Topic: Marketing Effectiveness

You’re the best chiropractor and you know it? But are your potential patients aware of it?

Chiropractor seo ranking success relies on a combination of tools such as healthcare call centers, patient portals, and Google My Business among others. All these tools and tips aim to improve your patients’ experience.

Let’s break down 15 steps you can take to improve your SEO and get more chiropractic patients

1. Have Accurate and Consistent Business Information

The most important information for SEO ranking is:

• Business name
• Address
• Phone number

Local search engines will use these three as a yardstick to ensure all your data aligns and that your chiropractic practice exists.

Search engines will look at the

• Relevance of your details to the patient’s search query
• Distance from the location term used in the search
• The prominence of your practice

Ensure your website’s information is identical to all other listings such as Bing Places For Business and Google My Business.

Inaccuracies will result in a negative ranking

2. Improve Local SEO

There are further steps you can take to improve local SEO.

• Add a Google Map to your contact page
• Use local images and optimize with location metadata
• Create a separate page on your site for each service
• If you have multiple locations, list them on separate pages

3. Encourage Online Reviews From Patients

Manage your reviews. Responding to both positive and negative reviews demonstrates your care for your patients. It also improves your SEO rankings.

Encourage new patients to review your chiropractor services on Yelp and Google. You can also use new customer surveys and discount incentives.

Reviews are regulated and impart social proof to your business. Dedicate a page on your website to reviews.

4. Upgrade Your Website

A clunky static website is as bad as no website at all. You have 2-8 seconds to make a good impression on a potential new patient.

Ensure your website is well designed and your WebHost offers you excellent speed and bandwidth. Your website shouldn’t hang mid-query.

Once you’re done with the basics of location, contact, and service information, you can add some upgrades.

Chatboxes that can be linked to your Facebook Messenger gives the patient a one-on-one experience. Include social media widgets

5. Optimize for Mobile Devices

As you revamp your website don’t forget the visitors on mobile devices.

There is nothing as jarring as clicking onto a website not optimized for mobile. Having to zoom in and out or scroll left and right is takes away from the website experience.

Considering 88% of consumers who will search your chiropractor practice will do so on a mobile device, you must prioritize them.

6. Do Your Keyword Research

A huge part of chiropractor SEO is keywords. Which terms are your patients searching for? Research the terms applicable to chiropractic services specific to your locale.

I hope by now you know to not stuff your blog posts with keywords. Keyword usage must always be organic.

7. Show Your Appreciation For Your Patients

The personal touch is a great differentiator for businesses in almost any niche. Here’s how you can make your patients feel catered to.

• Personalize your emails by patient name
• Offer discounts, coupons, giveaways to show appreciation
• Birthday messages also make the patient feel seen

8. Focus On Expert Authoritative Trustworthy Content

Colin Powell said, “Great leaders are almost always great simplifiers, who can cut through argument, debate, and doubt, to offer a solution everybody can understand.”

Cut to the heart of your patients’ problems and give them solutions or direct them to your practice for relief. They will be thankful and Google will reward you with positive rankings.

9. Get Peer Reviews and Referrals

A great way to do this is to collaborate with local businesses that offer complementary services. Think hospitals and rehabilitation centers.

Strong community involvement and sponsoring causes in cash or kind will make you a household name in your area. Your practice will be the first name that comes to mind.

10. Capture With Social Media

With nearly 4 billion people using social media platforms globally, your chiropractor practice can only benefit from engagement on social media.

More than 80% of patients trust and rely on online reviews to find medical services. Take advantage of social media to engage with your patients and understand their interests. Read more: 5 Benefits of Social Media in Healthcare

11. Video Is the Future

According to 74% of marketers, videos have a better return on investment than static images.

For chiropractic services, video can be a great way to get the necessary information to your patients about procedures and aftercare.

Videos are also highly shareable which is a great benefit for your business.

12. Maximize Pay-per-Click Ads

SEO is a long game. Its short-term counterpart is pay-per-click ads. As you dedicate a chunk of your marketing budget towards content marketing and building your SEO ranking don’t forget your immediate goals.

Google and social media ads can be customized according to your budget, target audience, location, and customer behavior.

13. Cohesive Digital Marketing Strategy

Marketing strategies for chiropractors should be interconnected across all online platforms.

The PPC ads, social media content, email marketing, and Google Business listing should all work together to funnel curious potential clients to patronize your services.

