10 Effective Tips for Marketing Your Medical Practice

By Wanda Dobson

Good news: you started a medical practice; congrats! Bad news: meh, marketing is not your forte. As a doctor, your passion and expertise is improving and enhancing your patients’ lives.

You have worked tirelessly to get to here: 8-12 years of school, residency and advanced training, board exams, licensing, and continuing medical education. You don’t want a Master’s in Marketing too!

You are exhausted. And you want more patients, STAT. You are putting off developing a marketing strategy as it sounds overwhelming, and you already have enough on your overflowing desk.

It’s time to up your marketing efforts for your practice, which will pay off. Think of the most successful businesses in your area. What comes to mind? More than likely, they are successful due to these three things.

They are easy to find online
They are highly visible in the community
They engage patients early and often

How can you accomplish the above when you’re marketing your medical practice? As someone who has worked with doctors for over 20 years, I have seen what works in medical practice marketing.

Hang in there — we will review the tried and true tips that have worked for your competitors and can work for you. After you consider these tips, you will be more confident in how to spend your time for effective outreach to convert prospective customers into loyal patients.

Engage Prospective Patients with a Dynamic Website & Sensational SEO Strategy

If you want to successfully market your medical practice and have new patients knocking on your door consistently, here are some strategic points worth trying:

1) Have a Mobile-Friendly Website

We have more face time with our phones than our home computers. With that in mind, you want to ensure your website is mobile-friendly. Your patients always look up information on their phones — at work, in the car, and on the go.

At this point, more people search the web via their mobile devices vs. laptops or home computers, so Google is now mobile-first. Google searches the content on your mobile site version (vs. the web version) to determine how to rank your medical practice’s content.

Ensure your site loads quickly, your mobile # is easy to find and click to call, and all your website buttons are easy to click. Try ‘Google’s Mobile Friendly Test’ to find out if your website will be effective for mobile searches.1

2) Have a Laser-Focused Local SEO Strategy

It’s easy to think, “I’m a sports medicine doctor; injured athletes looking online should be able to find me.” If only it were that simple. Is your current practice marketing making it easy for search engines (& customers) to find you?

When you have chosen Google search keywords related to your practice, content, and target patients, look at the search volumes for those keywords. Use ‘Keyword Finder’ (free 10-day trial) or similar keyword analyzers.2 Write a clear title tag: the blue underlined link in search engine results: (ex) Sports Medicine / Manish Patel, MD / Rehabilitation.

3) Get Cozy with Google’s Free Services

If you want to take your marketing for your medical practice to the next level, set up a free Business Profile, which helps you control your customer’s first impression of your medical practice.3 Do this in three easy steps:

Under the Search and Maps section, create a Google Business Profile or add information to an existing profile.
Update your Business Profile by adding hours, maps, and photos to get you on the radar of customers near you.
Visit your profile often, share updates, and respond to all reviews, as each published response boosts your searchability on Google.

4) Optimize Facebook Ad Campaigns

Savvy medical practices use social media to their advantage. Currently, the three most popular and downloaded apps are #1 Tik Tok, #2 Instagram, and #3 Facebook.4 If you can’t invest time (or money) in all three platforms, focus on Facebook. Facebook is a very active marketplace that taps into customer search and buying trends.

There are nearly two billion daily Facebook users, and chances are your prospective patients are hanging out here. You can create Facebook ads targeting patients in your area searching for healthcare providers in your specialty. Your ad will appear in their feed and direct them to your practice website.5

Advertising on Facebook is fully customizable. You can choose the duration of the ad, target area, and audience. You can track the ad’s effectiveness and tweak who sees it for better results. It makes sense to market your practice where your patients spend time, so make the most of Facebook’s massive outreach online.

5) Host an Open House

Leverage the power of your local relationships to grow your practice. Hosting an open house is a great way to develop deeper connections with surrounding businesses and neighbors. They’re interested in learning more about you and your services & could be valuable referral partners.

Provide a limited-time offer at your open house and takeaways with the practice name and phone number and a raffle someone can use after the open house. On the event day, be a gracious host who greets everyone and makes them feel welcome. They will tell others about their first experience with you.

Bonus: open houses are not just limited to launching a business; you can do open houses for anniversaries or special events, like introducing another practice partner who offers new treatments and procedures.

6) Be Visible in the Community

For successful marketing in the medical space, get involved. 5Ks, charity events: blood drives, hospital galas, benefits, or events for schools & colleges — these are all opportunities to be the local expert in your field and show you invest in the health and success of the community. As more people meet you, they will learn about you and your practice.

7) Don’t Ignore Non-Web Advertising

Most patients are only willing to travel to one or two towns over to get healthcare. Patients want access to doctors near where they work, live, and shop. So, keep this in mind while marketing your medical practice and pinning down your target audience.

