Today the healthcare environment has become more of a marketplace, and in order for your medical practice to beat out the competition and increase patient volume, you must begin to use effective medical practice marketing strategies to grow your practice. More and more people turn to the internet today to find health-related information, including information on physicians, and most parents are going to do their research before they bring a child into your practice. Exceptional patient care and clinical expertise are both essential for keeping patients, but you’ll need to learn medical practice marketing tips in the changing healthcare landscape if you want to increase patient volume.
Here are several tips your practice can use to reach your audience and bring more patients in the door.
1. Make Sure You Have a Simple, User-Friendly Website
Since most parents will go online to check out a medical practice before they go and see the doctor, it’s important to make sure you have a simple, user-friendly website in place. You don’t need anything fancy or huge, but you do need to have an online presence so current and future patients and families can find you. Many different online services make it easy for you to create a simple, customized website, or you may even be able to work with your current EHR vendor to create the perfect website. Easy navigation, providing answers to common questions, and adding patient/parent testimonials can all make your websites more attractive to parents checking out your practice.
2. Optimize That Website to Make It Easy to Find on Search Engines
Once you have a good website in place, it’s important to optimize your website to make it easy to find in the search engines. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) involves take steps to improve your rankings in online searches. Small additions to your site like adding your medical practice’s address to site pages can improve rankings. Adding new content optimized with important keywords that potential patients use to search can also boost rankings in the search engines, making it easier for people to find you. Focus on local SEO is also important, since your practice likely services a specific area. Adding local keywords to your website can make your site pop up when people do local searches for your specialty medical practices, ensuring that you get your website in front of locals looking for medical services.
3. Begin a Blog on Your Website
Start offering your patient families information they can use and they’ll begin engaging with your website regularly, which is why it’s a great idea to begin a blog to help market your practice. With a regularly updated blog, you can address the interests and needs of your patient family audience, which helps you build your practice’s brand. Blog posts help build trust with current and prospective patient families, and regular new content on your website improves your visibility online as well.
4. Offer an Email Newsletter
Work on gathering the email addresses for patient families, with their permission, and add an email capture form on your website to capture the email addresses of prospective patient families. Then you can create and send out an email newsletter offering office updates, linking to blog posts, and notifying them of updates to your website. Regular email newsletters ensure that your practice is in the forefront of patient families’ minds, and it can also ensure that prospective patient families remember that your medical practice is there to serve them when they’re ready to make a decision.
5. Create an Online Profile for Online Healthcare Marketplaces
Millennial parents spend a lot of time searching for health information on the web, so you need to make sure that your medical practice builds a good online profile on online healthcare marketplaces, such as ZocDoc and Healthgrades. This allows you to link to your website, show patient reviews, and allows you to keep practice information current as well. Word-of-mouth through current patient families is a very powerful marketing tool, so having positive reviews can show prospective patient families how your practice is perceived by others.
6. Look at Your Competition’s Marketing Practices
Take a look at the most successful medical practices and pay attention to what marketing practices they use. Talk to other specialists in your field and ask if they’ve found any marketing practices that work particularly well for them. Spend some time looking at the websites of other medical practices to see what things they may be doing differently. You can learn a lot from looking at your competition and seeing what marketing practices are providing them with great results.
7. Go Social
You can’t really escape social media today if you want to compete in the current healthcare marketplace. Millions of people use Facebook, and you want to grab your own slice of that audience for your medical practice. Create a professional Facebook page for your practice so you can share important content with your online audience. Posting helpful health tips, practice news, and medical health information can keep you fresh in the mind of current and prospective patient families. Instagram and Twitter are other social media sites that can also be leveraged to stay in touch with current patient families and reach out to prospective families to bring more patients in your door.
Related Article: 10 Ways to Improve Medical Practice Profitability
All of these tips are important, but they will need to be used in a sustained, organized way if you want to see more patient volume for your medical practice. Marketing in a changing healthcare marketplace isn’t a one-time thing, it takes consistent effort on your part. Bringing in more patients can help you improve your practice’s profitability. Increasing reimbursements with improved medical billing and coding can also help you improve profits for your medical practice.
Here is step-by step guide on how you can start marketing locally with Google and other search engines. To learn more about how we can help you in marketing your medical practice, call us today at 770-666-0470 for more information.
{{cta(‘6523d9cb-b3a1-473c-a2d4-8e190678ea6e’,’justifycenter’)}}