Should a Medical Practice Engage in Digital Marketing?

Medical professionals might question whether or not digital marketing is something they should engage in. This decision should not be taken lightly with time and manpower being scarce; however, investing resources in intangibles like a website, blog, Facebook page, and the like can make a measurable difference in the longevity of your practice.

Digital Marketing is a necessity even for those who already have a loyal following. Maintaining the level of community presence not only allows a practice to present thought leadership, but also increases the likelihood of prospective patients coming across any number of your tactics. This type of marketing enables you to be a practice that people trust. Your practice should absolutely maintain a website and engage in multiple digital marketing strategies.

Before you write it off completely, read the tips below and learn to implement something successful your first try!

Use Your Website Resources

1. You don’t necessarily have to start from scratch. If your website is not up to date, that needs to be your first step. Patients will notice that you put the time and effort into providing them with the most recent site that continuously makes improvements to better their experience. They will connect this experience with the type of service your practice must be known for. Your finished product needs to reflect your brand, be well-organized, easily navigated, and most importantly – modern.

• Showcase the medical professionals who work in your practice. Consider staff biographies with photos and a few personal sentences.
• Include testimonials from patients who provide valuable feedback or positive reviews
• Link your social media accounts. If you are not active on these, get active!

2. Consider streamlining the process. Adding call to action buttons for the two most requested elements of your practice is a great way to create a functional site - e.g.: requesting an appointment and FAQs. See example below:

Another option to introduce a more streamlined process that is also mobile-friendly is the introduction of apps to manage things like FAQs and scheduling.

3. Consider becoming a member of a larger Healthcare interface. Two of the more widely known options are the Healthcare startup HealthTap, which started out as a Q&A site for patients to ask a medical expert questions, and ZocDoc, an appointment-setting app. These innovative apps have created opportunities for physicians and other medical professionals to create their own personal pages and upload various digital assets.

Physicians see the value of participating on these apps and networks when new patients discover their practice and make appointments.  Usually it takes one such conversion to get a doctor hooked.

Join the Conversation

After structuring your website for success, your practice needs to implement and maintain a blog. A blog allows you to keep up digital marketing consistency, while only requiring weekly posting. These thought leadership efforts can be amplified by syndicating the content with links published to social channels, like Twitter, Facebook, or Google+, and any email newsletters or alerts distributed by the practice.

• As individuals consume the Web with more specific intent, users are increasingly typing in longer phrases, questions, and search strings.  A medical practice’s blog that can anticipate and address such expected medical questions, or specific medical terms, acronyms, conditions, symptoms, or medications, is sure to get found more quickly.
• If you’re struggling with content, consider why preventative care is needed for any number of common situations, as well as the time of year and what illness or struggles people might encounter. For example, in the springtime, many suffer from allergies and a blog post about combatting them would help your community.
• The information shared in a medical practice blog is meant to be informative. The only way to keep your blog on track is to pair the right level of advice with lack of over share. Some argue that the act of blogging can diminish a patient’s desire to schedule an appointment. While that may be true in some cases, reminding readers that it is first and foremost recommended to schedule a visit to the practice if there are concerns can alleviate this affect. 

Distributing Content: Go Where Patients Are

Content distribution should always begin with social media. It is important to allocate which mediums you will be using and maintain consistency. There are apps that can assist you in this process, especially with the lack of downtime that those who work in your practice have.

• Hootsuite is an app that allows you to manage all of your social networks, schedule messages, engage your audiences, and measure ROI directly from the app.
• Another helpful tool for multi-site posting is Tweetdeck. This approach is extremely helpful when pressed for time or juggling multiple job duties at one time. The only thing to be aware of is that you will still want to post individually to each of your social media sites from time to time in order to maintain interest among clients or business affiliates who may be following you on all mediums.

Each social media site is unique in the approach to connecting you with your patients.

• On Facebook, you can ask for a response to a certain post or question. Facebook also offers what they call sponsored ads, where you can promote certain posts and reach a larger audience and gain exposure. This is a fairly inexpensive tactic that has yielded results.
• Twitter allows for an easy way to boost promotions, as long as you are doing your part in maintaining followers. Instagram can showcase your facility and your staff in an everyday, relatable environment.
• In addition to traditional social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, LinkedIn is emerging as one of the best ways to distribute content marketing. Utilize LinkedIn for blog posts, as well as showcasing new and exciting business news. You will spread your outreach and interact with your community on a business and personal level. 

Patient Marketing

While this might sound like a complicated strategy to implement, it really isn’t. It all begins with a core value that your practice might already hold: Treat your patients right.

Since patients have a choice where they bestow their business, you must make sure you are providing a respectable experience; otherwise, all the marketing you do will not matter if your patients don’t feel valued. 

! Follow up on visits with phone calls, mail outs, or offer in-house survey feedback. You could even pair any one of these with an incentive.

Lastly, a surefire way to distribute content to patients and community is to create an email newsletter. Always remember to be concise and clients will appreciate the updates without having to put too much effort into reading through them.

Final Thought: A medical practice should have a digital presence for many reasons, perhaps starting as a page on an existing healthcare social network and eventually building to a robust, standalone presence.  The key is to present compelling thought leadership and engage in proper search engine marketing.  This is what separates one expert from another online, and in the competitive medical industry, and a highly regarded blog can make all the difference. Getting found based on insights and expertise will serve the medical practice well.
 

ChangeU: For your independent study ...

Healthcare Social Networks:  New Choices for Doctors, Patients http://ubm.io/1GkeHU3
A review of social networks for the medical community.

Social Media on HHS.gov http://1.usa.gov/1GkeQXq
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ guidelines on social media usage.

3 Keys to Digital Marketing in Healthcare http://bit.ly/1GkeSih
Digital marketing insights from marketing software provider Hubspot.