Is your digital marketing strategy attracting new patients to your clinic?
As a healthcare provider, new patients are the lifeblood of your business. But with an abundance of medical practices available, patients today have more choice than ever before. In a crowded and competitive market, how do you attract new patients to your practice?
A successful patient acquisition strategy starts with your online presence. While we all know that Google is no replacement for a medical professional, many people find it the perfect place to start when it comes to researching and choosing healthcare practitioners. With so many potential patients heading straight for the web, it’s crucial that your marketing efforts are up to the cut.
Let’s run through the top 20 ways you can start attracting patients online today.
20 Effective Strategies to Increase Patient Flow
1. Get to Know Your Target Audience
Do you know who your ideal patients are? Chances are you already have some idea of your target specific demographics, either from your existing patients or from the services you offer but digging deeper into factors like age, gender, profession, location and lifestyle can provide you with invaluable information to work from. Once you can identify exactly who you are trying to attract, you can customise your marketing efforts and online presence to their specific healthcare needs.
2. Know Your Business
With so many healthcare professionals for new patients to choose from, it’s vital that your practice offers something the others don’t. What sets you apart? Maybe it’s your extensive knowledge and experience, your family friendly approach or your holistic treatment philosophy. Highlighting what makes you special will not only help you to stand out from the crowd, it can help patients start to connect to your practice, building trust and confidence in your services.
3. Research Your Competitors
Knowing who the local competition are, and their strategies to attract patients has multiple benefits. Firstly, it’s always a good idea to have your finger on the pulse, keeping in touch with your local industry as a whole. This allows you to gauge the market, identify your strengths and weaknesses (as well as those of your competition) and identify any gaps in local services that you may be able to fill. Finally, your competitors are a great source of inspiration for your own marketing efforts. Seeing what they are offering, how they are promoting themselves and how successful their digital marketing strategies are allows you to analyse and enhance your own.
4. Build a Well Designed Website
Your practice website is your online home base. While you can build a strong online presence through avenues such as social media, a website gives you far more control and flexibility over how you market your business. Your website is also likely to be your patients’ final point of contact (and often, their first point as well) which gives you the opportunity to make a strong impression.
Tips to remember when designing your clinic website include:
- Make sure your website is responsive and mobile friendly – busy people will often search for and book appointments on the go
- Prioritise user experience – make sure the information your potential patients are looking for is well presented and easy to find
- Use strong CTA (call to action elements) to direct users to your bookings page
5. Increase Your Online Visibility
One of the most important factors in attracting more patients to your medical practice is making sure they can find you in the first place. The most common place for most people to start their search for a healthcare service is with search engines so investing in healthcare SEO (search engine optimisation) ensures that your practice website appears at the top of the search results, ready for new patients to discover you. Follow SEO best practices and research relevant keywords related to your audience’s search intent and incorporate them into the content. Some long-tail keywords can be easier to rank for than other more common competitive terms.
6. Introduce your Team
People connect to people. Your new patients are not just looking for a service, they are looking for someone they can trust and work with to resolve their health concerns. Showcasing your team on your website gives you the opportunity to start to introduce yourselves, highlight your qualifications and experience and put faces to names, building strong relationships that extend not only into new bookings but also into ongoing patient care.
7. Provide Helpful Content
As a healthcare professional, one of your main goals is to help your patients better understand and manage their health related issues. Providing helpful and informative content on your website allows you to start to build that relationship before a person even books an appointment. By demonstrating your knowledge and clearly defining your services and how you work, you build trust, which ultimately leads to new patient bookings. Helpful content should answer all the questions your patients may have, removing any barriers to them booking with you.
8. Write a Blog
Blogging is a great way to capture the attention of those searching for help or information on a healthcare issue who may still be in the research stage. By offering health tips or providing educational content, you set yourself up as a resource that someone will come back to when they are ready to seek help from a healthcare professional.
Blogging is also a great way to build your authority in the eyes of your readers and has the added benefit of also increasing your online authority, which is an important factor in building a robust online presence.
9. Stand Out in Local Search Results
With customers being 70% more likely to visit businesses with a Google Business profile, your listing is clearly a powerful tool for improving your business’ credibility and attracting new patients online. Positive reviews in your GBP will build trust and drive new patient conversions for your business.
There’s also the added benefit that GBP accounts support strong local SEO, improving your presence in local searches, and making you more visible online.
