Medical consumerism has undeniably changed the way that healthcare professionals’ market and deliver their services. Consumers now expect an unbeatable medical experience with innovative digital advancements. In short, the healthcare marketing landscape has drastically changed. This makes it essential for medical practitioners to compete using advanced digital marketing strategies. As more and more patients (almost 83%) use the Internet to search for different medical services, building an online presence with your website is critical.
Make Your Website the Center of Your Marketing Strategy
Your medical website is the center of your online marketing presence, giving way to other marketing channels. It’s about connecting with your patients, which is the core of every marketing effort. Think of your website as an investment in creating awareness of your brand for potential patients (how do I become a patient?) and a tool to do the heavy lifting for current patients (think forms, appointments, hours, directions, helpful content).
Publish A Working Website
Healthcare practices need to build a website with contemporary elements and has a mobile-friendly, simple design. The medical website should be easy to navigate and include strong SEO strategy (metadata, off-page elements, and keyword research). We recommend using WordPress so you can deploy a medical website design quickly so you can get to the point — marketing the website to generate new patients.
The website should include information about the practice, provider bios, service descriptions, information about how to become a patient, any information patients might need before their appointment, and relevant content in your blog (this will give you tools for other components in your marketing mix). Every web page should also include a compelling Call-To-Action (CTA), since they have the power to convert visitors into patient appointments.
Once the basics of the medical website are in place, you can now begin to focus on integrating other digital marketing channels into your strategy.
Build Organic Social Media
Social media has become integral to our daily life and online experiences. With more than half of the population (58.4%) on social media platforms and spending an average of two hours and 27 minutes, leveraging them to expand your medical practice reach is significant.
Sites like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter – all have billions of daily users. Therefore, it’s vital to have a presence on these major social platforms.
Harnessing the power of social media starts with setting up your profiles, where you need to ensure that your medical message and brand design are aligned with your medical website. The voice and tone for your content and posts must be aligned with your brand position. This will ensure that the users will have a consistent brand experience on social media platforms and when visiting your medical website. As a result, you reduce confusion eliminate possibilities of distrust and doubts about your medical practice and allows you to leverage the power of social media to actively drive your followers to visit your medical website.
The best way to entice and redirect your patients and followers to your medical website is by sharing your blog content on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter (using ongoing video would be an advanced strategy requiring more internal resources). An engaging caption with a link allows your readers to visit your website for more detail, which builds organic reach.
Develop Email Marketing
With all of the buzz about text messaging, email is not going anywhere. In fact, 92% of online adults use an email, with 61% checking their inbox first thing in the morning. Email marketing is also vital to the overall digital marketing strategy.
The simple way to get the word out through email is to send a monthly newsletter with content from your website (blog content), provider updates (new provider announcements), local news relevant to patients (covid, monkey pox), and anything else that is relevant for patients. Don’t stuff email with content from other websites. The point is to send people back to your website (the center of your marketing).
Paid Social Search
With paid social and search efforts, your practice can easily create ads to you targeted patients.
- Facebook/Instagram (social) would target people in the practice area and show content in their feeds/apps when they are actively browsing their social content. This allows content to extend beyond your profiles and have the content in front of potential patients throughout the day (volume based on budget). With a “social medial only” strategy, your reach will only be people who have liked or followed your page. Advertising gives you a reach in the thousands, or more, as opposed to a very limited reach that you have just posting to social media.
- Google (search) would target potential patients who are actively searching for keywords related to your practice topics (primary care doctor, obgyn doctor, chiropractor…etc). Using search advertising allows you to capture the top of the search results page in Google (as your budget allows) and not rely as much on your search engine optimization (which you need to do but that is a much longer timeline to generate results). When you use Google search ads you can start showing up as soon as your ads are deployed.
In order to achieve successful results from a paid social search, it’s important to draft compelling copy that speaks to each of your patient audiences. The final step in successfully establishing an ad campaign is to develop a landing page. This landing page must be a part of your practice website. However, it should be specifically designed for a particular group of patients. Personalization is the key. The landing page boosts conversion rates by redirecting visitors from advertised links to specific web pages that aim to capture their interest and convince them to visit your medical practice.
Ready To Take Your Medical Website Up A Notch?
It doesn’t matter whether you are an obgyn practice or a pediatric doctor, with the right tools and techniques, you can master digital marketing by developing a medical website that focuses on the essential elements. As you embark on your medical website development journey and make it the core of your marketing efforts, prioritize social media platforms, email marketing, and paid advertising. Use these strategies to make your website the center of your marketing efforts.