How to Effectively Market Your Healthcare Services

When people are searching for a healthcare practice near them, there are so many options that come up in the results. If you want someone to choose you, what are you doing to stand out from other practices in your local area? This is why having a plan for marketing your healthcare services is important.

Do you know what marketing strategies can be used for a healthcare service? If you want to increase your patient or client volume, actively working towards a great marketing strategy is essential. Investing in a solid healthcare marketing plan is what will set you apart from other businesses in your community.

5 Ways to Market Your Healthcare Practice

Whether potential patients or clients hear about your practice from online reviews, social media, or by simply doing a Google search, you want to be able to maximize your marketing efforts so they can find you through as many avenues as possible.

Here are our top 5 tips to help you improve your marketing service strategy.

1. Have a Responsive Website.

In order to create an optimal user experience for everyone that visits, your website needs to be responsive.

A responsive website is one that adapts to your visitor’s device whether it’s a smartphone, tablet, laptop, or desktop.

Your visitors should be able to read your content, see all of your media, and navigate through your entire site effortlessly because your website has certain settings in place that allow it to fit the screen on any device.

Characteristics like text size, picture resolution, or orientation will automatically change to adjust for someone who is viewing your website on their phone while on the go, or if they’re seated in front of a laptop. You want someone to stay on your website long enough to make it to your services page and see what you have to offer and in order to encourage them to stay, your site must adapt.

Don’t know if your website is responsive? Type in your website URL and try it out on multiple devices and see what your site looks like. Do you think users would look at your website and be interested in what you offer? If your site is not responsive, that can decrease your web traffic and conversion rate.

94 percent of people cited web design as the reason that they mistrusted or rejected a website. – TytonMedia

Having a website that is responsive can increase your ranking on Google and other search engines while also providing users with a site that is easy to navigate and schedule an appointment through.

2. Optimize Your Practice’s Website.

If you want to make it to the top of the search engine results pages (SERPs), your website must be optimized. There is more than one way that you can optimize your site for SEO. Some of the best ways include:

• Producing Valuable Content – Content for your website can be a blog post, a video, a podcast, an infographic, etc. As long as it is relevant or useful to your audience they will interact with it and search engines will recognize its importance.
• Increasing Page Speed – Be sure that your website loads in a timely manner. Most visitors expect to only wait 2 seconds for a website to load. So if your practice’s home page takes longer than this, there’s a high probability that they will exit your site.
• Conducting Keyword Research – The keywords that you select should be relevant to what people are searching for in your industry. For example, if you are an eye care professional, think of some keywords that involve eyeglasses or eye health that a patient would search for. Then, add content with those keyword phrases on your website in H2 headings, meta titles, and meta descriptions.
• Gaining Backlinks – The more backlinks you have, the better! If your website’s content is being cited or used as a resource on another website, this helps to direct more traffic to your site.
• Claiming Your Website on Google My Business – When you claim your website on Google, people can see your practice’s name, address, phone number, and hours. Google will officially recognize your site and you can begin to build yourself up as a trustworthy, authoritative figure.

3. Use PPC Advertisements for Healthcare Marketing.

Are you already utilizing pay-per-click ads? If so, great job! If not, hop to it! PPC ads help you to weed out people that you would not consider an ideal patient or client for your practice.

It’s important to actively work towards making your way to the top of the search results organically, but PPC ads help you appear above those organic positions.

Depending on what your budget is, you can choose what words you’re willing to pay for and have your website appear when someone searches for that phrase. If someone in your local area searches for keywords like “accident and injury chiropractic” and you’ve selected those words for your PPC ad, as long as they are within the parameters you’ve set in place, your ad will show up at the top of their page.

Just remember that when creating your ad, you should keep these things in mind:

• Shorter Ad Copy – Keep it short and sweet, but be sure that it captures the reader’s attention enough for them to head to your website. Your ad copy should give them a general idea of what to expect from your site and what you have to offer.
• Consider Mobile Users – Most of the people that come across your ad will see it on their mobile devices, which means that your PPC ad needs to be tailored to respond to smartphones as well.

Learn More: Creating PPC Ads to Attract Your Ideal Patients

4. Engage Through Social Media.

Most businesses are utilizing social media to engage with their audience and you should be too. Social media for healthcare professionals can be an excellent wait to communicate with your patients or clients in a less formal setting.

You can use social media to update your followers on events your practice is holding, partake in hashtag trends, answer health-related questions, and build a stronger social presence. Both younger and older people are present on social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, so you can reach a wide variety of people.

You should also take advantage of social media by posting your content there. Did you just publish a new blog post or finish creating an ebook? Post it on your social pages so your followers have the opportunity to interact with your content. The more engagement or views your content produces, the better for your online visibility.

Read More: 5 Benefits of Using Social Media for Healthcare Practices

5. Use Unique Branding and Practice Consistency.

One of the most important aspects of marketing your healthcare services is to remember that you are representing your brand. Who are you and what do you stand for as a company? You want patients or clients to see an image, an ad, or a piece of content and automatically know it’s your work because they are so familiar with your brand.

Branding should be unique to you and fit the idea of how you want to present yourself to ideal patients. What makes you different from other practices in your area and why should someone choose to schedule an appointment with you? Can you offer them services, quality customer service, or something else that they cannot get somewhere else?

Once you’ve determined the answer to these questions, be sure that this branding is consistent in every and all marketing materials so you’re easily recognizable.

Your Healthcare Marketing Strategy

Formulating a marketing plan that will achieve the goals that you want may take some time, but it’s not impossible! Designing a responsive website, optimizing for SEO, running PPC ads, engaging on social media, and being consistent with your branding can take your practice far.

Be purposeful in your approach with these marketing tactics and watch your business thrive!

What marketing strategies do you utilize in your healthcare practice?

If you want to take the first step in solidifying a reputable marketing strategy that will bring more patients or clients to you, contact us at 800.792.8384 or click here to discover the best digital marketing solution for you.