10. Make Use of Advertising Platforms
GoogleAds campaigns can deliver some powerful results for healthcare clinics; significantly increasing bookings and providing a surge in new patient numbers as well as improving brand awareness. Google Ads provides a fast, flexible option for converting customers quickly – with almost instant results in acquiring impressions and clicks.
Paid social media marketing can also help you target a very specific target audience, increasing your online visibility to potential patients even when they may not be actively searching for medical services.
11. Create A New Patient Offer
Special offers are a great way to attract new patients. If you’re prepared to use one, your offer should be comparable with your competitors and it needs to stand out. Think about ways you can offer more value to entice new users to book an initial appointment. Discounted services for a first session are a common form of new patient offer but you may also consider add on benefits like offering an additional service or resource. Leveraging your existing patient base through a patient referral program is also a very strong strategy for generating word of mouth referrals.
12. Maintain an Active Social Media Presence
Social media platforms are a valuable tool for connecting with potential patients, whether you’re a physiotherapist, a dentist, or a podiatrist. You can leverage your social media presence to maximise its potential for attracting new patients by posting shareable content, photos and videos, commenting and liking or retweeting your follower’s posts, and following or adding patients on social media. Other ways to leverage your social media include responding to tweets and posts to/about your business and connecting with other professionals in your field or local area.
13. Add Listings to Online Directories
With over 70% of people using local listings in online directories, such as Health Engine, Yelp and White Pages, when searching for healthcare practitioners, listing your practice in an online local directory is a great way to drive targeted traffic to your website and increase new patient numbers. Online directories also help to establish your local presence, assisting with local SEO.
14. Build an Online Reputation with Reviews
Research from Think with Google shows that 88% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations. Generating positive patient reviews on your Google Business Profile, social media accounts and online health listings is a very effective method of promoting your business online and giving potential patients the confidence to book with you.
15. Provide Excellent Customer Service
You may think providing excellent customer service is only relevant once a patient steps foot in your clinic, but a positive patient experience actually starts much earlier than this. Make sure your website displays clear contact information and that you respond to all emails, phone calls and enquiries promptly.
Extending the same service to your existing patients consistently throughout their journey with you means they then become promoters of your business, generating patient referrals via their positive testimonies and recommendations.
16. Use Email Marketing
Email marketing allows you to connect with your patients on a more direct and personalised level, making them an effective and cost efficient way of promoting your practice. The key to successful email marketing is providing value – for every sales email you send, you should also send 2-3 resource based emails. Email marketing can also be used to manage appointments, remind patients of checkups or update them on new offers or services.
17. Connect with the Community
Connecting with your local community through social media channels, events and organisations to will give you the opportunity to inform and educate, as well as expand your access to potential patients. Consider hosting a seminar for kids on how to care for their health and hygiene at the local school or kindergarten or start a community running group to encourage people to invest in their health. People will benefit from the opportunity to connect and learn, but it will also keep you top of mind next time they’re looking for healthcare providers.
18. Make it Easy with Online Bookings
Providing online bookings is a sure-fire way to attract new patients. It provides busy people with an immediate, quick, convenient way to book an appointment, without the hassle of a phone call. Most third party practice management systems will allow for integration of online bookings via your website which also streamlines your internal processes, making it a win-win situation for any health professional.
19. Analyse and Adapt
A great marketing strategy needs to be flexible so it can adjust and expand in response to performance and to new trends. The first step in keeping your website fresh and on the ball is to gather data on how it is currently performing and identify areas for improvement.
Analyse and track the behaviour of your website visitors, including the number of visitors to your site, the number of new visitors vs returning visitors, the length of visits, how people find your site, and what pages they view on your site and for how long. The bounce rate will inform you of the percentage of visitors that leave your website soon after visiting a single page on your site.
You can use this information to test different pages and find out what works and what doesn’t, use referral statistics to know where your traffic is coming from, and see what search words people are using to find you organically so that you can target these keywords through other marketing channels such as SEO.
20. Engage a Professional Marketing Company
Healthcare marketing is a complex and multi factored industry. As an active practitioner you may find that the time to research, understand, execute and maintain a successful digital marketing strategy is just too much to add to your existing workload. Outsourcing to a professional marketing agency, particularly one that specialises in the healthcare industry means you have the peace of mind of letting an expert team take care of your marketing needs while you focus on your business.
Harnessing the power of digital marketing is essential for any medical practice aiming to thrive in a competitive online landscape. If you’d like to find out more about how practiceedge can help you increase patient leads, book a free discovery call today.
