Online marketing strategies for medical practices should humanize your brand to prioritize winning your patients’ trust. Because when your prospective patients require medical care, they are searching for providers who make them feel comfortable.

While all surgeons, doctors and providers at most elite medical practices are masters of their specific medical craft, healthcare marketing and sales are the non-medical related skill-sets that they do not teach you in medical school. For successful medical practice growth, this needs to be mastered to convert a steady stream of qualified patients.

Incidentally, 81% of prospects trust brands  who do what is right as a deciding factor in their healthcare purchasing decisions, according to Edelman. On the other hand, 62 % of customers remain faithful to brands they have trusted for a long time.

7 Humanistic Online Marketing Strategies For Medical Practices

Humans respond to humans. We consistently come across poorly designed cookie-cutter medical practice websites that are filled with low-quality fluffer content. If your website doesn’t exude your niche-specific expert authority and a human touch, how do you expect your prospective patients to schedule appointments with you via your website?

Here are a few ways to humanize your digital medical marketing.

Invest in a fast, beautiful, data-driven medical website

In this day and age, every medical practice has or should have a website. However, as a healthcare leader selling high-niche, high-value medical services, are you crystal clear as to how your website will attract and convert a set number of your ideal patients every single month?

While a lot of freelancers and agencies can “build you a website”, few can completely own the entire buyer’s journey of devising a sophisticated digital inbound strategy combined with attracting, filtering out and then converting 10+ new patients every single month.

You need to connect with your ideal patients at an emotional level. In order to achieve this, you need to start with gathering the right data-points connecting your ideal patient’s psychological profile to their perceived search intent and motives. Once you are clear on this data, it is about transforming that medical website design knowledge into a fast, responsive, beautifully-designed mobile-first website that will serve as an evergreen lead-generating asset.

Publish well-written and curated blog posts under your Author Bio

Imagine you are an elite plastic surgeon. You charge $10,000 – $15,000 for a facelift. And $25,000 for a mommy makeover. Now imagine your ideal patients arriving at your medical practice website only to find fluffy, filler-style outsourced cookie-cutter content desperately lacking in depth, substance and subject-matter expertise.

Do you see these prospects converting into paying patients? Chances are they will bounce and search elsewhere. Because your ideal patients who are most ready, willing and able to afford your high-end services have high standards of their own. They are difficult to win over, but once you win their trust, you get a loyal patient for life who will keep returning to commit to your medical services.

As such, you need to carefully vet and edit every piece of content published on your medical practice website for nuance, depth and authority.

You need to also ensure you maintain Author Bio profiles under each blog post you publish under your own name, so as to take accountability for information you are putting out there. Google places all medical practice websites under their YMYL (Your Money, Your Life) guidelines. 

Publishing high-authority content consistently on your blog is probably the most important of all inbound marketing strategies for medical practices.

Have a personalized “About Us” section that includes your biography

While your Author Bio should have a summarized version of your professional accreditations, you should expand on this under your “About Us” section.

As a leader at an elite medical practice, it makes sense for you to write this section out personally. While we understand the time constraints of most healthcare experts, this is a one-time effort for you to directly introduce yourself to your ideal patients, strike an emotional connection and maintain consistency in your efforts to humanize your brand and marketing message.

This is quite akin to your patients arriving at your clinic eager to meet with you and get to know you, but only end up meeting someone else. The words and message you would use to introduce yourself cannot be ghostwritten by an outsourced copywriter or someone else from your team.

You need to own this section through your own words.

Visually stand out from your competitors

High-quality photos convey a visual aesthetic about your medical practice to your ideal patients who want to visualize what is possible.

If you haven’t yet created a “Before & After” section within your website as part of your medical practice marketing strategy, it is time to get started.

Before and After galleries serve as an invaluable and proven marketing vehicle to provide the visual proof your ideal patients are seeking. Think of this section as visual case studies of your high-niche medical skills.

Integrating fully optimized “Before and After” photos into your practice’s image management and medical marketing strategy allows current and prospective new patients to envision what your services can do for them. Patients can compare these Before and After photos to develop realistic expectations and develop trust in your promise to deliver excellent results.

The same holds true for all your top-level medical service pages and blog posts.

If your ideal patients can visualize how your medical procedures can help them get the results they want (and if you can augment that with testimonials), they are much more likely to schedule an appointment with you and commit to your treatment plans.

Maintain a Testimonials section to aggregate your patient reviews

The most prominent surgeons, doctors and leaders at elite medical practices are amplifying their online medical marketing strategies utilizing patient reviews as part of a client-driven online reputation management and healthcare digital marketing strategy.

Patient testimonials from Zocdoc, Google, VitalSigns, Healthgrades and Yelp drive new patient engagement and commitment, while significantly boosting search engine rankings.

If your ideal dream patients are sharing their positive experiences, then using these patient testimonials as a cohesive part of your medical marketing strategy gives your medical practice credibility and a human touch.

Create videos showcasing your medical services

Video results show up in in over 70% of the top 100 search result listings as people vastly prefer watching videos online over reading.

96% of web users confess that they have watched a video to learn more about a product or service. In relation to your medical practice services, creating explainer videos is one of the best ways to give a live overview to your ideal patients as well as also striking an emotional connection with them.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then your videos explaining your services are worth a thousand sales. However, increasing conversions through video marketing is a bit more than just somehow creating a video and then putting it up on your website or Youtube. As with all aspects of your inbound marketing, your video marketing needs to be tied to a cohesive digital strategy around your medical practice brand and ideal patient profile.

Your videos will showcase your knowledge while building trust, connection and credibility with your ideal patients.

Use Live Chat software

Enabling Live Chat on your website entails embedding a code snippet that opens up a real-time chat-box conversation with your online visitors.

The primary purpose of this marketing tool is to immediately attend to the needs of your ideal patients in terms of answering their questions, giving them critically important information or as simple as pointing them to the right section of your website. In terms of medical marketing strategies, this involves allowing your ideal patients to schedule qualified appointments with you at all odd times beyond your regular business hours.

This should appeal to most busy medical experts and healthcare leaders who want to attract and convert qualified new patients, but simply do not have the time to sit around and “chat” with every inquisitive inbound prospect.

Ultimately, marketing your medical practice is about building a human emotional connection with your most qualified ideal patients and earning their trust. Medical issues can put your patients in an uncomfortable situation where they are full of doubts and concerns. As such, they are seeking providers they can relate to.

Here’s summing it all up in an infographic.