All Billing Best Practices

Importance of Digital Marketing – How to market and attract new patients to grow your healthcare practice

The world we live in today has been highly influenced by the use of technology and the internet. People nowadays always seem to be on their phones or laptop and rely on the internet as it provides easy access to all kinds of information. Therefore, it is more important than ever for everyone, especially business owners to establish their presence online.

The healthcare sector or anyone with a private practice needs to adapt to the online era to attract patients. Like any other sector, healthcare practice also has a lot of competitors. So, you must think of strategies to outshine yourself. Digital marketing is an important marketing medium that you need to focus on to mark your presence among your competitors.

Here we will be discussing some points focusing on how to market and attract new patients to grow your healthcare practice.

Table of Contents

Hire a Digital Marketing Executive

Running a health care practice is stressful and as a physician, your primary focus must be patient care. It will be stressful for you to handle other aspects of your practice by yourself and that includes patient acquisition and digital marketing.

Hire a digital marketing executive that will help you develop strategies, implement, monitor, and optimize your digital presence. They will be responsible for working with web designers, social media management, placing ads online, supervising online campaigns and web content, staying updated on digital marketing trends, and monitoring your ROI (Return On Investment).

Use Data Analytics

Data analytics in healthcare practice refers to collecting and analyzing clinical and financial data to evaluate your return on investment. Using data analytics in your practice helps you to evaluate how effective and efficient your marketing strategy is and helps you make changes in your strategies accordingly.

Develop A HealthCare Brand

Branding your practice is a process of building your reputation in the healthcare market. Your brand can be your health facility’s name and logo (identity), easily accessible, informative, responsive, and, eye-catching web page or satisfactory, efficient patient experience, or educational content relatable to your target audience. You need to identify what your practice serves that is unique and incorporate it into your digital marketing strategy.

Optimize Your Website

When people need to visit a physician, they tend to do their research online or ask other people. They look for a place that has good reviews, is easily accessible, and is patient-oriented. Your website is your identity. You need to have a responsive mobile-friendly website as 63% of google searches are done via mobile phones with less loading time, have engaging informative content about your services, and your contact details on your website. Your web content should be search engine optimized (SEO), meaning you need to incorporate relevant health-care-related keywords that your prospective patients might use to search for your services. Using SEO can help raise your rank in search engines.

Social Media Presence

Social media is used by almost everyone making it the best place to market your services. Social media like Facebook and Instagram are great platforms where you can post your services, informative content, patient reviews, place ads, collaborate with your local patients, known personalities, and link your website to increase your target audience. You can also have interactions and solve queries of your prospective patients through social media.

Interactive Online Presence

A good way to build a reputation is to be interactive with your patients. You should follow up on your patients via email or phone calls, reply to reviews and queries posted on your website. This habit reflects that you value your patient’s opinions and the time they put into browsing your website.

Place Paid Ads

Paid advertisements tend to rank higher than any other search engine optimized web pages, making your site more visible by being at the top of the search engine.

Consistent Online Presence

For any kind of healthcare practice, it takes time and effort to build a reputation, and gain your target audience’s confidence. You need to be consistent with keeping your online presence updated according to marketing trends and patients’ needs.

Offline Marketing

Handing out business cards with your online profile information, organizing informative campaigns, handing out flyers, placing ads on billboards, and participating in activities in your local community will help your practice establish an online presence. With this offline marketing, the number of people looking up your practice online will enhance and you may gain patients.

Build Your Doctor Referral Liaison

A doctor referral liaison helps to form, increase, and maintain a long-term partnership with other physicians and medical facilities to gain referrals. The referred patients will then look you up online to look for your services and reviews, which is why you must ensure that your digital presence is not just well-established, but also well-rated.

Reputation Management

When people post reviews and their experience about your practice online, that boosts your reputation. In response to reviews, you should be actively reviewing their comments and making changes to further improve your digital standing.

Monitor Your Marketing Strategy

You need to monitor your marketing strategy regularly to see how effective it has been in increasing your patient flow and your revenues. Try to get feedback from patients and assess your financial growth. Get your data analytics and set a regular discussion with your digital marketing executives to make necessary changes according to the needs of the patients and market.

Key Takeaway

In this digital age, where everything is online and technology-based, not utilizing the services of digital marketing will slow down your practice.

Digital marketing is a great platform for any physician to build a reputation and connect with your target audience. It is a long-term investment that will help you decrease your cost per patient acquisition and maintain patient volume. Hence, any medical practitioner must invest some time and budget into digital marketing to lead their practice towards success.