5 Steps To Successfully Marketing A Medical Practice
Written by Aaron Buch, CEO & Founder of Patients.com
Step I
Become Promotable
“This first step we take with our clients is making sure we set up a practice that is promotable online. Many practices may believe they are promotable and are not. This is something we see all the time. You cannot throw thousands of dollars at Google Ads/Facebook Ads and have it perform well when initial steps have been skipped or overlooked. We don’t put the cart in front of the horse.” – Founder, Aaron Buch
We must ensure sure that when patients find your practice, they find a great, memorable brand that is rich with unique content, missions, and information to help them to make a decision to visit your group specifically.
So, ask yourself this…
Does your practice really have a solid brand, logo, website, and identity that deserves promoting? Or, are you “Orthopedic Specialists of ______” or ” {Insert Town} + {Insert Specialty} ” with a mediocre website that looks like the rest with nothing memorable and no unique content?
Developing a brand is an important part of getting new patients to remember your practice as they travel through the patient funnel of choosing a practice. Short of being in practice for a very long time and enjoying some great domain authority and search engine rankings, it may be time to consider either re-branding your practice or refreshing your current practice name with all new positioning. This includes aspects like establishing clear missions and values and bringing them into the design, creative and outward appearance (position) of your practice. This is something we have specialized in for nearly two decades.
You will work directly with our brand development team to establish your goals and execute the best strategy to continuously connect your practices with new ideal patients.
Step II
Modernize Communication & Prep For Patient Volume Increase
“In Step 2, we are getting our clients organized, secured, compliant, and prepared to connect, triage, and manage upcoming patient lead volume. Numerous leads and no system to manage them will lead to failed marketing and declining practice. We don’t let that happen here.” – Founder, Aaron Buch
All website forms and patient messages sent from your website should be 100% secure and HIPAA-Compliant. This is a serious and expensive mistake to make, and we see it far too often. Once the forms are secure, we need to route them into one secure online portal so that your reception team can comment, organize, and most importantly never lose a patient lead to disorganization or lack of proper software. Give your front desk the tools they need. Our PracticeMessages platform makes triaging and organizing patient messages and leads effortlessly. This step is critical for revenue! If your office is either missing or taking too long to call back (for example) 4-5 patients per week that could be as many as 250+ patients per year. If only 10% were going to move forward with a service/procedure, that is still 25+ procedures and depending on specialty thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.
While using services like our PracticeMessages, our staff will help train your front of practice staff with best practices for patient communication to help increase the number of patients that actually book appointments.
Once your practice brand is optimized, and you have an organized and secure system for patient leads, the next step is to ensure that patients can actually find you during their decision-making process. This is a critical point, patients will research your group multiple times (7-10 on average) before calling to book an appointment or filling out an online request. This means that patients will be interacting with search engines from multiple devices using several platforms.
Our Practice Reputation Management Technology will quickly get your practice’s entire online presence in order and ready for patient traffic. It is imperative that your directories (Google My Business, Healthgrades, Vitals, RateMD’s, etc are all in excellent working order, rich with photos, perfect information, and everything in between. Anything short of this can lead to missed opportunities, which we won’t tolerate when ad dollars are at play!
Step III
Targeted Marketing & Patient Reputation Automation
In Step III, we employ a wide range of digital and traditional marketing efforts to connect your practice to ideal patients that fulfill your practice’s goals. We use a variety of platforms, all of which we are high-level partners like Google, Facebook, RateMDs, etc. Beyond advertising, there is also a multitude of local, on and off-page SEO tactics we employ to get your practice noticed by qualified patients.
We also activate our PracticeReviews technology, which is a critical part of keeping your marketing cost under control by increasing your click-through rates and chances of conversions. Our platform includes an EHR-integrated fully automated system which increases and controls your reviews effortlessly.
We also offer a wide range of creative services including landing page web development testing, graphic design, video production, and more.
Step IV
Lead Nurturing & Automated Follow-Ups
What happens after your practice receives a lead? Most practices do very little. Our PracticeDash technology is an incredibly powerful and fully customizable Patient Relationship Manager that increases new bookings and boosts profits by automating custom potential-patient follow-up communications through text, email, phone calls, and more to move from a lead to a patient.
Step V
Analysis, Volumes & ROI Tracking
Once we finish building your practice this well-oiled machine to generate qualified patients, we then create ongoing easy to understand reports with our online dashboard to provide your practice with proprietary information on what is happening in your within your specific specialty and geographical area. Each month is an amazing learning opportunity to analyze new data which we consistently use to make key marketing decisions in an effort to always improve results for your specific practice goals.
Whatever Stage You’re In, We Can Help
Setup a No-Cost Call or Demo with one of our specialty marketing teams.