Top Doctor Marketing Services That Produce New Patients
If you are a doctor and own your medical practice, you already have quite a bit on your plate. Handling the marketing aspect of your business is vital to maintain and grow your business. It also can be so time-consuming; you don’t have time for anything else: like treat your patients. Instead of burning the candle at both ends, there are some marketing services out there that you should consider. Employ their expertise in the world of marketing so you can use your medical knowledge to treat patients.
Below are some common services that many doctors use to help them market their practice and bring in new patients.
Website Design & Management Services
Your website will often be the first thing many new patients will see before they decide to choose you for their healthcare needs. Unlike an open house when buying a home, they are not going to spend half an hour exploring your website. They won’t even spend five minutes. Studies show you have less than 15 seconds to get someone’s attention before they move on to another choice. Some studies also suggest that time is now down to less than 5 seconds. So, a good, captivating design that loads quickly is vital.
Unless you majored in medicine and website design, it is unlikely you know all of the ins and outs of designing a website. A professional medical website designer will be able to create a website that looks great and is using all of the current best practices. They will make sure all of the things behind the scenes, like H1 tags, image tags, and meta descriptions, are correctly filled out and being used. Many medical website management companies will also assist with content marketing to help make your website more relevant to web searches and continually work on SEO rankings for your key search terms.
Finally, a medical website design and management company will make sure nothing “breaks.” Slow load times, bad images, misplaced links, or even website hacks can be challenging to deal with on your own. These companies have the expertise to keep all of the gears of your website greased.
Pay Per Click Management Services
Pay Per Click advertising is essential to the growth of many medical practices. Pay Per Click, which are ads that appear on search engines like Google and Bing, help you reach people who are specifically looking for your services. Anyone can make a Google AdWords or Bing Ads account. However, the management of these accounts can be difficult.
Yes, you can set some keywords, write out ad copy, and select what page to send your clicks to. This is the fundamental way of setting up an online Pay Per Click campaign, however, it is very inefficient. A Pay Per Click Management service will:
- Analyze which keywords are performing and which ones are not.
- Adjust bids as needed
- Groups ads into different campaigns
- Assess which keywords are receiving low-quality scores
- Swap out separate ad copy
- Monitor when a medical practice’s budget is being exhausted
Doctors doing this themselves will spend a lot of hours looking at numbers that they doesn’t fully understand. Pay Per Click management services will send you concise, specific reports about what is working, what is not, and evaluate how well your budget is performing.
Social Media Management Services
Social Media is becoming more and more important to doctors and their medical practices. However, it can also be very time consuming to write, post, and monitor social media channels. If a patient has a question, it should be answered as soon as possible, not when you check your social media page at the end of the day. A social media management service will work with you to create content for your social media channels and monitor any messages, comments, or posts from patients or anyone else. This service will also help create and manage any ads you would like to run on a social media channel. Most social media management companies will assist with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google Business Profiles. Generally speaking, they do not help manage things like Tik Tok and Snapchat. While some other services may be rapidly becoming more and more popular, they do not yet allow for 3rd party management of them.
Email Marketing Services
While not as effective as it was in the past, email marketing can still be quite useful. After providing the management service with a list of emails or access to a continually updating database of patients, a service will:
- Create & send emails with feedback from the doctor
- Manage hard and soft bounces
- Provide reports on the effectiveness of email campaigns
- Manage any responses
Email marketing can be tricky to do one’s self. You need to be able to provide those on your mailing list with engaging, insightful, and content-rich emails. Sending an email every week, promoting a service, or reminding patients to refer people to your practice is not very engaging. A service providing email marketing will create compelling graphics and content to send to your patients after your approval.
Online Appointment App
If you do not offer the ability for people to make appointments online, you are likely missing out on some patients. If you provide them with the ability to make an appointment right then and there, you will get some new patients. The more time you give them to wait to make an appointment, the higher the chance they may choose another doctor for their health care needs.
An online appointment service, if compatible with your patient management software, will allow you to manage your patients and their appointments seamlessly. Many appointment services also have a feature where you can solicit feedback from patients to evaluate doctors, services, or encourage online reviews. These services often operate in real time and are HIPAA compliant. Other doctors are already using online appointments, so it will only benefit you if you do as well.
These are just some of the marketing services you can employ to help bring patients to your medical practice. In some cases, a doctor may be able to handle one of these areas on their own or maybe doesn’t need a service mentioned above. With that said, it may be beneficial to try one out for a few months and see if your patient count improves. Even if your patient count remains the same, if it makes your day more efficient and allows you to provide better care to a patient, it may be well worth the extra expense. The better experience you can offer a patient, the more satisfied they will be! This goes a long way to securing their loyalty to your medical practice.
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.
PatientGain.com is a certified premier google partner for healthcare.
To learn about Website Strategies and Website Examples for Doctors & Medical Clinics, please go here.
To learn about How Much Do Doctors Spend On Advertising, please go here.
To learn about Search Engine Optimization for Doctors & Medical Clinics, please go here.
To learn about Pay Per Click PPC Advertising for Doctors & Medical Clinics, please go here.
To learn about Content Marketing Strategies for Doctors & Medical Clinics, please go here.
To learn about GOLD Package Marketing for Doctors & Medical Clinics, please go here.