It might be easy to feel that your expertise is no longer enough to set you apart from other practitioners. But that is not exactly the case anymore. Our traditional idea of word of mouth marketing can no longer compare with online mentions generated through a digital presence. These days, patients have more options than ever, prompting everyone to keep up with today’s marketing solutions. If you want to stay ahead of other healthcare providers, doctor’s practices, or hospitals, why not utilize healthcare marketing with reputable companies?
Advertising in Today’s Online Landscape
Nowadays, it is important to utilize online marketing so that you don’t get left behind. People no longer visit hospitals just to get information especially since they can easily get access to the information they need online! In fact, according to Google, 88 percent of those who want to know more health information start by going to search engines. Forty-eight percent of patients also tend to take 2 weeks of research before booking an appointment. You want your practice to be one of the top results in search engines when they are searching for doctors, hospitals, or providers. Using healthcare marketing strategies can make that happen.
Even if you are already happy with your current patient volume, a progressive marketing strategy can help keep your brand in people’s minds. This is an essential practice because inevitably, the patients you have will also consider switching healthcare providers. It is not even necessary for them to have a negative experience with your services for them to start looking around. Think about it. Your rival practices will have their own aggressive marketing solutions that will be able to touch base with your own clients. Don’t wait for that to happen!
How to Gain More Patients
As a medical practitioner, it is understandable if you are not well-versed in different marketing strategies. To familiarize you with some of them, we will share with you 6 ways you can market your healthcare service:
1. Use Consistent Healthcare Branding
You want your brand as a practitioner to be distinguishable above everyone else’s, so you have to ask yourself what makes your services unique. Is it the way you treat your patients? Is it your family-friendly office? Maybe it is your particular background and experience that sets your credentials apart from your rival colleagues in the practice. There will always be at least one exceptional thing about your service that will be identifiable with you. And you can use that to your advantage. You have to let this asset be known as part of your branding so you can attract potential clients and this will be the reason they’ll choose you.
2. Evaluate Online Patient Experience
An integral part of maintaining an online presence is interacting and connecting with your patients. You need to find out if your patients find your website useful and if your team is responsive enough to online inquiries. You have to check if you are posting relevant content. One way to know that is if you can consider your content necessary information that will attract interested, potential, and loyal patients. By knowing this, you will be able to adjust your ways and cater better to your patients. Sometimes it’s the little things you don’t notice that are hindering you from giving the best service and experience to your clients.
3. Build A Responsive Healthcare Website
Think back on the last time you yourself browsed through a website. Try to remember the best and worst parts of this experience and what you think that particular website could have improved upon.
A website is a good platform for marketing because it can hold all the necessary information you want your patients to know. It will also be the main platform where you can touch base with your clients. Here they can provide you with feedback as well as send inquiries. Maintaining a functioning website will elevate patient experience and help convert you from an unfamiliar name to a trusted brand.
A good tool to help you build a website is healthcare marketing with “iMatrix”. When you form your website with iMatrix, this will help you attract more leads and engage with more online users. Through engaging with these online passers-by, you’ll be able to bring in more patients, and you can then focus on retaining them and sustaining your development as a brand. You can partner up with iMatrix to accelerate your practice’s growth!
4. Take Advantage of Search Engine Optimization
As we have already mentioned, prospective patients who have never heard of you before will most likely encounter you through a search engine result. So if you can imagine, the best way to ramp up your game is to make sure you are one of the first names they read about.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is all about this. You want your website to contain a lot of the relevant text that online users will eventually enter in search engines. This will ensure that you stay at the top of results without having to pay extra for each time your website gets viewed by a casual visitor.
5. Use Targeted Ads
If you do have the budget for it, however, we recommend employing the power of targeted advertising.
When you are able to directly identify your potential patients through their characteristics, this eliminates waste in deployment of marketing strategies. You won’t have to wait for clients to look you up or type related keywords in Google to find you. This is a more proactive approach to attracting new patients that can give better results.
6. Build Relations Online
Your website must not be your only profile on the internet. You must also cultivate a digital presence in the social media applications that matter most to your clients, like Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter.
A lot of people spend an enormous amount of their time online these days. Don’t miss the chance for free mentions whenever you get tagged or reviewed by social media users!
As much as possible, you only want things that you can’t control to be the reason why some patients eventually leave you. To stay on top of it, do not give them a reason to switch at all. Even if the inevitable happens, you are at least constantly gaining new patients through healthcare marketing strategies.
