Marketing Strategies For Doctors Offices

Marketing Strategies & Software For Healthcare Medical Practices Costs $499/mon to $599/mon. No Long Term Contracts. Used By Top Clinics in USA & Canada.

Thousands of medical clinics, doctors struggle every day to fill their calendar with patients, but it does not have to be this way. Marketing for doctors can be divided into two main areas:

1.  Offline – Traditional Marketing

This includes bill boards, print media, placing an ad in local movie theatre to drive patients to your clinic. This type of marketing is on the decline, as more and more patients are online now.

2.  Online Digital Marketing

For doctors and medical clinics, this is constantly changing and covers 6 important areas. It requires constant technology changes, medical industry knowledge, HIPAA issues, and deep online marketing experience.

PatientGain.com, a healthcare specific software & marketing company has worked with thousands of advertising & promotional campaigns coast to coast. We have found that thousands of medical clinics, doctors struggle every day to fill their calendar with patients. Many doctors question if it is ethical to advertise. Some focus on referrals only. Some have taken small steps- Not sure if advertising and specially online advertising and marketing for doctors will produce results. Physicians and practice owners have vastly differing levels of promotional experience and sophistication which can be summarized as follows:

Level 1. Beginner/ Introductory Level

Marketing & Advertising is considered an unimportant priority, an  after-thought that can be managed by any clinic staff member from front office staff to clinic administrators. The general perception is that with any kind of basic, free web site presence, the applicable patient base will be auto-directed to the clinic via Google, Bing, Yahoo etc. – What could be simpler?

Level 2. Intermediate Level

The clinic has acceptable average daily patient counts. With a clinic admin person working with a local web – designer, a nice looking web site, but there is no focus on online success. Hoping that free Search Engine Optimizations (SEO) will naturally result in steady and predictable patient / clinic growth. Some online advertising – some optimizations.  Some Email Marketing – and a Facebook business page with no intelligence. Online marketing is how your competition is acquiring new patients – This is not a decision that should be taken lightly—after all, this is your image and reputation on the line.

Level 3. Optimized Level

Reality –  the clinic owner understands that online strategy is by far the #1 method to grow patient volumes and secure clinic profitability. Driving patients to your door and out-smarting the competition online requires a depth of online promotional expertise combined with a profound understanding of medical practice operations that very few marketing / advertising companies can provide. Example of this execution includes top performing brands.  Medical practices with more than 100 locations, dozen locations, to a single location use PatientGain.com’s Patient Advertising & Marketing Platform.

Thousands of medical clinics struggle every day to fill their calendar with patients.  They have a great location, dedicated professional medical staff, proper equipment, many hard earned certifications and qualifications. They also have a nice looking Website.  However what they lack is a sophisticated online marketing software and expertise. These days having a nice looking website is not enough to generate new patient clients. If your clinic needs to retain existing patients for repeat services and procedures, then you need additional strategies and intelligent software. PatientGain.com has 20+ applications designed just for this.  These applications are used by the TOP healthcare companies from coast to coast.

PatientGain.com Provides Additional Benefits for Medical Practice Marketing

Clinic owners, practice managers, dentists and doctors are often forced to work with multiple applications and incompatible online tools to help drive their business. There’s a lot to keep track of: website management, social media, Facebook, online advertising, website lead management, generating positive reviews, minimizing negative reviews, monthly email marketing, call tracking, online payments and much more… it can all be difficult to juggle. What’s more, where do you find the time to manage your efforts online while running your clinic effectively and treating your patients? PatientGain.com data shows you will save 21 to 44 hours a month ( on average 32 hours a month)  by using an Integrated Comprehensive Medical Practice Marketing system from PatientGain.com. At $47/hour, your average opportunity cost,  this is savings of $1527 per month, or $18K per year, per clinic. This does not include improvement in increased patient acquisition and patient referrals and patient engagement.

Example of a FREE Intelligent Website – Included with the GOLD Package.

Results From Online SEO For Primary Care Physician

Review of a real customer.  Location is east coast – mid-level competition. Doctor Jones has been in practice for the last 13 years. Her focus has been Primary Care, Internal Medicine and general wellness with focus on Diabetic patients.  However, since last 3 years, multiple clinics have opened within her 5 mile radius. In addition, two Urgent Care clinics have also impacted her business. In the past all she had to do was to advertise in local yellow pages, few referral practices and business had grown due to her excellent focus on patient care. Due to competition, her average patient count had steadily decreased from 30 patients a day to 22.

