Internet marketing lets you place your medical practice right in front of potential patients. They go looking for a doctor and your practice pops up at the top of the search engine results. Or, so you hope. Simple mistakes in your medical practice marketing can have significant impacts on your results.
Your website is the cornerstone of your medical practice marketing. A clean, professional website conveys the message that you are a serious medical practitioner here to help your patients.
When your website isn’t clean and professional, it conveys other messages. For example, if your website is out-of-date, it tells patients you don’t keep up with the latest information in your specialty. If the website is unattractive, it tells patients you don’t care or have pride in how you present yourself.
A clean, simple website that’s kept up to date is one of the most powerful internet marketing tools you can use.
It’s so easy to invest money in to a website design, then save money by keeping the same design for several years. If your website isn’t mobile friendly, you may be losing money instead of saving it.
According to Statista, over 52% of web internet traffic is mobile. If your website isn’t mobile friendly, many smart device users will go elsewhere within seconds. Those people are potential patients for your practice.
Bring up your practice website on your smart phone. Does it look good? Does it function properly on the smaller screen? If not, you need an overhaul.
Modern medical practice marketing requires an active social media presence. Your target audience uses social media for personal interactions and to make connections with businesses. Your practice is a business. That’s why you need to put your practice on social media and keep it active.
Create a business page on Facebook. Create blog posts and post blurbs on Twitter. Keep track of your practice’s “story” by posting to Instagram.
Once you get active on social media, the next step is to make it a two-way conversation. If a patient comments on one of your social media channels, respond. For example, a patient says “Thanks, Dr. Jones! Feeling much better.” You respond “Good to hear that, Jennifer!”. A simple interaction reinforces the fact that you care and that you treat each patient as an individual.
This is one of the biggest mistakes in medical practice marketing. Let’s face it. Marketing of any kind can get expensive. You don’t want to pour a lot of money into a marketing campaign and find it was a waste of money.
Tracking your marketing ROI shows you which marketing strategies are most effective and which ones are failures. You can see direct evidence of how each strategy performed. This makes it much easier to make smart marketing decisions and to get the most out of every dollar you spend.
Potential patients will look at online reviews of your practice. That’s a given in today’s consumer driven market. They want to know what kind of doctor you are, how you treat your patients, and how well your practice is run.
Patients who have a negative experience are far more likely to make an online review than those with a positive experience. So, you could easily end up with several negative reviews even though you have hundreds of very satisfied patients.
The best way to handle reviews is to address them directly. Most sites that allow patient reviews allow for the practice to respond. For positive reviews, thank them and tell them you are looking forward to their next visit. For negative reviews, apologize for their experience and ask them to call your office manager to see if there’s any way to make amends. To counter those negative reviews, ask your happy patients to leave reviews.
Best Edge Medical Marketing is a medical marketing agency that provides marketing, SEO, design, and development services to businesses in the medical industry.
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