Healthcare Marketing: 5 Ways To Get More Patients In Your Practice
With the changing times of healthcare marketing, you can use many new avenues to increase brand awareness and create hype for the services you provide.
As an allied health practitioner, it’s essential to keep up with trends in the industry so that patients can easily find the best care possible.
This article covers five ways allied health practitioners can market their practice online and through Google and social media platforms, including Facebook and Instagram.
To generate new patients and attract them into our practices (and away from competitors), here are five strategies that we recommend:
1) Create a website that has all the information on the services and locations;
2) Be sure to understand the target market and showcase the benefits of the services;
3) Ensure the Google My Business is optimised;
4) Use social media to generate and reach out to a broader audience;
5) Don’t forget about health blogs to share information about the conditions you treat and the services you provide.
Healthcare marketers must be good at promoting their services and stand out by understanding their target market, getting clear on the message to the target market, and the media they will use to reach the target market.
This article will discuss what it takes to successfully implement a healthcare marketing strategy from understanding the target audience and the message.
What is marketing in healthcare?
Healthcare Marketing and Branding is all about creating a strategy and road map for promoting a practice. This includes ensuring the right messages are communicated, delivered in a way that resonates with patients, using patient data for enhanced insights into what will most effectively reach them based on proven direct marketing methods.
Healthcare marketing always comes back to three things: Creating valuable content, communicating it successfully, so the audience engages with it and understands its importance, then delivering those vital messages through effective channels, such as social media or email campaigns.
Healthcare providers are tasked with the difficult job of standing out among the competition when it comes to attracting and retaining patients.
Healthcare marketing has changed significantly in recent years due to increased changes in healthcare systems, including increasing regulations on advertising practices.
Importance of healthcare marketing
Having an effective marketing strategy in place for healthcare providers is crucial to attracting new patients and retaining them.
As we previously mentioned, there are a few things to consider when developing a marketing plan, such as defining the offer and identifying the target market. In terms of identifying the target market, marketing considerations may be different depending on whether you’re targeting patients (eg general population) or surgeons.
Surgeons may require significantly different information about their prospective treatment before referring their patient, so it is important to have all this info easily accessible. This may even be in a form of a PDF file for the doctor to easily download and print.
The offer also has to be easy to digest from both sides; a great social medium is YouTube; where you have the opportunity to explain via video to a potential patients and answer any common questions.
Create a website that has all the information on the services and locations
In order to generate new patients and attract them into our practices, Healthcare Practitioners need to have a Healthcare Marketing website. Allied health websites should include the location or locations as well as the information on their practitioners and services.
Healthcare providers who want more patients should create a Healthcare Marketing website that meets all of Google’s SEO best practices.
Allied Health SEO Best Practices
With so many people searching for Allied Health services on Google now Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays a significant role if you wish to have good rankings on Google Page 1.
So how do you optimise the Healthcare SEO to generate more patients?
Develop Quality Healthcare Content
Content should be optimised around the target keyword and unique phrases that relate directly to the clinic. As you might already know, Google prefers websites with a longer range of content.
You also need to provide great information for users so they’ll want to continue visiting the website regularly. So invest time into creating valuable Healthcare content – like blog posts, online courses or even video tutorials – as these are generally easier to rank well on search engines than product pages.
Be sure to understand the target market and showcase the benefits of the services.
If you want to dive deep into this topic, we recommend the 1 Page Marketing Plan by Allan Dibb. In his book, Allan explains that marketing is the strategy you use for getting the ideal target market to know, like and trust you enough that they get converted into customers.
All of these things can be associated with marketing. Still, it’s always a good idea to think about what kind of customer experience is going after first before starting on any strategies or tactics. For instance, if we’re targeting millennials who want affordable products, then our plan might look different than if we were looking at specific kinds of business professionals such as architects where an expensive product would make sense in their case.
How to optimise the profile on Google My Business
Google My Business (GMB) is currently the best way for healthcare practitioners to establish their professional profiles on the internet. It’s free, can be easily set up and managed online, and allows you to connect with potential patients in the local area. If you’re not yet using Google My Business, here are a few reasons why you should start today.
The first thing that any potential patient will do when wondering how they might find an appropriate health provider is to search online for keywords related to modalities of expertise.
Healthcare providers who are not using Google My Business or a similar service to optimise their information and profile online are missing out on this potentially massive source of new patients.
What is social marketing in healthcare
Social marketing has become a popular way to encourage people to accept ideas and attitudes, perform healthy behaviours, or change their ways of thinking about certain topics. It’s often used in healthcare settings where doctors may want patients to stop smoking or do something like wear sunscreen more often (Slip, Slop, Slap!).
Social marketing should not be done specifically for the healthcare industry in isolation, but rather as a tool to engage the wider population. Varying the use of marketing channels offers a powerful way to promote awareness and share accurate information about health topics and products.
It also allows consumers to hear more from providers with whom they have already established familiarity or trust, while spawning an open dialogue outreach that tends to engender loyalty and enthusiasm.
How social media marketing works in healthcare
These days social media is a powerful tool for healthcare providers that can be used as part of an overall marketing program. There are major advantages that come with using social media for your clinic, hospital, or other medical organization such as generating leads and growing your database of potential customers while giving current clientele new content on which they could find appropriate answers to their questions.
Social media marketing has its own set of best practices that include key principles such as honesty, authenticity, personalisation, inclusivity and respectfulness – all principles that healthcare providers can employ towards building awareness and establishing long-term relationships with patients, patients’s families members or caregivers.
Conclusion
Healthcare practitioners need to be good at promoting their healthcare services for them to stand out from the competition.
Unfortunately, Healthcare marketers who struggle to win patients either haven’t been prospecting the right way or aren’t putting enough effort into it.
Allied Health websites are crucial for Healthcare Practitioners because Healthcare Marketing is all about creating health information and interventions that help people improve their well-being.
SEO for physiotherapists Best Practices include:
- developing quality content
- understanding the target market and showcasing what benefits you offer with the service (be sure not to overpromise)
- optimising Google My Business profile, and using keywords related to one’s modalities of expertise when possible.
If this sounds intimidating and you and you need an experienced team to help, contact us to help you take Healthcare Marketing to the next level.