14. Analytics Are Your Friend

All the above steps would be ineffective if you failed to check the numbers. Analytics tell you what is working and what is not.

Google Analytics tells you where your website visitors are coming from, how many they are, and how long they are staying. By tweaking you can improve your ranking and customer satisfaction.

15. Embrace Healthcare Call Centers and Patient Portals

The world is moving towards remote delivery of services. For your return patients or those too far, this is a great option. Give clear instructions on how they can use telehealth on your site and the eligible services.

Outsourcing the design and management of your patient portals and telehealth will free up your staff to focus on customer service and your core offerings.

12 Tips To Master Facebook For Medical Practices

Patient engagement statistics reveal how much healthcare delivery has evolved to rely on technology and specifically social media.

Recent surveys have shown that 72% of patients are extremely satisfied when they know what to expect from a medical procedure and post-discharge follow-up calls reduce readmission by 50%. Medical staff members spend up to 2 hours a day calling patients and automating the process could yield better productivity. Enter social media, specifically Facebook. Facebook has 2.7 billion users globally as well as strategic integrations with other platforms such as Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, and Instagram. These rank as the third, fourth, and fifth most popular social media platforms respectively. What is social media’s impact on the healthcare business and how can your practice capitalize on Facebook’s best marketing practices?

1. Share Video Content

Video is the most consumed content format online and generates 35% more organic impressions than static images.

Video is a great way to educate patients about what to expect when they come in and the various protocols in place. It can also create more engagement by showing the human element of your practice. Optimize for Facebook by

• using square videos
• Showing not telling to maximize on autoplay
• Add captions

2. When Is Your Audience Online?

Facebook has developed a variety of analytics for businesses on its platform. These analytics tell you when is the best time to post on Facebook for maximum exposure. You can monitor when your audience is most active on Facebook and post at those times. In this way, Facebook can be a key component of your patient engagement solutions.

3. Tell Stories and Provoke Conversations

Posting advert after advert will quickly put off your audience. If you want your patients to respond to and share your content, engaging posts for Facebook are the way to go.

Images are more eye-catching and shareable than plain text posts. Facebook recommends having an accompanying image for all posts.

All images should be crisp, not blurry. They should be copyright-free or credited correctly. Pay close attention to the resolution requirements for Facebook.

4. Make Your Posts Actionable

Article links, newsletter signup forms, polls, and other call-to-action posts would feature regularly on your feed. They have higher engagement and can give extra value to your business by providing insights into your patients.

Though not all posts need to be actionable, a good amount should be.

5. Automate Posts and Responses

They also have scheduling and automation tools that can help your take advantage of these timelines even when you’re not awake.

You can set up automated responses on Facebook Messenger and Whatsapp for business to assist your patients on routine queries.

6. Consistency Is Key

Create a consistent posting schedule that will underscore your trustworthiness and authority.

As said, Facebook has scheduling tools to help with consistency. Alternatively, you can use third-party apps such as Buffer.

7. Partner With Related Businesses on Facebook

Other healthcare providers or professionals in the wellness space are great collaborators. Do live discussions or Q&As on each others’ pages. You’ll be able to piggyback on each other’s following and grow your reach organically.

8. Take Part in Community Development

Building a loyal online following has a crucial real-life component. People love to see their physicians be a part of and give back to the community.

If your practice can sponsor initiatives within the community, this is great. However, it can also be as simple as mentoring young people, food drives for the less fortunate, or sanitary packages for the homeless.

9. Periodic Targeted Ads and Offers

The beauty of Facebook ads is that you can target them so specifically, right down to the shows they like to watch and their hobbies. These targeted groups can be differentiated using more than 30 characteristics and behaviors. You can save each ad group and use it repeatedly.

It will work in your favor when offering specialized procedures such as facelifts or bariatric surgery which apply to very specific demographics

10. Simple and Cohesive Look and Tone

Don’t forget that your Facebook page is representing your brand. Stick to your brand colors and tone of voice throughout your posts Much as people enjoy seeing behind-the-scenes, keep it professional. It should not feel like a personal page. Facebook advises simple, clean creatives as the most attractive to users. Use minimal but impactful text.

11. Quick Responses and Reputation Management

The Facebook algorithm checks how quickly messages and queries are responded to. This period gets automatically added to your page.

