Healthcare Marketing: 10 Tips for Doctors to Attract More Patients

Marketing plays a crucial role in the success of any business, including a healthcare practice. No matter how good a doctor you are, if you fail to market your skills and expertise well, you are unlikely to attract new clients and be profitable.  Marketing has always been a challenge for healthcare professionals. If you are one of those doctors struggling to market your practice, read these 10 doctor marketing tips from FeedbackClarity.

1. Get Listed on Doctor Review Websites

Physician review websites have gained a lot of popularity in the past couple of decades. According to a report, nearly 60% of the interviewed patients admitted to choosing their doctor based on online reviews. Online reputation has never been so important as it is now. 

Why Are Reviews So Important?

Reviews are extremely important for your healthcare practice. They are proof of your credibility. Online reviews are among the top drivers of consumer trust. Patients feel more confident in calling a healthcare practice when they read many positive reviews online. 

When a patient reads positive reviews about a doctor, it gives them confidence that the doctor will be able to solve their problem. 

What Are Some Popular Doctor Review Websites?

From Google My Business and Yelp to ZocDoc, there are 10+ notable physician review websites on the internet. You can read more about doctor review websites here.

What About the Risk of Negative Reviews?

Many doctors stay away from review websites because of the fear of negative reviews. Poor feedback can be a problem. Fortunately, solutions like FeedbackClarity can take care of your healthcare practice’s online reputation end-to-end, including removing negative reviews. 

2. Create A Youtube Channel and Share Health Advice

Google ads, SEO, social media marketing, etc., are some marketing strategies that come to our minds when we think of healthcare marketing. Well, every digital marketer or a marketing agency pitch traditional marketing strategies. If you ask us, such campaigns may not give you better results due to the market congestion. You need to be creative and plan to do something else that not many of your competitors do. 

YouTube marketing is a creative technique that can build a strong brand for your healthcare practice and drive new customers. 

YouTube for Doctors: How to Make Most Out of the YouTube Platform

YouTube marketing sounds like a challenging, time-taking, and resource-consuming task. In reality, high-quality YouTube videos can be taken and edited easily with mobile phones. Do you know many YouTube influencers use their mobile phones to take videos?

What Do You Need to Get Started?

1. Equipment (A high-end phone or a professional camera, tripod, light, etc.)
2. A desktop or mobile video editing software (We recommend hiring a video editor to save time)
3. A keyword research tool such as Ubersuggest, Ahrefs, or SEMRush
4. A content/copy writer who can create video concepts based on keywords 
5. A virtual assistant who can help you in scheduling and uploading videos 

How to Get Started

Find keywords and questions related to your field of medicine that patients often use to search online. Create presentable concepts based on those keywords. The video concepts can be medical advice, general health advice, frequently asked questions, tips, etc. The only thing you need to remember is that they should be relevant to medical expertise. 

Use your phone camera or a professional camera and share the footage with a video editor and let them do the magic. Try to upload a couple of videos every week. Remember, YouTube has many features within its platform, such as description, category, tags, etc., to increase videos’ reach. 

3. Upgrade Your Website

You might have built your website several years ago. There has been a drastic change in web design trends to suit ever-changing consumer behavior. If your website was made a few years ago, you must seriously consider upgrading it. 

Here are the downsides of an outdated website:

1. Less visitor engagement and high bounce rates
2. Slow-loading web pages
3. Less visitor-to-lead conversion 
4. Less secure
5. Responsiveness and readability issues 

Check your competitors’ websites.  You are highly likely to find your most successful competitor has the best-looking and most sophisticated website. 

How to Get Started

Talk to your local web design companies and get quotes. Use freelance platforms like Upwork to get quotes and estimations. Talk to professionals, check their previous work, compare quotes, and go with one that you think offers the best value. 

Put Quality First

A website is the best investment any business owner can make. A great-looking medical website also leaves a positive impression on patients’ and prospects’ minds. 

Prefer WordPress

Build your new website on WordPress for optimum SEO results and blog functionality. WordPress has a built-in blog functionality that helps scale content marketing and SEO efforts. Building customer features and functionalities is easier and cheaper in WordPress than in custom websites. 

4. Create a Quora Profile and Be Active There

Content marketing plays a key role in a business’s organic growth. The importance of content marketing is much more important when it comes to a healthcare or medical business. 

While the term content marketing sounds like it involves a lot of effort, it can be as easy as sending an email or writing a social media post. 

Question and answers platform Quora is among the top platforms for content sharing. Millions worldwide post questions on Quora. Health has been a top topic since Quora’s inception. People post so many questions about symptoms, general health, surgeries, etc. 

How to Get Started on Quora

You need to create a Quora account and build a nice profile there. Enter all your profile details, including a professional-looking photo. Provide a link back to your website from your profile to generate referral traffic and leads. 

Browse the profiles of doctors on Quora who have a large number of followers and greater viewership. 

Answer as many questions as you can. Make sure to write clear and lengthy answers to get the top spot. Different states have different rules when it comes to sharing medical advice online. Please check your local laws to make sure you are not violating any. 

5. Leverage Online & Offline Press Releases

Press releases are a great way to be in touch with your community and let them know what’s with your healthcare practice. Whether you ace a complex surgery, got a certification, bought new equipment, opened a new location, addition of a new doctor, always let people know about your achievements. While offline public relations may not work for every business, the strategy will work for healthcare professionals. 

