner.
- Content- Content is King for many reasons. One reason is that website content provides information for Google to absorb.
Website speed- You and your medical practice can always make more money but you can’t make more time – it’s the single most valuable resource in the world. If visitors wait for even a handful of seconds for a website to fully load and become usable (this is called “Time-To-Interactive”), they leave. Even with the most effective digital marketing campaign(s), if visitors arrive and your website is slow, it’s likely your visitor will bounce and search for a different option.
Key takeaways
All successful healthcare digital marketing efforts share a common starting point and this is no different for medical practices – they have a clearly defined ideal customer or patient profile. Your ideal patient profiles should serve as the foundation for your digital marketing efforts and help you create audiences and messages that resonate with your best prospective patients.
