Find Your Niche
When it comes to marketing and selling your medical practice, you want to focus on the right audience and the right platforms. You don’t want to waste your time and energy spreading yourself too thin across multiple platforms you may not even be using correctly. Finding your niche means you can identify and target your ideal buyer – whether they’re patients searching for a family physician or a general practitioner (GP) – and tailor your marketing initiatives to reach them. The digital marketing world is highly fragmented and can be a little overwhelming if you’re not sure where to start.
Grow Your Own Clients
One of the best things about having your own medical practice is the ability to directly generate new leads and customers. Whether you’re using inbound marketing or direct marketing tactics such as email blasts, your own practice allows you to consistently find and engage new audiences. You can also use social media to find and connect with potential patients and make them visit your website or give you a call.
As your practice grows, you’ll discover there are certain types of patients you’re better suited to serve. For example, if you specialize in adult medicine, you might find yourself inundated with adult emergencies in the evening. As a result, your evening and overnight hours might be a bit chaotic. If that’s the type of practice you run, you might decide to specialize in maternity care or handle certain types of surgeries yourself. This is where your knowledge and expertise as a doctor can be invaluable – helping you determine which patients you should see and which ones you should refer to another physician.
Build An Online Reputation
Just because your practice is online doesn’t mean you need to limit yourself to the web. You can use other platforms and tactics to build an online reputation that attracts potential patients. For example, if you’ve got a Facebook page with hundreds of followers, you can post about upcoming medical events and other relevant topics – even if those events and topics don’t have anything to do with healthcare. Doing this well may land you more referrals, more patients, and eventually, more revenue.
Use Technology
As we’ve discussed, being a doctor is no longer just about providing healthcare. It’s about having a complete understanding of a patient’s medical history and being able to guide them through the entire process. With that in mind, you may want to look at healthcare technology to help you better serve your patients. By using technology in your practice, you can easily access a patient’s medical records from anywhere. This includes things such as their medical history, test results, prescriptions, and follow-up appointments. It also means you can contact them when they have questions about their health or medication and even offer them assistance with anything related to self-care (e.g., weight loss, nutrition, etc.).
Not sure where to start with healthcare technology? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. Here are three tips to help you get started.
Set Up A Test Run
No, we don’t mean setup a dummy practice with a handful of patients to see how your new marketing plan works. We mean set up a test run to see how well your existing marketing plan is performing. Running a test run doesn’t require a lot of effort or money and as a result, it’s often overlooked as a way of evaluating marketing strategies and tactics. Simply put, a test run is when you try out a new marketing platform or method of communication with just a few patients or customers. Once you’ve gotten the hang of it, you can scale up the number of individuals you engage with regularly (i.e., subscribers, bloggers, etc.).
For example, you might want to try out a new social media platform with your existing Google Ads – just to see how they perform together. You don’t have to have a perfect balance of paid and organic traffic at first- the key is just to get started. Even if your test run doesn’t produce immediate results, you’ll still gain valuable experience that will help you determine the right approach for your own practice.
Determining Your ROI
Marketing is a significant investment for any business, and it’s a key consideration when you’re determining how much you’ll need to spend on advertising in future. However, even if you do end up spending a significant amount of money on marketing, you may not see the results you want right away. To figure out how much your efforts are costing you, you’ll need to calculate the ROI – the return on investment. The good news is there are a variety of tools you can use to track the results of your marketing efforts – from online marketing platforms to CRMs (customer relationship management software). Simply put, a tool like HubSpot takes all the guesswork out of marketing. From collecting leads to converting them into paying customers, everything is streamlined using this tool. As a result, you can have confidence that you’re on the right track and making the right decisions. You can also use HubSpot’s reporting features to determine the effectiveness of each campaign – including the ROI of each individual channel you may have used.
For instance, you may see that blogging about a medical topic related to your healthcare specialty increases your website traffic and leads to higher conversion rates. However, the same engagement on social media may not do as much. Calculating the ROI of your various strategies and tactics will allow you to determine which ones are working and which ones you should drop – or at least, alter the way you’re using them. In this way, you can continue to improve your marketing and increase your revenue without needing to constantly change what you’re doing.
Keep Your Marketing On Trend
With every new generation that comes along, the need for creative marketing strategies increases. After all, people are constantly plugged into their phones and therefore, constantly searching for whatever is hot and trendy at any given moment. As a digital marketer, this is your bread and butter. Keeping up with all the trends while marketing your healthcare practice may seem impossible – but you can use tools to make it easier. For example, if you notice there’s a sudden rise in the use of QR codes (quick response codes) – which are black and white barcodes that can be scanned by a smartphone camera – you can use this trend to your advantage. Simply create a QR code for each of your marketing efforts – whether it’s a webinar, blog post, or social media campaign – and voila, you have a platform to reach millions of smartphone users with the push of a button.
The key is to keep up with the trends while still being able to market your healthcare practice. Trends will come and go, but your marketing plan will remain permanent. Knowing which ones to keep and which ones to drop means you’ll be able to continuously improve your practice and stand out among your competitors.