Billboards can be highly effective in advertising your practice and will be seen at stoplights while patients are waiting for their coffee and on the way to the gym.
Physical postcard mailers to the surrounding neighborhoods closest to your practice capture patients who may need to be more web-savvy or see online marketing.
Newspaper ads, local TV, and radio ads can work with a strategic marketing rollout.

8) Yes! You Too Can YouTube

If you are serious about getting your practice ‘out there’ where prospective patients can see you, create a YouTube channel.6 Visibility is the key to getting found online.

Your YouTube channel is a warm welcome inviting patients to your practice. Your video content can be as simple and easy as your office manager or medical assistant shooting a video on their iPhone as you give a tour of your practice. You can record yourself through the ‘5 Things to Expect On Your First Patient Visit’.

The most effective videos will be short and easy to understand. Instead of trying to cover your practice from A to Z in one longer video, split up the overview of your practice over several videos. A casual viewer on YouTube may not be willing to invest 30 minutes of their time learning about your medical practice, but several shorter ‘snippets’ could do the trick. Your video sequence can look like this:

Introduction & tour of your practice: this makes patients familiar with your practice’s physical look and feels like they know how you can help them before they arrive.
What to expect on a first patient visit: Introduce your staff from a new patient point of view. Going through the steps from the first hello of your receptionist to your sample consult – the patient can be familiar with the friendliness and professionalism of you and your staff.
Key reasons why patients visit you: (share three patient testimonials): This is your chance to cover the ‘Pain Points’ that bring patients to your practice. It also showcases satisfied patients who have benefitted from your care.
Medical minute videos: This is an opportunity to show your expertise. If you are a chiropractor, you can review back pain treatments and highlight the benefits of non-surgical, drug-free care. You are educating patients about something that could give them effective relief, and it shows you have compassion and specialized skill for their health concerns.

9) Patient Referral Reward Programs

You have worked hard to attract patients to your practice; it’s okay to want the most significant return on your investment. When you calculate your effort and expenses to bring in new patients, retaining current patients and ensuring they are happy is worth it.7

It’s no secret that happy patients are referring patients, and you can maximize this by offering a referral reward program. Your program can be as simple as offering a discount on their next office appointment, a gift card for their efforts in introducing five new patients to your practice, or discounts on a product or service.

10) Embrace Blogging

Even if you are satisfied with the look and performance of your website, you could use a key element to drive traffic: website blogs. Here are the benefits of blogs for marketing your practice.

- Monthly blogs train your readers to expect to hear from you each month, which helps build your following and is another opportunity to grow your email subscriptions. When readers visit your blog page, create a ‘Subscribe’ opt-in for each post.

Regular blogs also allow you to post new content on your social media pages, expanding your online footprint and creating more breadcrumbs leading back to your medical practice’s door.
Creating monthly posts doesn’t have to be a chore. While your practice may be highly specialized, you care about your patient’s whole health, and highlighting a variety of health-focused blogs shows you are compassionate about all aspects of your patient’s well-being.
You can schedule a full calendar year of topics to raise awareness of many health topics. Kick off the year with Healthy Resolutions, move into February’s Women’s Heart Month, and work your way to No Shave November. Each month is an opportunity to share your expertise and, more importantly, demonstrate your care for your patient’s health.

Adding these tweaks in marketing your medical practice can be transformative. The time you invest in your marketing strategy can make a measurable difference.

Get found on more local web searches
Be more visible on multiple platforms (Google, YouTube, Social Media)
Gain followers who ‘opt in’ to subscribe to your email newsletters/blogs
Be top of mind since you have made yourself the ‘Go-to’ in your community

Not having a marketing strategy or feeling overwhelmed and doing nothing will not move your practice forward. Actively engaging customers online and making it easy for them to choose you can be the game changer in growing your medical practice.

If you have enjoyed this article, we would love to hear which strategies have worked for your practice. Please comment on your healthcare niche and share your wins here.

Need help getting the ball rolling? Reach out and let a medical copywriter help get you started.

References:

Tool to see if your medical practice website is mobile-friendly: https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly (Accessed 4/7/23).
Keyword finder to boost your practice’s SEO: https://keywordfinder.io/ (Accessed 4/7/23)
Create a free Google business profile for your medical practice: https://search.google.com/search-console/about (Accessed 4/7/23)
Top 3 most used apps: https://www.startuptalky.com/most-apps-downloaded/ (Accessed 4/7/23)
Maximize your practice’s visibility with step-by-step instructions to create facebook ads: https://www.facebook.com/business/ads (Accessed 4/7/23)
Showcase your practice by building a YouTube channel: https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1646861?hl=en (Accessed 4/7/23)
How to calculate patient acquisition cost: https://www.patientgain.com/calculate-patient-acquisition (Accessed 4/7/23)