A healthcare page that typically responds in 48 hours is not a good look. For queries not covered under the automated responses, have a schedule detailing the staff in charge of replying at various times. Assign each a signature or initials.

Negative reviews will occur from time to time especially if medical insurance verification was not done properly or there is a payment issue.

Responding to reviews helps boost your ranking and shows your patients that you care. You might need to take it to private direct messages for sensitive cases or request an offline conversation.

12. Take Advantage of Facebook Analytics

To round off these Facebook tips, remember to consistently evaluate the performance of your posts and ads. Insights on the Facebook admin page will let you know:

• Which content had the most engagement
• Who is visiting your page
• How they are interacting with your posts

This crucial information will enable you to tweak your content marketing strategy to its most optimal.

Facebook can be a key part of your patient engagement and after-care. If done well it will expand your reach to new patients and create a solid online following.

10 Reasons to Hire a Doctor Marketing Agency

Are you vacillating between hiring a healthcare marketing agency and a regular marketing firm? Medical marketing strategies are very specialized due to the sensitive and essential nature of medical services. Your medical practice needs a marketing partner specific to healthcare rather than a jack-of-all-trades agency. Here’s why.

1. Targeted Expertise in the Healthcare Market

Would you trust a doctor who claims to treat cancer, infant conditions, and horses? It would be absurd. Specialized fields such as medicine require marketing professionals who understand market insights and strategies that are targeted. High-level knowledge of the current healthcare ecosystem, the patient journey, and physician competition are necessary for successful medical marketing strategies. This expertise will enable the medical marketing agency to provide competitor analyses, effective marketing plans and to help navigate marketing efforts moving forward.

Read more : What Is a Healthcare Marketing Plan? Expert Tips and Strategies

3. Understanding Of Stark and HIPAA Laws

Medicine is a highly regulated field. This is to protect the privacy and safety of the patient and to protect physicians from exposing themselves to liability. Medical marketing consultants are conversant with the stipulations of these two laws. This means that any marketing plans they create and implement will not expose your practice to malpractice suits or legal violations.

3. Ease Of Communication With Physicians

The medical industry can get pretty technical in terms of language, operations, and protocols. Marketing agencies for doctors understand these technicalities and jargon. They can sufficiently represent and cater to your practice without inadvertently injuring your reputation. There is also the consideration that medical practitioners work outside the 9-5 framework. Any consulting agency needs to understand this and accommodate emergencies and unpredictable hours with ease.

4. Access to Medical Marketing Channels

Medical online marketing requires a unique approach. Not all marketing channels are appropriate or effective to medical practices.

• Video Marketing
• Digital advertising for medical practices
• Engaging social media and referral marketing
• Targeted email campaigns
• Mobile marketing
• Listings Management for Doctors
• Physician Reputation Management
• Medical SEO
• Physician liaison marketing
• Analytics and reporting

5. Budget-Conscious Marketing Strategy

Medicine is not like consumer goods or luxury industries that have huge marketing budgets. Revenue is tied up in expensive procedures, equipment, and reduced reimbursements. A medical marketing agency understands that they cannot afford to go over budget with their strategy. They need to make the allocated budgets work.

6. Reputation Recovery

Doctor marketing agencies understand that reputation management is key in a medical practice’s marketing strategy. Many bad reviews online result from dissatisfaction with treatment costs and the patient’s lack of understanding about their insurance coverage. Less favorable reviews online can wreak havoc on your business listing. An experienced marketing agency will know how to rescue these reviews and tip the balance to positive.

7. Prioritize Patient Referral Volume

Referrals of patients from other physician is a tried and tested way for a healthcare business to get new patients. A specialized marketing agency understands the importance of a physician liaison. This is the salesperson responsible for your system for doctor referral appointments. They make sure you’re getting referrals and that they are converting into appointments.

8. Building Patient Engagement

Long gone are the days of blindly firing off articles into the ether and hoping an interested customer bites the bait. Medical advertising agencies focus their digital marketing strategy on gaining the most patient engagement. Patients prefer direct engagement from their healthcare provider. They want dependable content that adds value. This, in turn, increases the reach of your brand and brings in new patients

Read more : Important Tools That Can Help You Improve Patient Engagement

9. Understand Patient Intake and Flow

Different elements play into the intake of patients and how they move from interest to appointment. A healthcare marketing firm needs to understand the ins and outs of all these elements to streamline and improve the experience for all. Experienced firms understand how crucial patient engagement solutions are to the patient journey. The solutions they implement will lead to a better experience, good reviews, and of course, new patients. These elements include:

• Accurate business information online
• Reviews and ratings
• Effective scheduling and cancellation of appointments
• New vs returning patient needs
• Recurring visits vs one-off
• High revenue procedures

10. Design and Patient Experience of Your Medical Website

83 percent of internet users are looking for medical information related to symptoms, treatment, and facilities.