How to Get Started With PR

There are two points you need to consider mainly. What to share and how to release the PR? When it comes to drafting a press release, you can consider anything interesting or new that’s worth sharing with your community. We gave some examples in the paragraph above. Make sure to provide your healthcare practice’s contact information including your website link. 

The next step is finding a local PR agency or a syndication service that distributes your press releases on various offline and online publications. Keep in mind that a PR distribution should not cost more than a few hundred dollars. If you choose to distribute the press release strictly online, it should cost even lesser. 

6. Start Sending a Monthly Newsletter

A newsletter is a great way to keep in touch with your customers and engage them. Many healthcare practices overlook the importance of sending newsletters. Even doctors who spend thousands of dollars on digital marketing often tend to ignore newsletters. 

Here is How Newsletters Help Your Practice

• They keep your patients and prospects updated and engaged
• They build strong trust, credibility, and authority
• Newsletters help drive new leads
• They require less investment and time
• They increase the brand value of practice 

How to Get Started With Newsletters

You need to things to get started. One is a database of your patients and prospects. The other is a tool that can schedule and send emails. Send newsletters used to be a complex and cumbersome process once upon a time. Fortunately, many newsletter tools exist on the market that simplifies the process of sending newsletters.

(We featured Moonsend in our small business tools article. Moonsend is an online tool that helps business owners create, schedule, and send newsletters using a simple and intuitive user interface). 

Newsletters Best Practices

• Send newsletters once a month, on a specific day, every month
• Use little text and more graphics to increase readability and engagement
• Keep a track of metrics such as email open rate, bounce rate, etc. to optimize the campaign for better results
• Have a CTA in the email and encourage readers to click it
• Provide an unsubscribe link in the email to allow readers to unsubscribe without hassles 

7. Provide a Chat Option to Website Visitors

Most websites provide only two ways for website visitors to contact them. The two traditional methods are providing a form and displaying a phone number. Besides these two, you can install chat software on your website that lets visitors chat with your front desk executives. People who don’t like sharing their contact information right away can chat with your team first. You can also highlight the chat feature as a customer support option.

How to Implement a Chat on Your Website

You need to purchase chat software first and then need to hire a developer to install it on your site. Since the volume of chats will be low lo doctor websites, the investment will be low. You may even use free chat platforms such as LiveChat, Twak.to, etc.

What If You Don’t Have Human Resources to Take Chat?

If you don’t have employees to take customer chats, you can opt for chat software with AI bot features. The bots can chat with patients and offer them a solution. Alternatively, you may hire an inexpensive virtual assistant on Upwork or other freelancer platforms to take chats. 

8. Publish Blogs on Your Website

Nearly 80% of medical websites lack new blog posts on their websites. Blogs are the most powerful component of a content marketing strategy. They can drive thousands of target audiences to your website and generate hundreds of phone calls or leads. All you need to do is ensure that you publish at least two blogs a week on your website.

Use Keywords Related to Your Field of Medicine

Use keywords related to dentistry, dental problems, procedures, etc. if you are a dentist. You can find these keywords using tools such as Uberusggest, Ahrefs, SEMRush, etc. Note that these tools are premium and cost a couple of hundred dollars every month. We would not recommend buying them but hire a content strategy expert who can handle all these things for you. 

Blogs Add a Freshness Factor to Your Website

Google prefers websites that add fresh content in the form of blogs or pages over the sites that are static. If you have not added any new page to your website in the past few months, the chances are high that it ranks very low in search engines. Publishing blogs add a freshness factor to your website, boosting organic rankings of all website pages including the homepage. 

9. Solicit More Customer Reviews 

You got listed your healthcare business on leading doctor review websites. What’s next? The next thing is getting a lot of customer reviews on those business listings. More reviews automatically mean a better online reputation and trust. When people noticed your business has so much positive feedback, they are more likely to convert. 

Request Reviews from Your Happy Patients

Reach out to current or past patients who were happy with your treatment and request them to share their feedback on leading healthcare review platforms such as Google My Business, Yelp, ZocDoc, RateMDS.com, etc. Reach out to only those patients whom you think will give a five-star rating. 

Partner With an Online Reputation Management Agency

Driving more review positives can be very challenging for most doctors. It involves a lot of time, effort, persuasion, and money. Where do you think that most doctors get their reviews from? Definitely not by themselves! They work with an online reputation management solution like FeedbackClarity that can remove negative reviews, drive more positive reviews, and keep you informed about your reputation. 

10. Build a Strong Doctor Referral Network

Referrals have long been a major source of new patients for many doctors. When planned correctly, doctor referrals alone can drive hundreds of new patients to your clinic every year. Most doctors already have a referral network to a certain extent. If doctors can look at referrals from a marketing standpoint and dedicate some time, they sure can win big. 

Identify Potential Referrals 

Make a list of all healthcare providers in your area. You may take the help of your employees or hire a virtual assistant to do it. Remove your competitors from the list. Go through each and every healthcare practice and understand their services, values, etc. Make a list of doctors or clinics that can be ideal partners. Prefer to partner with clinics that have a great online presence and better patient flow. 

Amp Up Your Networking Game

Reach out to doctors personally and explain to them how you can be a great partner. Sometimes, it’s a better idea to talk to them personally or meet them physically over sending emails. Take advantage of local events that attract healthcare and medical professionals. You may also want to follow doctors on their social media profiles.