Menu
If you’re a small medical practice, you might be overwhelmed by the number of online marketing strategies available to you. Fortunately, online marketing is low-cost and easy to scale – so you can test different methods and see which ones work best for your practice. Some have proven to be better than the rest, however. The three strategies below, listed in order of impact, will help you promote your business and drive patients to your clinic. Here are the top three online marketing strategies for a small medical practice.
If you’re an established business in your area, patient referrals are among the best online marketing strategies to implement. The system has two parts: First, you need to promote your practice as an expert in your field by providing top-notch service and developing an excellent reputation. Second, when you do that well enough to get new patients rolling in, figure out how to handle their initial interest/concerns, so they keep coming back.
Content marketing is one of the best marketing strategies for a small medical practice. It is a great way to get in front of more people online looking for information or have a question. Publishing regular content about your service helps potential customers learn more about your business. Even if they don’t particularly need your assistance right now, they could later, or they might recommend you to a friend or family member.
The good thing about content marketing is that you will always have enough content to split up and use on social media without worrying about coming up with something to post. Additionally, publishing content regularly on your blog helps you become an authority online, which causes you to rank higher on search engines. Anytime you can get your brand in front of more people, you increase the likelihood of getting a referral.
Once you start using your blog to create content about your business, people will organically visit your website. Once you start getting visitors, you want them to take action before leaving. Having your viewers subscribe to an email lets you send them discounts, offers, or updates about your business. A simple email keeps your practice in the forefront of their minds, so you can get the referral when your viewers need your service. People who subscribe to your list might not always be local, so they won’t be able to use your service, but they might share your content on social media or other websites, which helps promote your business even more.
Vivid Insights & Marketing has worked with many businesses in the healthcare industry including small practices, to help with online marketing. We can help drive more patients to your doors.
Most owners of medical practices already know that an optimized website is critical to their online marketing efforts. But SEO can be challenging when you’re just starting, and without good SEO, online marketing can be a lot more expensive. Fortunately, there are several ways to work on your SEO if you don’t have a big marketing budget. Search engine optimization is the best long-term option out of the top 3 marketing strategies for a small medical practice. It can be a little more expensive, but it pays dividends in the end. Here are a few ways to improve your SEO as a small medical practice.
Google Business is one of the best sources of organic customers regardless of your budget. Google Business is a free listing that shows up at the top of search results when someone is looking for a local service. There are usually three businesses that show up in the “map pack.” If you aren’t in the top three, people can still click a button to look at more businesses in the area. The two most important ranking factors for Google Business are related to your business’s location, so you have a good chance of getting customers even if your listing is brand new.
Google Business is connected with your website, and your listing will rank higher once you can invest in SEO. Getting reviews, posting new photos, and sharing posts also helps with rankings. Setting aside time or hiring someone to manage your Google Business page is a great way to take advantage of one of the most effective online marketing platforms you will ever use.
There is no better return on investment in the online marketing world than search engine optimization. Being able to attract new patients to your practice without paying for expensive ad campaigns or relying on an unpredictable amount of referrals is every medical practice’s dream. That dream can become a reality if you know how to optimize your website correctly. If you don’t know how to optimize your website, check out our blog post explaining SEO for medical practices.
Having an active presence on search engines and directories like Yelp, local businesses, and other sites where people search for medical care in their area. Small medical practices should make sure that the content on their website is mobile-friendly, so it ranks well in Google searches on smartphones or tablets.
If you have the budget, blogger outreach is one of the most effective services to help your business appear higher in search results. Blogger outreach helps you attract backlinks through guest posting. Backlinks are essentially votes of confidence from other websites that search engines use to establish a trust score for your website. Getting backlinks from websites within your niche shows Google that your business is a legitimate and credible source of information within your industry. These links can be acquired naturally, but it could take years before you can move the needle with your rankings. You are better off outsourcing backlink building to a professional agency.
Hiring a blogger outreach agency and budgeting for a certain amount of links per month is the best way to go. The links you get from blogger outreach are high-quality and usually much more robust than spammy links you might get from Fiverr or someone in a Facebook group. You probably won’t need more than 10-15 to start competing for top search results, especially in a small town. If you are in a larger city, you may need a few more. For the most part, you will be looking at around $200 each for quality backlinks from blogger outreach agencies. Most businesses who choose to invest in this service will pay for anywhere from 2-5 guest post links per month ($400 – $1,000.)
That much money may be a hard pill to swallow at first, but the impact this service will have on your website is worth it. It takes about ten weeks for the links to start kicking in, but you will be happy with your investment once they do.
With the number of business listing platforms on the internet today, you can leave online reviews almost everywhere. More and more people are turning to online sources and reviews for information about products and services before buying. For this reason, the number of business review organizations is increasing. Google Business, Yelp, Facebook, Yahoo, Better Business Bureau, your website; the list goes on and on. It may take a lot of time, but small medical practices that don’t have large marketing budgets should leverage as many online review sites as possible where local patients can share their experiences.
Having reviews on multiple platforms is an excellent way to ensure there is a positive reflection of your practice wherever potential customers may find you. Online reviews also help you show up higher in search engines such as Google or Bing.
Review sites also provide free market research because they show what others in your community think of your practice. Using these tools wisely can help you make informed decisions on how to improve your practice’s reputation cost-effectively. Just make sure you are monitoring all the places you could have reviews. Some platforms give you a chance to resolve issues with customers who have left bad reviews. Nothing is worse than having a bad review you didn’t know existed without being able to fix it!
If you have any further questions about marketing strategies for small medical practices, we are happy to help! Additionally, if marketing your practice just seems like too much work and you would rather have someone take care of it for you, we have you covered. Feel free to give us a call or send us an email with any questions.
2021 Client Data
Questions?
The Best Website Design and SEO Packages for Small Business