What this means for healthcare marketing is that a physician’s or healthcare business’s website is like their digital front office.

A dedicated marketing agency understands this and the importance of UI (User interface) and UX (User experience). They will focus on giving your business a website that

• Boosts engagement,
• Increases traffic
• Grows patient conversions

Marketing your medical practice is one of the most important things you can do to help grow your patient volumes. By increasing your visibility online, you’re able to be found by those looking for you, be seen by those who are interested, and be known by those who wish to tell their loved ones. No matter which of the types of medicine practices you run, your practice will benefit from medical marketing.

Unfortunately, simply buying ads and hoping for the best can be a very expensive strategy. In this article, you’ll learn about the best low-cost ways to grow your practice using these medical marketing strategies.

6 Low Cost Ways To Promote Your Medical Practice

Google My Business

Google My Business is a free service provided by Google that allows you to put your business’s info on the search engine, even if you don’t yet have a website. This allows you to be found on Google Maps and is one of the ways Google identifies which businesses are where.

To set up Google My Business, simply go to this link and follow the instructions. You’ll need to verify your business’s information. We recommend checking out this guide to Google My Business optimization.

Interact On Social Media

Everyone knows that having a social media presence is important, but it’s not just about making content and posting it. You also want to be interacting regularly with your community.

Not only should you be growing your following with content, using your social media profiles to comment on and share content created by people in the community is a great way to make your brand known.

Email Marketing

Even in this age of Whatsapp and instant messaging, email is still a powerful primary mode of communication for people. By using emails to let people know about events, initiatives, and appointment reminders, you can make sure that your patients always keep you at top of mind.

Be careful with your marketing communications, though. You’ll still have to remain HIPAA compliant and there’s certain data that you simply cannot use for marketing purposes.

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of making your website easy to find on search engines. Investing in a SEO company can seem expensive, although it doesn’t need to be. You could also have an in-house marketing specialist do your SEO, however if they’re not already well-versed in SEO it will take longer to get results.

Local Events and Organizations

By being a part of your local chamber of commerce or board of trade, and by actively participating in those events, you can get your practice’s brand out there and be an effective face for the brand while you do.

You can also sponsor some events. Although this can be expensive, sponsoring smaller events can be a low-cost way to effectively market your practice.

Offer Excellent Service & Ask For Reviews

Your online reputation is a key part of your digital marketing efforts. By offering an excellent patient experience, people will be more likely to give you a glowing review online.

However, most people will not review a place without a reason, and usually, that reason is a negative one. So it’s up to you and your staff to be upfront with asking for reviews. Do so in your email communications and make it part of your normal processes.

Guideway Care provides patient engagement solutions, including healthcare digital marketing, EMR integration, and more.

Getting patients to come to your practice is a key aspect of running one. After all, medical practices are still businesses and in order to stay afloat, they need to maintain sufficient patient volumes. As a result, medical marketing strategies are super important for any practice, regardless of specialty or general practice of medicine.

Of course, healthcare advertising can be expensive and not all practices have room in their budget to grow their ad spend. In this article, you will learn about how you can get more patients to your practice without breaking the bank.

Tips For Attracting More Patients On a Budget

Understand Your Patient Base

There are several things you need to understand about your patients before you’re able to effectively grow. The first is to understand the areas in which you’re lacking. Patient satisfaction surveys can help you uncover your practice’s weak points.

Another thing you need to understand is the demography of your patient base. Answer the following questions:

• How old are they on average?
• what races and ethnicities are present
• what languages are spoken
• how far does a patient have to travel to reach your office
• How educated are they?
• What’s the average and median income?

Build Relationships With Referring Practices

Most practices get patients through referrals, and these referrals come from building good relationships with primary care providers and other non-specialists.

Some tips on building good relationships with referring practices:

• Make sure referred patients have a wonderful experience. Patients see their primary care provider relatively often and have a relationship with them, and their word will be taken seriously by the physician.
• Create a direct line of contact between your practice and practices that refer patients to you. This makes it easier to share information.
• Let the referring practice know of treatment and other notes promptly after the treatment has been provided.

