8 Types of Digital Marketing for Your Medical Practice
The world of marketing is a big place with new strategies and technology popping up all the time. Agonizing over which types of marketing make the most sense for your medical practice is way too time-consuming, and avoiding it altogether is stress-inducing.
So let me break the digital marketing world down to simpler terms in a nutshell. Here are 8 digital marketing channels for you to consider and possibly combine depending on your practice goals.
The marketing channels you’ll choose for your practice will most likely be based on your practice size, budget, provider count, location, services you sell & treatments you provide, plus your goals for the future.
Medical practices don’t need to use every marketing channel that’s out there and matter of fact, I’m guarded against suggesting it all until you know what works.
So let’s dive into the 8 different types of marketing you could choose from. There are always new and improved ways popping up, but let’s stick to what we have here.
8 different types of online marketing for medical practices
1.Social media for your medical practice
Social media is a necessary evil. You know, they know it, we all know it.
Even if you don’t like social media for personal posting, every business should exist on social. Social media has platforms that every patient can hang out on in some capacity. Social media has become a search engine where people come to find information about their condition and treatment, and any other life-related topic.
Source: Pew Research
People also use social media to look up businesses or in your case medical practices. They want to see what you’re all about. They want to see what kind of work you do. People want to see your practice style. Is it hip and trendy, can they relate to you?
Social media is widely used by every generation, and as you know, is a place for myths and mistruths to linger about medical concerns, conditions, and treatments.
Not only does social media improve your online visibility, but it also gives you the platform to put accurate dermatologist-approved information out for viewers to consume. Plus, with social media, you can expand your audience reach and gain practice exposure.
Social media gives you the opportunity to
Showcase your services
Highlight your expertise
Share some insider shots of the office and medical staff so people can feel like they know you
Share real-time updates about your practice
Show before and afters
Handle concerns and obstacles that hold people back from getting procedures
Reach a broader audience
Cultivate a community audience
Build social proof which, let’s be honest, makes people feel good
Automate
Boost ads
2. Email marketing in healthcare
Email marketing is an incredible way to connect with your current and potential patients and customers.
One huge benefit is that you own the contact information of the people you are interacting with. Unlike social media, your email list belongs to you, and if social media ever crashes, you have all your contacts —not your followers.
Something else that’s great about email is that it has a long shelf life. Unlike social media, email stays around. People can file it away, save it, search it, plus it’s easily visible.
Social media has a short shelf life. As soon as you post, it gets lost in a sea of feed. You can always go back and scroll through to find a post but it lives in the present for a much shorter time period. Email can also deliver detailed information and a variety of information. An email can provide links and make it easy to take the next steps. It also speaks directly to the person who receives it and the content can be tailored for them -making the experience feel more personal.
And lastly, and quite arguably the most impactful piece about is email is that it has an average ROI of 38:1. So if your goal is to sell a product or promote a service, email is an incredible way to directly reach a larger audience all at once —and even in your sleep.
There’s a lot of flexibility when it comes to email.
Source: Optinmonster
Why email is good for your medical practice
Connect on a regular basis
Always stay top of mind to your patients and customers
Gives you a contact list you own
Has a great ROI
Share info about the practice, services, health conditions, and treatment
Be automated
Sell or promote in your sleep
Gain an understanding of what content works and what doesn’t
3. Website and SEO
Silly us to think “ok cool we have a website up and running, we’re good to go”. That’s like buying a car and never getting maintenance.
So the thing about your website is that yes, we know it’s your virtual storefront and it might be beautifully set up and pleasing to the eye — aesthetics are super important right?, but the mechanics of the website, all the little pieces that make it up are being indexed, reviewed, and ranked by Google.
It's Google's job to make sure it serves only the very best product to its customer, the internet user, the people, your patient. Google promotes your website over your competitor if the overall quality is better.
That’s where SEO comes in. SEO is a technique that improves searchability. In its simplest form, I think of it as a checklist of things you can adjust and measure on your website to make sure it’s the highest quality experience for your patient or customer.
At the end of the day, SEO, search engine optimization is like a tune-up for a car. It’s making all the necessary updates and adjustments for the best possible performance.
Things Google likes to measure when it comes to how you’re website is ranked
Keywords
Page titles
Load speed
Image descriptions
Content quality and length
Broken pages
Bad links
Backlinks
Internal links
Dwell time
Bounce rate
4. Referral marketing
Maybe underutilized, you tell me… Referral marketing is a great tool because referrals are warm leads coming from someone the patient trusts.
Now, I know that referrals in many specialties are largely based on insurance acceptance, and providers don’t want to do a disservice by sending a patient out-of-network. But, what about when patients are paying cash for these services?
Or what if there’s a concierge physician who could refer to other concierge physicians, knowing their patients don’t mind the idea of membership, or cash pay and billing back to insurance? Now you have a tie that bonds.
And what about all your cosmetic and cash-pay patients? Referral marketing to your physician neighbors increases your practice exposure and boosts your patient lead generation.
Referral marketing takes some effort but the payoff is worth it.
You might be getting repeated referrals as it is, but is there anything that says forever to that relationship? If another practice begins cultivating that same type of relationship you might lose out. A little extra goes a long way.
