In the current mobile and web-driven world, it is of utmost significance for medical practitioners to make an online presence and promote their services evocatively. Individuals seeking medical help and guidance are surfing through web pages and mobile apps to find the right medical facility, doctors and surgeons. Hence, medical marketing for doctors must be deployed as a strategic process while making optimum use of various marketing tools and techniques, to reach out to those searching for the right service.
While having a website is imperative for doctors to market themselves online, it is of greater significance to have all the relevant marketing tools on the website such as:
Contact Forms
Short and simple web forms on the website to gather the information about website visitors along with their contact information. The shorter the form, the higher is the response rate for key patient data.
Responsive Website Design
It is important for the website to have a responsive design to maximize the reach for potential patients through various mobile devices. More often than not, Google discards non-responsive websites.
Relevant and Clear Call to Action
No matter how impressive a website is, it is a failure without an effective CTA. Healthcare marketing for doctors starts with a call to action phone number, easy-to-find email address or a well placed Contact Us page for the visitors to contact the practitioners.
A HIPAA-compliant Websites
The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) is a law governing websites. As per the compliance, a website must ensure that:
- All protected health information is transported encrypted
- The data is backed-up
- Only accessible by authorized personnel
- The data is not tampered with or altered
- The website utilizes storage encryption
- The website can be permanently disposed of when no longer needed,
- The website is located on secure web servers.
Google prefers HIPAA compliant websites for online searches made by the individuals.
While having a website kick starts the digital marketing for medical practices, an overall foolproof plan including all possible digital platforms, fuels the marketing initiatives. This is paved by commissioning the organic search, paid search, landing pages, social media, and reputation management.
Organic Search is important because it is the most natural and dominant way for potential patients to search for a practitioner online. It requires the placement of specific keywords and keyword phrases on the doctor’s website with a prescribed density. According to some valuable recent reports, organic search totalled 23% of patient reach through the doctor during Q1 2017, which was higher than any other online medium. Thus, it is evident that medical marketing for doctors is incomplete without an SEO expert who knows keywords placement and Google analytics. Websites with wrong keyword density go rejected.
The paid search industry created by Google is making billions of dollars today. It is called PPC, the paid-per-click advertisement method. These short PPC ads appear on the web pages and target the clients based on their search patterns. Almost 20% of medical businesses owe their success to PPC. Thus, to have effectual digital marketing for medical practices in place, a good budget for PPC is a recommendation.
Landing pages to market specific products and services prove to be instrumental. The potential patients land at these pages following the links advertised on various web platforms, newsletters, or through email campaigns. With the minimum and focused content to promote a single entity, these effective tools minimize the distractions and ensure greater response by the patients.
Social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Yelp, YouTube, Google+, LinkedIn, and many others are growing in popularity and fan bases. In the past year:
- Facebook had over 0.8 billion patients worldwide searching for social pages of doctors
- WhatsApp had over 0.4 billion users sharing and looking for medical content
- Instagram topped 300 million monthly active users following the accounts for relevant medical information
- Twitter, which proves to be most beneficial when it comes to healthcare marketing for doctors, houses 120 million users following the medical accounts
Most doctors, physicians and big pharmacy companies rely on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube for medical content postings.
It is also important for doctors and practice managers to share meaningful, informative, impressive, relatable and optimized health content on all web platforms to attract visitors to their practices. This not only helps the aspiring individuals to get the right health advice gathering greater trust in the medical practitioner, but also facilitates online brand promotion for the doctor in a momentous form.
Digital marketing for medical practices must always be patient-centric as this is not just about promoting services, but also about providing insightful information to the patients and promoting overall health for all. It is also a significant trust-building exercise for the doctors and physicians.
The ultimate objective of the online marketing for doctors is to bring maximum traffic to the website or other web presences by escalating the rank in the Search Engine Result Pages when the prospective patients are searching for a particular condition or a remedy. Thus, for higher ranking in SERP, the ultimate digital marketing strategies to deploy are:
- Search Engine Optimization
- Social Media Marketing
- Content Marketing
- Online Advertising in relevant directories
- Google Adwords and PPC
- Online Reputation Management
These strategies help to bring new and high-paying patients to the doctor’s practice. Thus, digital marketing practices are also known as patient acquisition marketing. The following infographic brings to fore some recent related figures of patient acquisition through digital marketing:
Source: Reachlocal
Thus, digital marketing for medical practices must be a value-based and cost-effective approach to promote a healthcare brand and its services. For that, it must mark the following components:
- Personalized and highly targeted marketing campaigns for prospective patients
- Analytics tools and technologies for traceable and measurable efforts
- Strategies to maximize the ROI
To have an effective medical marketing for doctors in place, practice managers can hire an adept digital marketing agency that knows how to deploy a foolproof healthcare marketing strategy. This strategy needs to be a plan of action that addresses various aspects of an online marketing exertion and exploits all the available and attainable resources for online healthcare marketing to reach the absolute objectives. The ultimate goal of any marketing plan for doctors should be to bring more individuals seeking medical help to the doctor’s practice. Thus, patient engagement activities make a large part of such marketing strategy.
Following are some of the important elements of an effective online marketing for doctors that an experienced marketing agency would make sure to position properly:
- Building an impressive web as well as an offline presence
- Managing the brand reputation
- Securing top positions in local searches on Google
- Strategic and Customized marketing campaigns to target potential patients
- Bringing ample traffic of prospective patients to convert them into leads
- Bringing recommendations from patients
- Deploying the tools to track the results of online marketing initiatives and the expenditure
- Maximizing the ROI by bringing conversion cost to the minimum
- Developing online tools (content strategies) for better patient retention and loyalty
In addition, a multifaceted and well-equipped digital marketing agency would deploy a customized medical marketing for doctors only after a thorough audit of their various web presences to check the overall visibility and compatibility to diverse online marketing tools. This also involves analyzing the overall online and offline reputation of the brand or the medical practitioner.
Every doctor has their own unique values to offer through their medical specializations, establishing the fact that each practice requires bespoke marketing plans to complement their needs and goals. This further enhances the actuality that a vigorous and full-bodied digital marketing strategy for medical practices is crucial to keep the healthcare businesses and brands established by the doctors in recognition and a profit-making state.
At Yi3ld, we are competent enough to perform a dynamic and multidimensional online marketing for doctors and their brands. Connect with us and help us to understand your marketing needs.
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