In this case, Doctor Jones had to focus on new patient acquisition.  She search online for “online advertising for doctors” and found PatientGain.com as the first organic listing on Google. She signed up for PatientGain.com’s GOLD Service for $499/mon.  The results have been as follows:

Nov 2016 – Go live with new website, along with 20 apps embedded in the new Medical Marketing website.  135 phone calls received in the first month.  116 unique phone calls.

Dec 2016 – 434 phone calls received in the 2nd month.  388 unique phone calls.

Jan 2017 – 621 phone calls received in the 3rd month.  534 unique phone calls.

Feb 2017 – 518 phone calls received in the 4th month.  419 unique phone calls.

Mar 2017 – 599 phone calls received in the 5th month.  450 unique phone calls.

Apr 2017 – 697 phone calls received in the 6th month.  541 unique phone calls.

May 2017 – 801 phone calls received in the 7th month.  643 unique phone calls.

By the end of 7th month, Doctor Jones had achieved her target of 30 patients per day.   Mission accomplished. 

Impact of Medical Marketing on Physicians Earnings

Thousands of Physicians & Specialized Medical Practices struggle every day to fill their calendar with patients. Despite having a great location, a dedicated and professional medical staff, proper equipment, and hard earned certifications and qualifications, their daily patient counts aren’t where they’d like them to be. Many clinics don’t realize that what they are missing is online expertise and a sophisticated software solution to power their patient acquisition efforts. These days, your clinic’s strategy for generating new patients online has to be more than just having a good looking website.  Review of 162 online campaigns reveals that 72 percent of the patients are searching for medical services on a mobile device. Exactly the same test revealed that this number was 54 percent 12 months ago. PatientGain.com predicts that this number will be close to 90 percent in the next few years.  As a healthcare practitioner and a physician you are aware that average income of primary care physicians, while has increased in the last 6 years (possibly due to ObamaCare), and averaged $194,000 per year. But this should not be compared with "savvy" physicians, who are using online medical marketing software to increase the value of services they provide.  For savvy physicians, these numbers are significantly higher.  We wish you to be in the “savvy” category.

Medical Marketing Key Performance Indicators (KPI's)

Many practice managers often confuse medical practices objectives and goals with medical marketing KPIs. 

Goals and Objectives for your medical practice can be as follows: (these are examples)

1. Increase daily patient count at location in Palo Alto California by 20 patients per day in the next 12 months 
2. Increase patient satisfaction by 30% at location in Palo Alto California in the next 12 months
3. Reduce patient acquisition costs by 10%at location in Palo Alto California in the next 6 months 

In order to achieve these goals, objectives or desired business results, the practice manager or medical director of a practice has to typically consider "how"  to achieve these desired goals. Next step to select software, vendors, service providers and consultants for these various tasks.  Sometime  the practice manager or medical director has enough resources like an internal staff like marketing manager who can oversee these initiatives and provide status to the practice manager or medical director.  Once the practice manager or medical director has established a strategy, he or she has to come up with KPIs to measure ongoing progress and success of each area.

Working with hundreds of healthcare providers, PatientGain.com has established that there are 6 key KPIs for your medical marketing strategy.  These are built into you Medical Marketing Dashboards. 

Most Important KPIs. There are many - actually hundreds of ways to measure what happens online to promote your practice/clinic. Some of them are simply "noise"- We recommend the follow as a best practice.

1. Actual Patient Count - no one will question you if your actual patient count increases
2. No Number of phone calls - 73 percent of patients still want to "call you" 
3. Appointment requests/inquiries - Using apps on Facebook and your mobile site allow patients to request an appointment
4. Local SEO Rankings - Extremely important to optimize Google, Yelp and Facebook business pates
5. Organic SEO Rankings
6. PPC Data & Metrics
7. Engagement Data - Social Media - Facebook Posts
8. Mobile Engagement Data
9. Emails Marketing
10. Non-Social Engagement 

8 Reasons Why Content Is Important. 

Your Content Is the Single Most Important Factor in Your Online Success. 

1. Content defines your brand.
2. Content expresses who you are, how you conduct your business.
3. Content is read by the Search Engines - and this results in GOOD or POOR rankings - You should NEVER copy content from another site.  Checking ideas from other websites is OK, but copying content is like shooting yourself in the foot.
4. Content can make your marketing flourish.
5. Content can make your advertising irresistible.
6. Social media loves GOOD content.
7. Email marketing with good quality content will give you higher open-rates.
8. Best of all - Patients LOVE Useful content.