Think of it like this. Networking is key in the KOL world, in the academic world, and in the referral world.
Referral marketing builds practice credibility like this:
New patients come to you with a layer of trust already built-in
The referring physician sees your relationship as reciprocated and will continue to refer in the future
Referring physician benefits too, by strengthening trust with their patients by being a resource and providing more value
Communication between providers is better when you have a working relationship, and benefits the patients when it comes to treatment outcomes
The office staff gets involved and can make it a streamlined process
You know the type of care patients will receive when they are sent to that provider
Providers work harder to keep the relationship solid
More (satisfied) patients
5. Reputation Management
In the midst of a busy practice and running a business, reputation management gets, well… overlooked.
The issue with that though, is that people, potential patients and customers, use your online reputation as a way to gauge how amazing you’re going to be for them. They want to know about the care you provide and judge ahead of time how you’re going to help them with condition XYZ.
71% of people say they read reviews of a physician before they book. So if a person reads your reviews and sees some negative ones that haven’t been acknowledged, they have nothing else to do but believe the one side of the story they read.
It’s a best practice to address all reviews, even the good ones -a public thank you goes a long way.
The negative reviews should be followed up with a non-combative response that offers a beginning of a solution. I recommend you do this even if you’ve already spoken to them on the phone because guess what, the people reading the review have no idea that the issue has been handled in an amicable way with a positive outcome.
Benefits of reputation management:
Builds confidence in readers and prospective patients
Shows what kind of practice you are and how you handle patient conflict and concerns
Helps you learn what patients think about you as a physician, your practice, and your medical staff.
Reviews are very telling and show you areas that need improvement and areas you’ve nailed.
Build a positive online presence
Reviews are a good source of marketing content
6. Paid ads
Paid ads can work really well. Meaning when done right, they pay off.
It is, however, a pay-to-play concept. As soon as you take your chips off the table, the game’s over.
Paid ads are nice because you can measure their conversion pretty well. There are some caveats to that statement, but overall you can track ads well. Plus paid ads help you dial in exactly who you want to target, whether it’s a demographic, behavior, keyword, or association kinda thing.
The one thing about paid ads is, I personally don’t think they should ride alone. A paid ad might be the driver to the party but a party is always more fun with friends. So, there should be the added benefit of content marketing to accompany paid ads on the passenger side and in the back seat.
Your other marketing efforts will carry the snowballing load once your paid ad money runs dry and you discontinue.
Paid ads are a good short-term game —as long as you’re paying.
When and how should you use paid ads:
Steady running paid ads are great for awareness and promoting
Run paid ads, like when you open a new location, add a new provider, or want to sell a service or product
Paid ads are trackable
Paid ads can be targeted by behavior, location, and audience type or look-alikes. You can get real specific which makes them nice!
Some paid ads can be geofenced, which means they can be targeted based on the exact location
Paid ads can have an immediate effect
Some types of paid ad performance are guided by an algorithm that takes time to learn, like FB ads
Paid ads can be expensive
Paid ads are cost-effective and lucrative when they’re paying off
7. YouTube /video
Youtube is its own search engine. How often do you, your friends, or your kids go on YouTube to find something? My daughter who can’t read or spell big words (at the time you’re reading this), uses the microphone on YouTube kids to search for “squishy painting” videos. And yes, to my surprise as well, there are quite a few YouTube stations about how to re-paint squishies to customize them.
That being said, the search bar on YouTube is a search engine and people are looking for info on health conditions and treatments. Being able to show a laser treatment or other procedure or describe it to people helps them get comfortable with the procedure and expected outcome. Not to mention, they’re building confidence in your technique and expertise at that very moment.
Video is a great way for patients to get to know who you are and the type of care you provide. Anyone can treat acne but no one does it like you. Patients can get IPL from many medical businesses but only you have the experience, expertise, and follow through with aftercare and overall guidance like you do.
Ways video marketing helps medical practices
Let’s your patient audience get to know you and your personality
Evokes emotion in the viewer and builds a connection
An easy form of content to consume
Attracts a different audience —one who prefers video to learn
Helps you stand out from your competition
Adds quality content to your website, virtual storefront
Improves visibility and searchability
8. SMS marketing
Text marketing, ya love it or you hate it. Texting is great because everyone does it and it’s so commonplace that it feels way less intrusive than it used to be.
Matter of fact, it’s preferred because it’s quick and easy to manage in the palm of your hand.
…Plus it’s easy to opt-out of SMS text marketing.
What SMS marketing is really great for are appointment reminders and product sales. Especially if it’s for products your customer or patient loves and the product is not cheap. You can text me a deal on my SkinCeuticals any day.
Source: ZWhip
That being said, text marketing helps not only reach your patients quickly (and directly), but it decreases your no-shows. Text appointment reminders are an added friendly reminder that busy people appreciate, and they increase the number of completed appointments.
SMS is a great way to alert your patients and customers to sales, deals, deadlines, and to ask for reviews.
Again, if people don’t want to revive texts they can easily opt-out but as long as they’re not too frequent people don’t mind.
Why SMS text marketing is good for medical practices:
Quick contact with your patients
Appointment reminders
Reduces cancellations and no-shows