Website Design
Your medical practice should have a website, as it’s difficult to execute any digital marketing strategies without one. However, having any website isn’t enough to build a solid marketing strategy on. It needs to be easy to navigate, attractive, and fast.
Specifically, patients expect their physician to have a slick website with a design that makes it easy to:
- Quickly find what they need
- Scan through important content
- Enjoy the browsing experience
As website design strongly impacts the user experience, it has a waterfall impact on all of the other marketing strategies you execute.
At Stodzy, we offer web design services for medical practices, and here is one of our many examples.
Search Engine Optimization
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the staple physician marketing services at Stodzy. Essentially, it helps you rank in search engines for all of the keywords your potential patients are searching for, such as “eye doctor near me.”
SEO usually takes about 6-18 months to start showing an ROI. However, once you’ve invested in it consistently for a period of time, the results will begin to compound. For this reason, SEO is a physician marketing strategy we encourage all of our clients to double down on.
The first step we take is to optimize for local search. This will help you show up in the map pack and the local listings as seen below:
To show up as one of these resources, you have to set up a Google My Business account. Then, fill out your business name, address, and phone number. Google will send a card to your physical address to confirm that you are indeed a local business. From there, you will have the opportunity to show up in the local search results.
However, filling out the card doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll automatically appear in the search results. This is where you may want a specialist to step in to further optimize your website.
Optimizing Your Website
First, we build local links (citations) by filling out a profile for your medical practice in relevant directories like Yelp. Citations, along with a high volume of positive patient reviews, will likely have the biggest impact on your local SEO.
However, ranking for local search terms is only half of search engine optimization. We also help physicians rank their company for service keywords like “inpatient addiction treatment” and “detox specialists.”
To do this, we perform a combination of on-page and off-page SEO.
On-page SEO consists of:
- Optimizing title tags and meta descriptions
- Performing keyword research
- Improving website structure/technical performance
Off-page SEO consists of:
- Link building campaigns with other medical groups
- Building trust with primary care providers and other potential
Combined with content marketing, we’ve helped clients achieve tremendous results.
For example, Sober Nation came to us in 2016, and we have helped them grow from less than 3,000 monthly visitors to over 55,000 organic monthly visitors. Ahrefs also estimates that the organic traffic they earn for free each month is worth about $279,000 (every month!)
If you’re debating between various physician marketing services, SEO should be at the top of your list. Its compounding effect will help you generate long-term growth.
You can call our team today to learn more about our approach to marketing for physicians and how we can help your company achieve similar results.
Content Marketing
Content marketing is another underrated physician marketing service that most doctors overlook. However, it’s essential if you want your practice to grow into a full-fledged brand.
If you think of major brands with excellent healthcare marketing strategies, WebMD and Mayo Clinic probably come to mind. So why do WebMD and Mayo Clinic come to mind? Well, they appear for virtually every medical ailment you search.
However, they only appear on Google for your medical ailment searches because they’ve written guides on them.
These informative guides are the essence of content marketing.
Therefore, even if you don’t want to build a brand as big as WebMD or the Mayo Clinic, content marketing is an effective way to put your brand in front of a patient while they are still doing research.
When it comes time to choose a physician, they will already be familiar with your brand and see you as an industry leader.
Answering Questions Through Content Marketing
For example, if you are an eye doctor, it would make sense to write a blog post about early questions like, “why is my vision fuzzy in one eye?”
If someone is suffering from fuzzy vision in one eye and reads a blog post that contains a solution to that issue, it makes sense that they would call your practice and become a new patient.
However, the key to effective content marketing is to ensure each post written addresses a pain point your clients face. For example, if you are an eye doctor, it might be tempting to write about topics like “Ways to Reduce Digital Eyestrain.”
After all, it is directly related to the solutions you offer. However, plenty of people searching “reduce digital eyestrain” aren’t immediately looking to make an appointment with a physician. Many of them may be tired office workers that are looking for solutions to make their workday easier.
To find keywords that new patients might search, list out some of the most commonly asked questions in consultations. Specifically, what words do new patients use to describe their ailments? For example, do they say their vision is fuzzy or foggy? How do they describe their initial symptoms?
From there, you can create content around those keywords and track conversions in Google Analytics. Google Analytics will measure the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.
Call Tracking for Physicians
At Stodzy, we set up call tracking software. Call tracking shows exactly how many leads we generate from our SEO and content marketing efforts combined. While ranking for service pages such as “cataract surgery” helps with patient acquisition efforts, content marketing is designed to put your brand in front of potential patients on their initial search. For example, a potential patient might Google “how do I know if I have cataracts?”.
