When competition is heavy, a medical practice needs all of the web traffic that it can get. You’ve got a staff to pay and expenses to cover — your office needs to remain as busy as possible every day. More people are looking for local businesses like online medical practices, so online medical digital marketing is the perfect way to retain new patients at the most affordable prices possible. With a little creativity, you can find countless ways to market your medical practice online. Here are some of our favorite medical digital marketing best practices.
1. Social Media
Being active on social media is a great way to promote your medical practice to your existing patients. Use Facebook and Twitter feeds during your practice to let patients know about new services you offer, remind them it’s time for a flu shot, and share healthier lifestyle tips. If your followers find your post useful, they’ll share your content with their friends. Keeping your practice at the top of existing patients’ minds is also an excellent way to keep your office busy when you aren’t getting a lot of new patients.
2. Community Outreach
Sponsoring a community event like jogging for heart health is a great way to promote your health and raise awareness of general health issues. When you sponsor a community event, contact all of your local newspapers. You can also submit a press release online. This event will generate many new inbound links to your site. Over time, the links can increase your site’s ranking in the search engines.
3. Business Directories
Does your medical practice appear high on Google’s results pages for local keywords? Otherwise, you may need to add online pages that mention your address and make your practice more relevant to local searches. The best way to increase your number of local citations is by claiming your practice’s profiles on local business directories and ensuring that each profile correctly displays your office’s name, address, and phone number. The accuracy of the business listings on Yelp and Google are of particular importance.
4. Website Content
Website content is one of the most powerful marketing tools that your medical practice has. Every time you publish an article on your website, you create the chance that your website will appear among Google’s search results for that article’s target keyword. If you fill your website with genuinely useful information, it’s inevitable that your traffic will increase — and every website visitor gives your practice a chance to potentially earn a new patient. If you aren’t sure what to write about, you can start by describing some of the services that your medical practice offers. Explain the benefits of the services that you provide, and describe what your patients can expect when they come in to have those services performed.
5. Search Engine Advertising
In spite of your best efforts to create compelling content that website visitors love, your medical practice can’t possibly rank first on Google for all of its target keyword phrases. Advertising can help to make up any shortfalls in your search engine optimization efforts and ensure that your website has a chance to appear in the featured areas — for a price — on the results pages for your most important keywords. Although Google is the most popular search engine, Bing and Yahoo also have keyword-based advertising features. With search engine advertising, you pay only when people click your advertisements — so search engine advertising can be a very affordable way to attract new patients to your medical practice.
6. Retargeting
Some of the people who visit your medical practice’s website won’t call for appointments immediately. Some may only be looking for general information. Others are still considering their options and aren’t ready to commit to a doctor yet. If people are interested enough in your practice to visit your website, though, they may ultimately become patients with a little coaxing on your part. Retargeting is an advertising system that follows people on the web after they’ve visited your website. After a person visits your website and leaves, he’ll see advertisements for your medical practice when he visits other websites on the same retargeting network.
7. Guest Blogging
Are you having trouble coming up with new blog topics for your own website? Try writing for someone else’s website instead. Health websites, newspapers and other publishers love to accept guest posts from doctors. A doctor’s words are always authoritative, and content from a doctor enhances the publisher’s reputation. The fact that you’re a doctor can also help you get your content published on websites that might not accept guest content from ordinary writers. When you write guest content, pitch it to high-value websites with large audiences. Don’t forget to ask for a link to your website in exchange for providing free content. If the publisher has a large audience, your content will likely generate plenty of clicks. A high-quality link to your website can also improve your search engine rankings over time.
8. Live Events
Hosting a live event can be a great way to increase website traffic and generate excitement for your practice. If your practice already has a Facebook page, using Facebook as a streaming platform is an easy way to get people to attend your event. You can also use Facebook’s advertising features to let people know that you have an event coming up. If you’re not on Facebook – or don’t want to use it to broadcast your event – you can also use YouTube as a streaming platform. You could host an event to discuss how to live with – or avoid – chronic illness. You can discuss how to avoid the flu during flu season. You can even organize a joint event with other local doctors where you discuss important current medical issues.
9. Answer Questions Online
People go online every day to ask medical questions on sites like LinkedIn, and Yahoo Answer. Most of the feedback they get is not authoritative. As a doctor, you have the opportunity to join Q&A sites and give authoritative answers that help people. You can also link to your website when providing answers on Q&A sites. While the links you get from your answers won’t do much to improve your site’s ranking in search engines, they will generate a constant stream of clicks from people read your answer and want to learn more about your practice. If you regularly answer questions online, the traffic you get from your answers can eventually become significant.
10. Video Marketing
Google gives particular priority to YouTube on the search results pages. People love videos because they provide quick access to information – and YouTube provides advertising revenue for Google, so Google loves YouTube. Take advantage of the popularity of YouTube by uploading informative videos. You don’t need a big budget to create a video; Your smartphone probably has a pretty good camera. However, consider purchasing a microphone to improve audio clarity. If you’re not sure what your video is about, check out your blog posts for inspiration. You can also summarize the content you have posted on Q&A sites. Your videos will help promote your medical practice and drive traffic to your website. Video marketing can also help you rank on Google for highly competitive keywords.
11. Email Marketing
If you’ve never experienced email marketing before, it’s easy to get started by training yourself and your staff in our software and using our customer support portal to send out your monthly promotions. If you are an existing MYSense customer and have not submitted your patient database to us, contact us so we can get started! For email marketing to be successful, you need to add forms to your website that invite visitors to join your mailing list. However, your existing patients won’t want to see the same content as non-patients, so you will need to segment your email list for the best possible results.
Get Help With Your Medical Digital Marketing Now
As the leading provider of medical digital marketing and website development services for the medical community, MYSense Digital Marketing, we are happy to provide you with information that you can use to increase your website traffic and generate new business. However, effective online marketing can easily use up all the time you have – and more. If you are feeling overwhelmed, contact us now for assistance with your online marketing efforts.
