Digital marketing for the medical industry comes with a number of nuances. What may work for other companies doesn’t bring results for the healthcare business and vice versa. Marketing for doctors involves paying special attention to the delicate needs of patients while relying heavily on brand awareness.
While the diversity of healthcare industry sectors is overwhelming, key common points for marketing doctor’s offices and services exist.
In this article, we’ll look into innovative marketing ideas for healthcare industry players. Whether you decide to use one or all of them, you are bound to help your business make a step forward.
1. Discover Instagram: Excellent for Social Media Marketing for Doctors
The power of social media marketing can’t be underestimated. While the majority of businesses focus on Facebook, medical practices may want to turn to Instagram.
Each year, the number of Instagram users in North America grows by 4% to 5%. Today, over a billion people use Instagram and 60% of them use the platform to discover new products and services.
Instagram can become a major contributor to your marketing team’s SEO efforts. It’s an excellent platform for educating your target audience with visual aids. As the popularity of images and videos online is growing, putting the message through by using them is an excellent idea. You can raise brand awareness without too much written text and help potential patients choose your practice among thousands of others.
Instagram can be an excellent tool for medical practices where aesthetic results are highly important. For example, it’s a good choice for dental offices and cosmetic surgeons. However, other specialists can use it just as well. Pediatricians, physicians, psychologists, and many other experts can take advantage of their audience’s desire to learn more about their conditions without doing too much reading.
This social media platform is doing a good job of coming up with different marketing tools. You can put your ads in front of the potential audience by taking advantage of geo-targeting and unique search. Meanwhile, numerous third-party tools for Instagram marketing exist. They help you discover which hashtags to use, edit images and videos to achieve perfection, schedule Instagram posts, create unique designs, and much more.
Overall, Instagram can raise brand awareness, assist with SEO efforts, keep your work results out in the open, promote events and deals, educated patients, and much more.
To take full advantage of this service, you should:
- Create a business account
- Fill out the profile
- Use relevant keywords and hashtags in your posts
- Style the page to follow your medical theme
- Post regularly
- Use unique images and videos (even though stock photos are ok sometimes)
- Use location-based keywords
- Analyze the Instagram marketing campaign
2. Online Marketing for Doctors: Take Full Advantage of SEO
Compared to other digital marketing tactics, medical SEO has generated the highest amount of medical and healthcare leads by far.
According to a survey performed by Doctros.com, in the past year, 80% of American adults used the Internet to make health-related searches. These figures create amazing opportunities for search engine optimization.
SEO is an integral part of online marketing for doctors. Putting your practice on the first pages of Google search can bring thousands of patients to your doorstep. But only if you take the right approach to attracting them.
By taking full advantage of SEO, you can increase brand awareness, boost revenue, educate your patients, and find the target audience.
Medical SEO includes numerous components. Missing one of them reduces your chances of improving the overall marketing campaign.
- Website design – while your website has to be appealing, fast-loading, and easy to navigate, it must be optimized for SEO efforts. That’s why it’s important to learn about SEO before creating a website rather than change it in the future.
- Online reviews – reviews are a huge part of marketing for doctors’ offices. Patients tend to look for reviews online before choosing a doctor. That makes these comments a marketing weapon you can use to attract the audience and boost your Google standings. Reviews are a strong page rank indicator.
- Google My Business – to increase the chances of high rankings, you need to list your practice on Google My Business. You have to share as much information as possible and keep the listing updated. Don’t forget to reply to reviews (good or bad) and comments to ensure activity and show that opinions matter to you.
- Keywords Search – top-notch keyword search is the key part of SEO efforts. Without knowing which keywords to use as well as when and where to use them, it’s impossible to achieve high search engine rankings.
- Linking – linking is a huge part of medical SEO. Whenever you share information, it’s important to make it appear credible by linking to appropriate sources. The more top-notch content you offer, the more websites are likely to link to your page. Meanwhile, linking to your previous relevant content makes your website easier to navigate. Linking is an SEO science that needs a professional approach.
- Content – as an expert in your field, you can provide high-quality content that can help your patients (potential and existing) understand their conditions better. By using the right keywords and placing the content in the right places, you can improve your website’s visibility tremendously, thus bringing new patients to the doorstep.
