Healthcare Marketing Strategy Step By Step Guide

How To Promote Your Medical Practice 8 Specific Areas for a Profitable Medical Practice.

Most of the practices have several areas to worry about. 1) Staffing of the practice, Medical Director and qualified staff  – this is a also known as  medical credentialing. 2) Legal requirements to provide medical services – there are specific laws to provide service to patients in every city, there are by-laws, permitting, specific requirements to operate a medical practice.  3) Insurance regulations and medical billing issues A.K.A Collections. Approx 81% of the patient billings have some errors.  4) Physical practice area – zoning, building and permits for medical practices, ADA requirements.   5) Medical equipment, lasers, machines for procedures, and licensing with each vendor.   6) HIPAA compliance and EMR.  7) Finances and funding of the operations.  8) Patient acquisition and patient marketing.

Many physicians also believe that by the virtue of 7 initial steps, they will automatically start acquiring new patients. Some also believe that by having a static, brochure website, patients will find them, and their calendar will start filling.

Each practice has to understand that times have changed. Every practice must advertise and marketing their services. Here we present specific techniques and strategies that have worked for hundreds of practices in USA and Canada. This is also available to you.

There are key strategies to help you. These are outlined in detailed below.  

Strategy No 1 – Focus on Patient Care and Patient Trust

Practices who focus on high level of patient care consistently are more successful and profitable than the rest.  Examples of clinics who pave patient centric view, seem to have their act together and they are winning patient’s trust and hence their business is more successful. They typically have learned the lessons in awesome patient service, and are operational savvy.   It does not mean that they have no issues, they are facing the same issues as other medical practices, however they respond to issues with a focus on patients.

Patient Trust is the Foundation of Medical Marketing Success for Your Practice.
Provide excellent patient care and medical services to your target patients. Treat every patient like they are your first patient. Healthcare practices who focus on high customer/patient service have a solid foundation. From medical marketing perspective, Patient Trust starts from the moment they land on your website or read your online reviews.

Strategy No 2 – Focus on Offline Healthcare Marketing

Dividing your healthcare marketing strategy into 2 main areas : 1) Offline healthcare marketing.  2) Online healthcare marketing.  Let’s discuss Offline healthcare marketing. There 5 specific areas to focus on offline healthcare marketing.

1. Referral marketing – Building a network of physicians, clinics and hospitals who complement your services. This has been the traditional foundation of healthcare marketing.

2. Local newspapers – Advertising in local newspapers will help you reach older population and also certain demographic of patients who do not use online resources.

3. High end paper magazines – Advertising in high end paper magazines can be effective.  Glossy magazines and major publications focused on certain subjects hold a certain cachet that online doesn’t achieve.   For example a luxury real-estate homes for sale can have an advertisement of a local plastic surgeon or a dentist specializing in Invisalign Clear Aligners. 

4. Local events – Many of the successful practices have a presence in local events. For example an urgent care clinic hold regular blood drives. A pediatrician sponsors an event for new moms at a local hospital.

5. Billboards – Many of the successful practices have a budget for billboard advertising.

6. Bus advertising – Some of the successful practices have ads placed on buses, targeting commuters in a busy downtown city,

7. Other areas – There are many other ways to market and advertise your practice.  However, as a business person, you will have to consider the ROI – Return On Investment for your healthcare marketing.  

Strategy No 3 – Focus on Digital Healthcare Marketing

Dividing your healthcare marketing strategy into 2 main areas : 1) Offline healthcare marketing.  2) Online healthcare marketing.   Online healthcare marketing for physicians can be very complex and daunting. We will layout steps and key important areas for your success here.

No amount of investment can match the returns you will receive from a coherent and proven successful online marketing and Google focused SEO medical website.

Technique No 1 :  Medical marketing website 

Purpose of a medical website is to present your medical practice professionally and attract :

1. Potential patients
2. Existing and returning patients
3. Search engines

There are 11 additional important aspects of your medical website

1. Content of the website
2. Structure of the website
3. Conversion technology and tactics embedded in the of website
4. SEO of the website
5. HIPAA compliance of the website
6. Interactiveness of the website
7. Connectivity of the website to your practice – like phone calls, appointments
8. Pages with specific information
9. Mobile optimizations of the website
10. Speech optimizations of the websites
11. ADA adherence of the website

Technique No 2 :  SEO of the website

You can have the most attractive and good looking website in town, but if it does not have excellent SEO – Search Engine Optimization, you will not see any ROI – Return Of Investment, from your pretty website.  Here are some factors that will help you with good SEO for your medical website:

