When you are a medical practice or a chiropractor or an acupuncture physician there is a different way that you need to market your practice partly because there are obviously some restrictions from a regulatory perspective in terms of what you can say but in addition it’s really it is the marketing of an individual expert and so you are your brand in the case of a multi physician practice then the practice in and of itself may have a brand but you’re also branding the individual physicians. The thing that’s really important with healthcare marketing is that when somebody comes to your website they need to see the resolution to the health problem that they’ve been struggling with so they may not know for example to Google your particular treatment modality because they may not know that that actually can be effective in their condition. What they know is their condition. They know if they have pain. They know if they have skin problems and they are looking for a resolution to those issues so making sure that you have content that’s very focused on resolution obviously without making promises that get you in trouble but you can certainly quote results that other patients have have had it’s a little different if you’re running Facebook ads they’re very very particular in terms of the language that you use with healthcare marketing but there are ways around that.
But making sure that that website converts is the most important thing once you’ve got that sound foundation then local SEO is it’s probably your next strategy because in a lot of cases patients are going to be searching for a doctor near them who can solve a particular health concern and so making sure that you show up on that google map if you think about the anatomy of a search the first section of the the search results is the AdWords which is your that’s a bidding platform where the higher your your bid and the the more closely tied to that particular keyword phrase is your ad then the higher you’ll appear and then that second section is the map and the map is populated through the more directory listings you have and not just on sites like WebMD but across the spectrum then the higher you’ll rank as long as you have strong reviews.
Google likes five-star reviews so make sure that your you know your asking your your patients if they can submit a review and there’s ways to do that also we work with a number of health care practitioners and help them to reach out to their patients on their behalf to ask for those reviews because sometimes it can feel a little bit awkward to do that yourself as a professional. So making sure that you’ve got strong reviews and that there’s strong social proof what Google is looking for in terms of returning those results so social proof comes from making sure that your publishing content out on social media that there’s a lot of engagement on social media with respect to what you’re posting and and that your you’re thinking about posting content elsewhere you know blogs on other sites for example that create those inbound links that can help you to rank higher.
But we do find that in terms of being able to move a health care practitioner up to the first page of Google that local search can be a really effective way to do that depending on the you know the budget that you may have for AdWords so AdWords is always regardless of pretty much regardless of your your specialty is going to be the strongest ROI in terms of a marketing strategy but it is not a cheap one, so you know you really need to be either all-in on AdWords or it’s probably not the best way to spend your money. You can you can get connections elsewhere.
So that’s very very important so really having the solid website the local SEO strategy optimizing the the website itself for organic search which is what’s referred to as on-page SEO as well as having a strong video strategy and good social media presence and depending on your specialty LinkedIn can also be really really effective. If you tend to get referrals from other doctors then connecting with those doctors online to make sure that they’re aware of your presence and seeing your professional content on LinkedIn is really important and you know we have a lot of health practitioners that we work with who are trying to migrate their practices from insurance to cash patients and so a lot of those cash patients are going to be the professionals who are hanging out on LinkedIn. So you want to be where they are and you want to be visible where they are. And there’s a number of health care practitioners number of doctors who’ve really become online social media influencers in their own right both in the content that they’re posting you know some of them on Instagram even and and really being known as the expert for a particular specialty.
So that’s really what you’re going after in health care marketing.
To do it all in is not a small undertaking but you could certainly staged your strategy in order to build your practice overtime to the to where you want it to be.