3. Videos of Doctors: Allow Patients to Make a Close Connection
The popularity of videos for marketing is hard to overlook. According to Statista, 85% of internet users in the USA watch online videos monthly. Meanwhile, according to Wyzowl, 87% of businesses use videos as a marketing tool.
Medical practices can take full advantage of this trend to stay on top of their game. Shooting videos of doctors doing their work may be somewhat tough even if they manage to get patients to agree. However, you can use videos to help patients get to know their doctors better while educating them about their conditions.
Don’t your doctors have something to say about the jobs they do, the research they make, and experience they have? Next time, let them say it in front of the camera. When it comes to medical-related content, videos often work better than texts.
Many patients don’t have time or patience to go through hundreds of words. Meanwhile, they can enjoy hearing a doctor talk to them. This is especially true for older patients, who are used to person-to-person interaction.
You can also create short videos that tell about each of the doctors from your practice. Allow potential patients to get to know them better.
Whatever videos you make, don’t just post them on your website. Upload these marketing tools to YouTube as well. For that, you would have to create a YouTube channel. Make sure to add your brand name and logo to each video to increase brand awareness.
While uploading videos to YouTube, make sure to use SEO perks. Tags, locations, descriptions, and the like can put your video on top of the search. Market your YouTube channel on your website and social media.
4. Power of Content: Guest Blogging for Brand Awareness
One of the advantages medical practices have over other businesses is the amount of useful information they can share. Meanwhile, the potential audience is highly likely to search for the necessary information about medical conditions before setting up an appointment.
Online marketing for doctors shouldn’t just revolve around their website or social media accounts. You have to get your practice out there. To do that, you can share your thoughts and experience on other websites.
Pay special attention to local websites and blogs. By bringing your content there, you can boost brand awareness and help your target audience find you. You can take advantage of another website’s access to your potential patients.
Guest blogging doesn’t just boost brand recognition and bring new clients to your doorstep. It increases traffic to your website, thus putting you on the first pages of search engines. Such blogs also help you establish yourself as an authority on a certain medical-related subject.
You can work with other medical practices to raise awareness for both of you. Dental offices can guest blog for cosmetic surgeons and vice versa.
One of the biggest advantages of successful guest blogging is backlinking. By writing an article for another website, you get an opportunity to insert a link to yours. Today, backlinking is among the most critical parts of the SEO efforts.
Look for websites that may bring more clients to your office and check if they accept guest blogs. Both parties win from guest blogging. You raise awareness while they gain additional exposure.
5. Increased Visibility: PPC Marketing
Since millions of patients are using search engines to discover new information about different health conditions, pay-per-click marketing can bring patients to your website. It’s one of the fastest ways to catch the attention of your target audience.
PPC ads show up at the top and bottom of search engine result pages. Your ad may be the first thing patients see when typing a certain keyword. Meanwhile, you only pay when they click on the ad.
PPC marketing requires a serious structured approach. You have to start by identifying your target audience as strictly as you can. Otherwise, you’ll be paying large amounts for unnecessary clicks. Such clicking hinders SEO efforts by raising your website’s bounce rate.
You must have created a buyer’s persona for previous marketing efforts. It can help with the PPC ad campaign by giving you an idea of which keywords to use. Creating a list of relevant keywords is vital for the campaign to be efficient.
Don’t forget about the utter importance of negative keywords. Just because the keyword comes with a high search volume and a low per-click cost doesn’t mean you have to grab it. In fact, you may want to remove it from your list intentionally.
For example, if you are a dental practice, “teeth whitening dentist” may seem like an excellent keyword. However, it may bring you thousands of patients, who are looking how to whiten their teeth at home. That’s why “teeth whitening at home” should become a negative keyword.
You can get some important insight into successful PPC campaigns by looking at what your competition is doing. By using such spy tools as SpyFu, you can find out which keywords your successful competitors use for their PPC campaign.
Pay special attention to the quality of your ad text and calls to action.
Final Thoughts
Online marketing for doctors needs a creative approach. It may be easier to promote a medical practice than another business because of the volume of search patients do every day.
Meanwhile, the quality of content provided by medical offices must be much higher to achieve top results. PPC marketing efforts for doctors include longer searches for a clear and unique message while calls to action have to be catchy but subtle. Experience in the medical marketing field is highly valuable and necessary for the campaign to succeed.