How to Market a Medical Practice
By Socius Staff
July 4, 2023
Medical Practice Marketing in the Digital Age
The health industry is fiercely competitive, giving clients a wealth of options. Having so many choices can make it harder for clients who are searching for the best medical practice in their local area.
This causes a problem for medical practices when they are trying to stand out from the competition and attract new clients. Medical marketing efforts must navigate the web of regulations regarding what can and can’t be in digital marketing efforts.
To get noticed, your medical practice must make smart decisions that attract new business and help clients pick you out of the sea of choices available. It takes more than just sending out flyers in the mail and attending the occasional health fair. Your medical practice must be in front of clients all the time, whether they’re at home, at work, or driving to the mall.
That means employing strategic, targeted digital marketing practices to help you attract attention. We’ve put together the top digital techniques to market your medical practice today.
Five Ways to Market Your Medical Practice
- How to Market a Medical Practice with Custom Websites
A generation ago, it was standard to list a medical practice in local phone directories, run newspaper or radio ads, and rely on clients for word-of-mouth marketing. These days, your number one marketing tool is a custom medical practice website.
A professionally designed, easy-to-navigate website that has optimized copy, useful information, answers to questions current clients have, and online reviews is the cornerstone of your digital marketing strategy. Your site will promote your brand, can be shared on social media, and can even host a telehealth portal for online client consultations.
Your website can easily be one of the biggest, most important investments you make when it comes to your medical clinic marketing strategy, so it has to be good. It’s worth noting that you could save a few dollars and use a DIY site builder to create your website. However, unless you know what you’re doing, it will cost you time and missed opportunities.
It’s not necessary to learn web design, development, user experience, and content optimization skills. Instead, you can save time and energy with a custom-designed website from the in-house, award-winning team of designers at Socius Marketing.
- How to Market a Medical Practice with Web Content and SEO
With your website in place, the next step is improving your visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). As clients type search queries for a medical practice into Google, ideally your website will be one of the first results on the page.
Optimizing your website so that search engines understand who you are and what you do is known as search engine optimization or SEO.
In theory, SEO is easy. In practice, however, it’s complicated.
Search engines process billions of searches every day and over a trillion searches every year. When they look at a website, they try to establish relevance, authority, and trustworthiness, so they can rank the site. Rankings are based on keywords and other factors, such as how valuable the content is to the person searching.
For instance, a client searching for a specialized medical practice in their local area might want to see content about:
- symptoms and diagnoses
- treatment options
- frequently asked questions
- reviews from other clients
- your location and contact details
If your website provides this information, you may be rewarded with a higher rank on the SERP.
Successful SEO is part skill, part art. Experience matters, especially when it comes to marketing local medical practices. Our strategists at Socius understand the ins and outs of SEO and the healthcare industry. While you are caring for clients, we tailor a marketing strategy to deliver results — and interested visitors to your website.
- How to Market a Medical Practice with Paid Media
Ads are an effective marketing strategy, as long as you run them where potential clients will see them. The best and fastest way to get in front of clients is with paid media and pay-per-click (PPC) advertising.
Every time you search Google, you see ads on the first page of the search results. Your clients see them, too. When your campaign targets the right keywords and audience, those paid spots can reach thousands of local future patients.
If you choose the wrong, however, they can be an expensive waste of time. Partnering with a PPC expert will help you see a return on your investment, instead of watching money go down the drain.
- How to Market a Medical Practice with Social Media
By now, it should come as no surprise that your medical practice marketing strategies must include social media. Your future clients are on social media, and you should be, too.
Done well, social media marketing shares useful tidbits of information and engages followers, helps establish and maintain your brand, and keeps you top of mind. It looks effortless and spontaneous, but in reality, it’s a lot of work.
An active, engaging social media program includes setting up and monitoring professional profiles, original and curated content, regular posts at peak times when your target audience is online, and prompt responses to comments.
- How to Market a Medical Practice with Online Reviews
Online reviews are an important piece of the marketing puzzle. 90% of patients say they look at reviews while choosing a medical practice. Existing client reviews help prospective patients learn more about your practice and play an important part in online branding and reputation management.
Asking your clients to leave an online review is easy. Yet getting patients to leave the review is hard. You also have no control over what the client says about you on a site like Yelp or Google Reviews.
You don’t have to leave the review process to chance, however. Socius Marketing offers a Review Canvassing and Management system that can get you more online reviews, and decrease the chance of negative online feedback.
Our automated system is simple: clients receive an email from you, asking for feedback. Once they submit a review, you can automatically post it to a review site if it’s positive, or follow up with the client if it’s not. This feedback loop gives you a chance to better meet your clients’ needs while building your online reputation — without creating more work for your administrative staff.
What’s Next in Marketing Your Medical Practice?
The most important next step in marketing your medical practice is to get started. Pick one step, like building a custom website, and do it.
Yet that first step can be the hardest one to take. You’re already busy running your medical practice. You don’t have time to become a digital marketing expert, too.
We understand. That’s why Socius Marketing is standing by, ready to partner with you to meet your goals through effective marketing efforts. Our team understands the healthcare industry and has years of experience in local digital marketing. We can take marketing off of your plate so you can focus on client care.
