Medical Marketing VS Medical Advertising

Medical and dental practice managers often confuse medical advertising with medical marketing. Medical marketing for healthcare practices is much broader and medical advertising is a subset of your medical marketing strategy.

Advertising is just one of the many “things”, “programs” or “techniques” launched to achieve a successful medical marketing program.  So medical advertising is one part, but very important part of medical marketing for a practice.  For example, the following is an ad for a a medical spa on Facebook.

For example if you are a pediatric physician with focus on urgent care for children, and your goal is to acquire more patients, you may want to “market” your practice in 20 mile radius for potential parents of patients who may seek Pediatric Urgent Care.  For this effort you would typically  have many things to do :

Step 1: Sign for the building
Step 2: Business cards
Step 3: Doctor’s bio printed and promoted to local primary care physicians
Step 4: Providing free “meet-and-greet” for parents of potential pediatric patients
Step 5: Collaboration with local schools for “low-cost” physicals for school athletes
Step 6: Mail drop in 5 mile radius using USPS mail and flyers for parents of potential pediatric patients
Step 7: Networking with other local businesses close to your own location
Step 8: Using social media campaigns
Step 9: Making the lobby of the clinic a pleasing place for parents of potential pediatric patients and for children
Step 10: Referral program to market using existing for parents of potential pediatric patients
Step 11: Launching your online strategy to market your practice
Step 12: Offline advertising offline for your healthcare practice
Step 13: Online Advertising for your healthcare practice

Medical Advertising Defined

Advertising for doctors can be offline or online. Offline advertising for doctors refers to Billboards, Newspapers, Paper Yellow Pages, Ads in Cinemas, Radio Ads.  

Online Advertising for doctors refers to advertising focused on internet based mediums. For example:

1. Google search advertising
2. Facebook display ads
3. SEO / Search Engine Optimizations
4. Website conversion techniques to improve the actual patients generation from your website
5. Advertising on Instagram
6. Email marketing
7. SMS/Text based marketing
8. Display advertising

Example of an example of medical spa advertisement on Instagram

The following is an example of a marketing dashboard of a pain clinic in Texas. Marketing dashboards help you understand how many leads of new patients are being received and is your “advertising” and marketing working.