17 Dec 7 Tips for Effective Online Physician Marketing
Whether you just started your medical practice or have been treating patients for years, taking a fresh look at your physician marketing plan is important as marketing changes at lightning speed. There can be various objectives to your marketing like brand awareness, website traffic and lead generation. However, they all should contribute to two main goals: get patients and keep them coming back.
Physician marketing often focuses on generating new patients, but the tips below will also give you insight on how to improve your patient retention.
Strategic Medical Marketing Plan is Key
It’s tempting to go after the “shiny” marketing objective like getting to 10K followers on Instagram. But how will it help your business? Do you know what type of followers you want to attract?
In our experience, the answer is often something along the lines of “It works for Doctor So and So”. We believe it’s important to recognize that your medical practice is unique. It will attract the type of patients you want to work with only if you have the right strategy, or foundation, for your medical marketing plan.
At SocialCow, we always start with strategy first.
Take a look: Why It’s Important to Start with Strategy First
7 Effective Physician Marketing Methods for Doctors
There are many ways to advertise your practice. The keys are authenticity and consistency.
1. Use the same content across multiple social media platforms.
You likely already know that content is king. Developing authentic, educational content that accurately represents your medical practice is as important as placing it in front of the right eyes. The first step to this is putting it onto social networks with the most “weight”. Every social media post you create should at least go on:
- Google Listing
If it’s a video, you will also want to put it on YouTube as that helps with your online visibility.
2. Make video content.
Your prospective patients want to see you. It’s important to make video production part of your physician marketing plan. But it doesn’t have to be fancy. Your iPhone X has a perfectly good camera to record a video about “Why Closed Rhinoplasty is Best” or “Heart-Healthy Substitutes for Holiday Favorites”. Don’t forget to include personal anecdotes and let your prospective patients see the human you, not the just the doctor.
Tip: Whenever taking pictures or videos, make sure that you do not have any patient information in the background so as to not break any HIPAA laws.
Learn: 7 places to put your video
3. Educate through blogs.
When used consistently as part of a larger medical marketing strategy, blogs have various levels of value. For one, consistent blogging on your website can help you rank higher in search engines like Google. Additionally, you can post your blogs to sites like LinkedIn and Medium. Keep in mind that Google doesn’t like duplicate content so it’s important to link back to your original article from those platforms.
Blogs should be 500 – 1500 words and be easy to read. By breaking up paragraphs, including photos and videos, it will help better engage the reader.
Keep in mind that you can include videos you created in tip #2 and write blogs. You can then post the video alone to your social media and also post a link to the blog where you go deeper into the topic. Now you have multiple pieces of content from one video.
4. Contribute to national and local publications.
Magazines are always looking for qualified experts to comment on new treatments and contribute other medical information. Reach out to publications, letting them know that your qualifications and which topics you can contribute on.
If you are using specific brand of equipment such as for laser treatments, you can speak to the company providing them about speaking at their conferences or at least appearing on their social media as well!
5. Consistently post on social media networks.
Consistency is key across all marketing efforts and social networks especially want to see that you are posting and engaging daily. Here are a few tips on how often you will want to post on each network:
- Facebook – 1-3 times a day
- Instagram feed – 1-3 times a day
- Facebook & Instagram stories – as many times as you can!
- LinkedIn – 1-3 times a day
- Twitter – 5-7 times a day
- IGTV – 1-3 times a week
- YouTube – 1-3 times a week
Need to know if your marketing is working? Schedule a free consult here.
6. Monitor and respond to your reviews.
Reputation management is an important aspect of both gaining new patients and retaining existing ones. Even when referred, prospective patients look online to sites like Google Listing, Healthgrades and RealSelf to see what kind of reviews the doctor receives.
Monitoring your reviews and responding to all, good and negative, is important. Responding properly to a negative review can help mitigate the effect it has on the public that reads them.
Keep in mind that the best way to have a high star rating is to proactively get reviews for your medical practice.
7. Email and text reminders for your medical practice.
Once you have a patient, it’s important to keep them engaged. Having an effective email newsletter going out 2-3 times per month with educational and engaging content allows you to keep on top of their minds. We recommend including direct sales very rarely into your emails or at least not as the main topic!
Medical Marketing Services
We find that physicians rarely have time to do their own marketing. If the above seems more than you can handle, we can help manage parts or your entire digital marketing strategy and implementation. Schedule a free 20-minute consult here.