1. Start with creating an account with Google analytics , very important your website’s  pages should be  accessible and readable by google search engine . Google search is the most accurate search engine, hence your online success depends on having success with Google search. Majority of the patients in USA and Canada search on Google
2. Content of the website – Content is the the king and good useful content for your patients will also be loved by the Google search engine.
3. Structure of the website – If the technical structure of your website is not accurate, you will spend a lot more time trying to achieve higher SEO rankings.
4. Internal links inside and to the website – There should be links in your website to different parts of your website. You want to make it easier for patients to read and take action from your website.
5. Select a website framework to speed up your development. We recommend using wordpress.org 
6. Every page on your website must have a purpose. For example do you have a page on how to “Contact Us” and “Services”  on your website?
7. Mobile responsiveness is the first step, you need to check every page and see how it loads on a mobile device.  Every image on mobile device should be reduced in size for faster load times.
8. Relevancy score – How pertinent is the information on the website compared to the “category” of the website – Every website has a “category” in Google’s index
9. Domain Age, URL and Authority
10. Business Information accurate and matches on Google Business page, Facebook business page and Yelp business page
11. HTTPS pages
12. User experience
13. Social Signals
14. Page speed and AMP

Technique No 3 :  Conversion on the website

What is A/B Tested Website For Doctors and Medical Practices?

In world of data driven strategy also known as evidence based marketing or ROI based strategy, the computer scientists start with a known hypothesis (A) and compare with it with a variation (B) to see if the B setup produces better results.
This process is also called Split-Run tests. It is a derived from the field of statistics where statisticians (these days also known as data scientists/statisticians). When applied to Websites, PatientGain.com tests different variations of websites and calculates the results based on patient behavior and eventually a conversion from the website. This constant variations and testing produces results from actual patients and helps us produce best conversion website design for doctors.

For example, in case of certain practice areas, we discovered that 82 percent of the patients are visiting a website from mobile phones, rather than laptops, i-Pads and full computers, we placed “click-to-dial” at the proximity of a user’s fingers to make it easier to dial the clinic’s number. We saw 13% better conversion. There are hundreds of detailed analysis is performed to achieve optimal results.

In a 2nd example by placing a clinic’s services with highest margins close to the top of a page, we saw 4% increase in conversion for higher margin procedures.

There is a lot more that goes into creating optimal websites for doctors and healthcare practices.

Healthcare Marketing Conversion Websites are different than informational websites. Here are 8 examples of characteristics for medical marketing conversion websites

Your conversion websites should:

No 1. Your medical  website should have useful information for a patient visitor to easily contact you multiple ways.  This includes

1. Click to Dial – Phone
2. Fill out an Appointment Request
3.   Find Directions
4.  Find Medical Services
5. Send Secure Message to Medical Provider.

No 2.  Intelligence so Information is captured securely in a HIPAA Compliant database

No 3.  Tracking software so source of your leads is captured so you can easily measure the ROI of each advertising medium

No 4.  Promotions and Offers should be included predominantly

No 5.  Tracking of Phone calls is very important

No 6.  Ability to respond automatically  ( Auto-Responders ) should be built into your medical marketing conversion website

No 7.  A/B Tested layout for best possible patient experience and results

No 8.  Your medical marketing conversion website should not take the user away from your primary focus. For example, if your strategy is to capture patient information from a landing page, keep it simple and to-the-point. Do not offer any other offers so the patient is tempted to click on another area  and leave your website.

Technique No 4 :  Online advertising for your medical practice

Every day millions of potential patients are searching online for their medical needs, and are using the web to find their local healthcare providers.  Yellow pages, bill-boards, local newspapers are outdated advertising mediums; they simply lack the instant accessibility and depth of information that a website and combination of online advertising can provide.  Online advertising is by far the most effective way to attract new patients, acquire them, and ultimately retain them.  Due to its preeminent importance, many clinics to focus their online advertising strategy solely around having a website. However, having a website is really only the first step in creating an online presence that will effectively attract and generate patients.  Executing a successful online advertising and patient acquisition strategy requires much more than a website.  In order to increase your clinic’s patient count, and the revenue from each patient you service, you need intelligent software behind your website, and a strategy that’s proven to be successful for healthcare clinics across the USA & Canada.

Technique No 5 :  Social media for your medical practice

As social media and specifically Facebook becomes more important for users all over the world, businesses need to do more on Facebook. How do you stand out from thousands of other businesses who are advertising and working to get the attention and “Likes” of targeted users? The first step in answering this question is to look at the leaders in your space and your industry to see what they are doing on Social Media, and more specifically, on Facebook. PatientGain.com’s Facebook apps platform provides you with a competitive advantage. Here 4 major ways to get more “eyes” on the social media. More people should “follow”, “friend” & “like” you on different social media platforms.Starting with Facebook is recommended, as majority of of your patients are on Facebook, compared to other platforms. Also note that most people who spend a good amount of time on Social Media have more time than money, so generally leads generated from social media have less quality.

1. Using your time, skill and content, add content to your Facebook business page. If you are on Instagram, add more visual content.
2. Using your offline marketing, mention the Facebook business page address – For example if you have  a print campaign, add your Facebook business page address
3.  Run ads on Facebook to promote your services, your events and you can even “boost”  your posts.
4. Post of Facebook with content related to your services.

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