9 Essential Healthcare Marketing Tips Every Practice Should Know
Having trouble marketing your healthcare business?
Trying to figure out the best ways to get more patients?
It takes a lot to successfully manage and market a medical practice or healthcare organization. There’s a lot to do and too little time. Luckily, if you know the best ways to invest your energy you can market your healthcare business successfully and will make the most of your efforts.
Below we’ll look at the essential healthcare marketing tips you need to know about for your healthcare organization or medical practice.
1. Social Media
If your practice isn’t on social media yet, that needs to change. While you don’t have to get started with every single social media platform all at once, you should be on a few. Start with Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter or wherever else you feel your audience will be.
It’s no secret that social media marketing has become a great way to market a business. However, not everybody knows how to do it for the best results.
You need to make sure that you are communicating personably with potential patients. Don’t just market to them all the time. Refrain from being overly promotional. Instead, work to build a real relationship and connection while letting followers know more about your practice, team, and services.
2. Create the Perfect Website
Some marketers make the mistake of only being on social media, however. Social media channels are not enough alone. You need to have an online space of your own such as a website that you can control.
On your own website, you can more easily show visitors exactly what you want them to do and what you can offer them.
Your website needs to be easy to navigate and well designed. It should clearly show what services you offer and have an easy way to get in touch. You should also list your credentials and prove your expertise. Let visitors know why your practice is the right one for them.
3. Promote Your Business with a High-Quality Blog
Your website also needs to have a blog. Blogs along with content marketing techniques are one of the best ways you can get visitors to your website and promote your business.
By using search engine optimization (SEO) strategies and blog content, search engines will pay more attention to your site and start sending more visitors your way.
With your blog, you can also prove your expertise to potential patients and educate them in your field. This can go a long way in convincing someone to become a patient or ensuring current patients keep you on their radar.
4. Make Use of Local SEO Techniques
A great website and blog are not complete without some great SEO techniques. Using local SEO techniques, you can ensure search engines are finding your site and sending the most relevant (and local) visitors to your site.
Managing your Google My Business (GMB) page, making sure phone numbers and contact information is consistent across Yelp and other online directories, and using locally relevant keywords can help with this.
All Women’s Medical of New York, for example, is one healthcare organization that does local SEO well. The organization’s website includes locally relevant information for visitors and for search engines. Learn more about All Women’s Medical now, and you can get a good idea of how this works in action.
5. Brand Yourself
All of the marking tactics listed here can help to market your medical practice but some strong branding can make everything that you do more effective. When you brand yourself properly, every marketing action you take goes much further and you’ll get more results for less effort.
At the bare minimum, you need to have a great logo in place. You should also make sure that all of your marketing materials and promotional images you use are consistent across your website, social media channels, and in your office.
It’s important to find the best way to brand yourself and appeal to your ideal audience and patient. You may be surprised a how much some good branding can help set your business apart from competitors.
6. Master the Follow-up
Making sure your patients come back to you after the first session is crucial for any medical or healthcare business. You always need to have a follow-up plan for every single patient.
Make sure you’re consistently reaching out after some time to encourage them to come back for a visit.
You can do this by collecting emails during a visit and automatically set up an email marketing campaign to contact them after a visit. SMS marketing and mobile marketing tactics can also be automated and is another great way to stay in touch for the follow-up.
7. Get Involved in the Community
If you’re not getting involved in your local community is some way you’re missing out. Getting involved with local events or charities can not only be rewarding but it can also be a great marketing strategy and can even lead to some local press.
Look for a charity organization that your practice can sponsor or work with in some way to promote your business. You may also choose to attend festivals and local events in your area. Get involved, hand out marketing materials or promotions. or get involved in some other way.
8. Get Great Reviews
Online reviews can make or break a healthcare organization. It can greatly influence the number of new patients that are coming in. Don’t neglect your online presence. Make sure you know what people are saying about you online and take some steps to improve upon it.
Reach out to your patients either through social media or face-to-face and ask them to give you reviews online if they have been satisfied with your services.
Having positive feedback on Facebook, Google, Yelp, and other online review pages can be helpful for swaying potential patients to make the plunge and give you a call.
9. Encourage Referrals
Similar to the last point, referrals can be another great word-of-mouth tactic for marketing your healthcare organization. Find a way to encourage your current patients to tell their friends and family members about you.
A simple reminder or request on social media or email can be a good way to do this. However, a referral discount such as a bit of money off of their next appointment can also be a good incentive.
Using your current patients and network to get new business is a great strategy, and can be highly effective in creating a thriving healthcare business.
Getting Started With These Healthcare Marketing Tips
As you can see, there are plenty of ways to market your medical business or healthcare organization. There are even others that are not on this list but by starting with the above healthcare marketing strategies you’ll have the best chance of regularly bringing in new patients and never letting the well run dry.
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