Get some insights on how to market your medical practice in the digital world so you can improve brand awareness, reach out to more potential patients, and expand your business
On our most recent webinar, How to market your medical practice, Alexandra Pacheco, Digital Marketing Specialist at Health Prime, talked about digital marketing and how you can implement specific strategies within your medical practice to enhance your marketing efforts, let customers know about your services and engage potential patients.
Technology continues to be a big part of our lives, and it will only keep growing and innovating. If medical practices want to expand their businesses, attract new customers, and position their brands, they need to orient their marketing efforts toward the digital field.
Digital marketing is all the marketing activities that use an electronic device or the internet. There are different advantages that your medical practice can obtain if it starts considering marketing through digital platforms instead of just traditional marketing efforts.
These advantages are:
Where to start?
There are different types of digital marketing that can be done across several channels, such as SEO, PPC, affiliate marketing, inbound marketing, content marketing, email marketing, social media marketing, online PR (Public Relations), and sponsored content. However, there are four of them that you should definitely be doing:
1. SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
Optimizing your website to rank higher in Google searches is the most cost-effective digital marketing technique; however, it is challenging to get it right.
SEO drives two things: rankings and visibility. Rankings are how search engines place a particular web page in search engine results pages. If you have high visibility, you have a bigger chance of ranking higher in search results.
For search engines, the website is just text. If you want to rank your website higher on the search engine and have a strong SEO strategy, you will need:
A proper technical setup
Set up by:
- Website navigation and links: Search engines only follow links. Have many links leading to landing pages, your social media platforms, and more. Also, make sure you get rid of dead and broken links.
- URL structure: Keep your URLs short and use keywords for which you want these pages to be found.
- Good page speed: If your page is slow, your website won’t get enough visits and will not rank high. Use Google’s page speed insights tool to see how fast your website is and if it needs improvements.
- Sitemap: this is a file that lists all URLs on your website. Search engines use it to identify what pages to crawl and index.
- Robots.txt: Tells search engines what content not to index. For example, specific policy pages you do not want to appear in searches.
You might want to consider removing all the duplicate content. Pages that contain identical or similar content confuse search engines.
Content
The more content your website has, the higher the chances of getting ranked on top.
Have the proper keywords so you can attract people who are prospects to your medical practice. SEO uses keywords to rank your website and show them where they are searching. Also, try focusing on On-Page Optimization which is when search engines understand a page’s topic and keywords; and also, can match that to relevant searches.
Backlinks
These are links that come from other places that are not your website. For example, when an article mentions a page from your website with a link.
2. Content Marketing
Create and promote content about your business and topics of interest for your potential clients to improve brand awareness, traffic growth, sales, reach, interactions, and loyalty.
There are six ways to create content: infographics, blogs, podcasts, videos, paid ads, and social media.
3. Email Marketing
Market a product or service through email campaigns. Medical practices can double-check with their medical software vendors to see if they have any tools available to assist you with email or another type of marketing strategy.
Use email marketing to build relationships, promote your content, boost brand awareness, market your products, and nurture your clients.
4. Social Media Marketing
Promote a brand, service, or content on social media channels. To create your social media marketing strategy, you need to:
- Know your audience: Identify who you are targeting for each of your efforts.
- Determine which social platform you want to market on: We recommend marketing your medical practice on Facebook (1.79 billion daily active users worldwide) and LinkedIn (675 million monthly active users worldwide).
- Create and schedule posts: Schedule them with as much time as possible. This will give you enough time to create great content.
- Analyze results: The metrics you should focus on are shares, impressions, and clicks. Also, keep an eye on how many followers or likes your pages have.
Read our blog for more information about marketing your practice and improving your processes: What are some best techniques to improve your medical practice?
If you have any questions or want more information, contact us at [email protected]. Subscribe to our Health Prime blog to stay tuned for our upcoming webinars and all the latest updates on running your medical practice better so you can focus on what matters most: your patients.
