More than 50% of doctors surveyed by the Physicians Practice want to work fewer hours per week. Being a doctor is very demanding, and sometimes just fulfilling your primary goal of treating patients can drain you. However, if you are looking to grow your private medical practice without physician burnout, along with all your regular “doctor”-duties, it is also crucial to ensure that you execute an evergreen healthcare marketing strategy to drive consistent new patient acquisition.

In this post, we will take you through some essential yet easy-to-implement medical marketing strategies that you can add onto your business plan to acquire new patients.

Create an Optimized Medical Website for Local Search

In today’s digital world, if you wish for prospective patients to discover your healthcare practice online, you need search engine optimization (SEO). This includes creating a website that is accessible on mobile with separate pages designed for every service provided, a prominent display of testimonials from your patients and an encyclopedic insight into answering the most burning questions your ideal patients have as pertaining to your high-niche medical services.

Local search rankings, a system that ranks businesses on Google within a geographical region, can be significantly improved by optimizing your medical practice website. When patients search for healthcare providers on Google, they tend to book an appointment from within the top few search results. So it is a big advantage to have a higher rank than your competition. In fact, a study by BrightLocal shows that organic and local search traffic gives a higher ROI than any other healthcare marketing strategy.

So if you wish to grow your business then improving your local search optimization is an essential step. At Inbound Medic, we can help you create your new medical website, and put you on the path to greater success. However, please note that SEO has always been a challenging task and it has only grown even more sophisticated and challenging. 

Be prepared to invest towards a significant build-in phase before you actually start reaping benefits through your organic digital strategy. To get more specific, you should target between 50 -100 well-created digital assets (service pages and blog posts) and power them up with enough editorially curated digital PR outreach to shoot for having a minimum of 1,000+ commercially valuable keywords on Google Page 1.

Take Control Of Your Online Reputation

There are a lot of third party websites and business listings available for healthcare providers. Before committing to any provider, patients tend to use these resources to actively search for all information about the doctor and their practice. So if your online reputation is not well-maintained, you might be losing out on a lot of business.

This is why it is essential that you claim your online profiles and ensure that you are proactively managing reviews. Take some time out to set up listings on websites such as WebMD, Vitals and Healthgrades. Make sure that the correct office address, opening hours and contact information is listed for your business. You should add pictures of your practice to add further legitimacy. 

Reviews act as a benchmark for the level of service that patients might expect to receive at your practice. Encourage your satisfied patients to leave a good review online. If you receive a negative review, make sure that you respond to it gracefully as soon as possible. 

Increase Your Online Presence with Paid Search

Once you have built up some steam on your medical practice organic strategy and have found the right set of high-converting organic keywords, you should then aim to increase its visibility using paid search marketing. This allows you to identify even more search terms that overlap both with your practice as well as what potential patients are searching for, and bids on them as per your budget. This is one of the best ways to drive even more qualified traffic to your website and your paid ads and organic strategy start complementing each other.

The biggest advantage of paid search marketing is that it is a low-effort system. Once you have identified and selected your search keywords, you can just sit back and let Google take over. Google will use its algorithm to decide what your ad rank will be and basis that will place you on the top of search results of patients. So while SEO can take weeks or months to show results, paid search will have impact on your website visits immediately.

Most doctors are too busy to get involved at a granular level with their marketing, which is exactly what makes the hands-off approach of paid search so attractive. And when you couple that with the results it can drive, the option seems impossible to ignore. Give it a try and start with a small set of keywords and small bids. Depending on the results, you can then expand the keyword set or increase the budget for your existing keywords. Make sure to refresh your keyword set to make sure that you are targeting exactly the patient you want.

Get Active on Social Media

Believe it or not, more and more patients across all ages are actually turning to social media to get more information about their healthcare providers. So while Google is still your number one new patient acquisition channel to target and convert the most sophisticated new patients, social media is a great additional way to supplement your potential retargeting to attract more of these ideal new patients to your healthcare practice. 

Having a social presence on more visual platforms such as Instagram and Facebook offers an opportunity for prospective new patients to discover your practice organically. This is more of a hands-on approach since you do need to curate your account on a regular basis to keep the content fresh and engaging. It is a good idea to have a social media policy to make sure you are consistent in your messaging tone, and make sure to always follow HIPAA regulations across all your posts.

Stop Ignoring Your Healthcare Marketing Strategy

There is no doubt that doctors like you are feeling overworked and always short on time, but trying to find a little bit of time to plan out your healthcare marketing strategy can greatly increase the bottom-line of your practice. Try out these tips to create and maintain your digital presence, so that you can attract a more targeted audience, provide them with the answers to their most burning questions so as to qualify and convert them as paying new patients month-in-month-out.

Get on a strategy call with us if you want a no-pressure overview of how you could best design your inbound digital strategy fully customized to those specific medical services that bring you the most revenue.