Over 3.9 million healthcare-related searches are made on Google every day1.
Patients are putting healthcare into their own hands, taking advantage of the many online resources available to them during both initial research and ongoing care. This makes it increasingly important that healthcare practices adopt a digital marketing strategy to boost patient engagement, leads, and conversions.
Your Patients and Future Patients are Online – and They’re Looking for You
With 8 out of every 10 healthcare-related searches starting online, there’s no doubt that potential patients are looking for the services you offer. If you don’t have a strong online presence, you’re likely going to lose prospective patients to other healthcare practices that do. Digital marketing is a way to make your practice accessible to the patients you’re trying to reach and meet them where they are – online. Search results listed on the first page of Google get 95% of all web traffic2 and the competition for those top spots are fierce. Through Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay-per-Click (PPC) strategies, you can ensure your practice is on the first page and is accessible to prospective patients 24/7.
Other Healthcare Practices are Already Online. Level the Playing Field.
Many healthcare practices in your market are using digital marketing tactics already. If you want to win patients, you’ll need to create social profiles, optimize your website for SEO, and run paid advertisements to attract new patients. Methods like SEO and PPC help to level the playing field so your practice can reach potential patients who are searching for services also offered by larger healthcare systems. A larger practice can’t buy their way in to the top – search engines treat all practices the same by looking at things like website content, relevancy, and user experience.
Ability to Target Your Ideal Patient
Digital marketing allows you to target your ideal patient more narrowly than traditional methods such as radio, print, or billboards. You can provide data about your prospective patients to help shape your digital marketing campaigns – making it easy for you to find the right people when they are trying to find you. PPC advertising allows you to pay for targeted ads across a specific demographic and/or geographic location. For example, an arthritis and osteoporosis practice could invest in Google Ads to target a specific location – for instance, “Arthritis specialist in Charlotte, NC” – to help push prospective clients to visit their website or call their practice.
Easily Monitor and Adjust Your Campaigns for Better Results
Digital marketing allows to you easily track and monitor your campaigns through analytics that traditional advertising doesn’t offer. You’ll be able to view shares, likes, comments, impressions, conversions and more. You can track your prospective patient’s activities and determine which ads and types of content they viewed right before they clicked on “Make an Appointment” or clicked on your practice’s phone number. This gives you insight on which marketing methods are most effective, allowing you to improve and adjust your strategy.
Increase Your Return on Investment
Digital marketing is cost-effective. It doesn’t cost much to run a PPC campaign or social media ad campaign, creating space for a high ROI. Conversion rates with digital marketing are higher when compared to other forms of marketing, and in turn produce more revenue. These conversions can be tracked knowing that traffic turns into leads and new patients. Practices of all sizes will reap the financial benefits when they have a strong digital marketing strategy in place that aims for and draws high conversions.
Healthcare digital marketing is a crucial tool to reach new patients and engage existing ones. With a successful digital marketing strategy, your practice can increase its reach and cater to patients at exactly the right time in their decision process, leading to increased brand awareness and return on investment.
Fogg Media has been helping medical practices in the Carolinas and throughout the US to increase their visibility and drive patient conversions. If you’re struggling to get search visibility, or if your patients struggle to use your website, we’ve created a simple, straight-forward package deal that gives you exactly what you need to get started in the world of digital marketing. We offer targeted, optimized digital advertising services for healthcare, including Pay-Per-Click (PPC), Google Ads, Search Engine Advertising, and more. Simply put, we’ll handle the behind-the-scenes digital marketing so you can get back to medicine. Learn more here: https://www.foggmedia.com/marketing-services/solo-practice-starter-package/
