To take your practice to new heights, you need to have a strong marketing strategy. For customer satisfaction, you need to offer quality care and good treatment, but for your practice’s outreach, you need to make more people know about you and that’s possible only through marketing. Although the benefits of digital marketing outweigh traditional marketing, both have their own significance.
Marketing goals
Before deciding between digital and traditional marketing or both, you need to set your goals for launching a marketing plan. For instance:
• To strengthen your presence and publicize your services in your locality
• To increase your patient base
• To thank your existing patients and offer facilities to them
• To increase referrals from other doctors, etc.
Once you are done with setting goals, it’s time to decide the marketing type to put into practice.
Traditional healthcare marketing
Traditional marketing includes marketing through television, newspaper, and radio advertisements. Brochures and event marketing are some other ways of traditional marketing. Traditional marketing always follows the ‘push marketing’ concept. In digital marketing, the ‘pull’ strategy is followed.
Digital healthcare marketing
Digital marketing is constantly evolving. More than 70 percent of people use online reviews for finding a physician or making a physical visit. People avoid visiting a doctor with no online presence. Digital marketing can involve creating a website, using search engine optimization, PPC (pay-per-lick), email marketing, social media, YouTube advertising, etc. Let’s discuss its advantages in more detail below.
Digital marketing vs. traditional marketing
Cost-effective: Digital marketing is less expensive than traditional marketing. Many online marketing channels are free. For instance, creating an account on social media platforms is free. You only need to devote time for its maintenance. SEO service requires placement of the right keywords to bring organic leads or people searching your practice. Other services such as website creation, email marketing, etc. are affordable and reap good results for a longer time.
Better reach: Digital allows you to have marketing campaigns specific to gender, location, age, symptom or treatment. Whether based on demographics or geography, you can reach your target audience easily.
Result tracking: Digital marketing offers various tools to track leads and conversions through online marketing activity. It guides you on the type and time of investment and how it impacts your practice. Whereas, in the case of radio/TV advertising, you cannot track the leads coming from the advertisement.
Builds bond: Since digital marketing is a two-way communication model, it builds the doctor-patient relationship, making patients feel important. Patient forms on your website, your social media account, emails and your accounts on review platforms allow patients to interact with you or review your services. Whether positive or negative, always thank the reviewer who took time to write about your services.
Better interaction: Social media platforms give you space to socialize with your existing patients and new ones. It is the best place to express your thought-leader personality to your target audience to build a foundation of trust. If you post an offer for your existing patients, potential patients on your social media page will be attracted to your practice and prefer visiting you.
Quick approachability: A person who hears your practice advertisement on radio or TV is likely to forget it soon. Whereas, online ads come with a call to action that takes the viewer directly to your website or destination page with no possibility of losing a potential patient. Your call to action should be different for different campaigns.
Citation: Citation means mentioning of your practice on other relevant sites. It includes your name, address and phone number (NAP). The more and consistent citations you have, the higher your visibility will be online and, subsequently, your patient base will increase.
Reputation builder: Online marketing helps you build a strong online reputation. Subsequently you get better word-of-mouth marketing for your practice. A good online image means more referrals and more potential patients visiting your practice.
Digital media allows you to develop better relationships with the individual audience. Take time to communicate with your patients and understand their requirements. Watch your strategies and market your practice the best way you can.