We’ve executed content marketing services for dozens of clients. In addition to the Sober Nation example above, we helped brands like Detox Local grow its organic traffic to over a valuation of over $100,000.
Paid Advertising
Pay per click advertising is another popular marketing service that is ideal for physicians that need quick results. Unlike SEO and content marketing, this service provides relatively fast results, though those results will just as quickly stop when you turn off the ads.
Nonetheless, we use paid advertising for physicians who need to kickstart their marketing and immediately acquire new patients. You can see all of the paid advertising services we offer here.
So, where should you advertise online?
Google AdWords and Facebook are the two most common patient acquisition channels we use for clients as they have proven most effective at reaching healthcare patients.
Retargeting campaigns are also a staple in our physician marketing strategies as customers already familiar with your brand are much more likely to convert.
When we begin a paid advertising campaign, we first analyze what’s working for your competition. To do this, we look at the ad creatives and offers your competition is running in tools like the Facebook Ad Library as well as which keywords they are targeting in tools like Ahrefs.
Using these two tools, we can minimize the time it takes to find a paid ads strategy that works for you and generate a faster ROI.
If you’d like to discuss your current PPC strategy with one of our experts, feel free to schedule a call and our physician marketing experts can help you find new opportunities.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is often thought of as one of the older marketing services and shunted to the side for the newest marketing services like chatbots.
While most email marketing engagement rates are relatively low, we’ve found ways to not only make the channel profitable but even make it one of the most valuable physician marketing services available.
While some rules can be broken, we’ve found that the most successful email marketing strategies tend to:
- Send 1-3 emails per week but no more than three times weekly and no less than twice a month
- Sell in 50% or less of your emails
- Actively scrub lists and remove unengaged members
The problem with most email marketing campaigns is that they don’t contain information that solves the patient’s pain points.
For example, they may give them weekly updates about new staff or other events at the clinic, but most of that information isn’t directly helping patients solve or learn more about their pain points.
To fix this, we first start by looking at your current engagement rates (open rates, CTR, unsubscribe, etc.) as well as conversions from email. From there, we’ll survey your audience to figure out what information your customers want to read.
Armed with this information, we’ll test various styles of emails, titles, and formats until we find something that works.
While email marketing may have a reputation for being an archaic marketing strategy, it can still yield a surprising ROI if you put the time into testing and consistency.
Social Media
Social media is another physician marketing service that can be a great patient acquisition and branding strategy.
There’s no denying that social media has astounding attention, and plenty of statistics show social media directly impacts patient’s healthcare decisions.
The only drawback about social media is that it targets passive viewers rather than people actively seeking your services (as content marketing and SEO do).
Therefore, this physician marketing service is probably only a good idea if you already have solid content marketing and SEO.
However, if you already have your content marketing and SEO in a good place, social media is a great way to generate additional brand awareness.
Building Brand Awareness
The key to creating a successful healthcare social account is to make each post personable and, well, social!
For example, rather than just posting educational content, post patient stories and even stories from your staff. In fact, many of the most shared social media posts are related to a patient’s health battle and how they overcame it. Not only do posts like this generate brand awareness, but it also positions your brand as a provider of world-class medical treatment.
Baylor Healthcare has an excellent example of this.
In addition to creating posts for your brand, you can also leverage social media. This is an excellent platform for influencer marketing collaborations. While you may envision partnering with Instagram celebrities, we’ve found that collaborating with micro-influencers in the health space can have massive results.
For example, if you run a fertility clinic, you could do a partnership with a micro-influencer mom-to-be. You can also look at your current list of patients and see if any of them have a following. If so, you might offer free services in exchange for a few posts.
Healthcare Questions for Social Media
Social media is also a great way to genuinely connect with your audience and ask them questions. For example, look at how much engagement this post from Everyday Health has achieved:
The only word of caution with this is that your posts must remain HIPAA compliant.
Choosing The Best Marketing Services For Your Practice
Every year there are hundreds of new marketing tactics and strategies. It can be difficult to choose the right one for your business.
While jumping on a new trend can be beneficial, we’ve found that running different campaigns and trying new marketing tactics every month doesn’t provide the same results as steady, consistent work.
For that reason, these are the six physician marketing services we prioritize and consistently practice. All the while, we sprinkle in a few experiments here and there with new strategies.
If you want a medical marketing agency with years of industry experience to do your marketing for you, set up a call. We would be happy to look at your current marketing strategy and explore opportunities with your team.