Make Your Online Presence Strong

A strong online presence is absolutely paramount in the digital age. It’s not as simple as just having a website and some social media accounts. A strong online presence means that patients are able to find you, online communities know about you, and your website is easy to use by anyone no matter what device they use.

Investing in healthcare SEO is one of the best ways to build a strong web presence. Doing so usually involves working with a healthcare SEO company, but it also means creating content for people to read or watch online.

You also want to make sure that your practice is actively participating on social media. By having a staff member regularly interact on social media on behalf of the practice, your practice will be seen by more people in the community.

Grow Your Reach In The Community

In addition to a strong social media presence, you also want to make a concerted effort to be a part of the community that you serve. Many physicians are not native to the community they work in and have not had the opportunity to become well known there.

One important part of growing your reach in the community is to be a part of community-held events. A good way to do this is to sponsor and attend events held by groups such as the chamber of commerce or community service groups.

All in all, growing your practice does not have to be expensive or complicated. By being there for your patients and providing an excellent experience while also making it easy for them to find you, you can see sustained patient growth over time.

Marketing for healthcare businesses is not quite the same as marketing for other businesses. There are different considerations, such as HIPAA compliance, and marketing healthcare services requires slightly different tactics than marketing a store or a professional service. But marketing is still important for medical practices and other healthcare businesses, and there are things you’ll need to do in order to fine-tune your medical marketing strategies.

4 Steps to Optimizing Your Medical Marketing Strategies

Use past data to figure out what works.

If your business is brand new, you won’t have access to historical internal data. But, if your business has been operating, you can use what you’ve done to help figure out where your marketing dollars should go in the future.

Answer the following questions:

• What marketing strategies did we invest in last year?
• Did we see growth in the following KPIs:
  • Patient volumes
  • Patient values
  • Overall revenue
  • Overall profit
• What strategies worked the best, based on the data we have?

If you don’t have data, or your business is brand new, your priority should be to make sure that you are able to collect that data this year. Companies like Guideway Care can help you collect and analyze patient engagement data in a HIPAA-compliant way.

Brainstorm new ideas.

At this stage, what you want to do is figure out what new marketing strategies could be used to generate new patient leads. Healthcare advertising, medical SEO, social media marketing, traditional marketing strategies such as radio or news… there’s a lot that can be done! But not all of these ideas will be equally viable.

Take insights from people in your company who work patient-facing roles and who are intimately familiar with the initial stages of patient onboarding. You’ll also want to use the insights from people who work with the website, the social media, and anything else related to your practice’s online presence.

Assess the ideas and come up with a strategy for each viable one.

Not all ideas will be right for this year. You will have likely settled on a few strategies that are viable for your practice. Not only that, but you’ll also have the original strategies that you’ve been using that have worked thus far.

Now, it’s time to come up with a strategy and an action plan for these initiatives. You’ll want to come up with the following:

• Tasks required
• Team members & their responsibilities
• Timeframe
• Costs involved
• Ideal outcomes

Set SMART goals for these strategies.

SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. The goals you choose should be based on KPIs that directly contribute to the bottom line.

Of course, not all strategies will work in the end. You will want to assess the results at the end of your chosen timeframe and decide whether or not it’s worth pursuing in the future.

Blogging and video creation are two of the most popular ways that healthcare practices make content. This content isn’t for nothing, though: these practices are engaging in content marketing, and as a strategy, content marketing in healthcare has been shown to work. In fact, content marketing companies do a lot of marketing to doctors offices because it’s such a powerful strategy.

So how can you take advantage of the power of content marketing? How does content marketing fit into a medical online marketing strategy?

What Is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a strategy that relies on creating and distributing highly valuable content on a consistent basis in order to build a loyal audience of people who are relevant to the business. It can be done through blog posts, video, infographics, and more.

The idea behind content marketing is that you give away value for free in order to do several things. First, you’re getting your name out there by connecting your practice’s brand to valuable content. Second, you’re becoming a trusted authority, allowing your readers to see you as someone who should be trusted with their healthcare. Third, you’re helping to engage the patients you already have by producing content that they could benefit from.

How Do You Get Traffic to Your Content?

Content marketing is only as good as its reach, and there are many ways that marketers aim to build up their website traffic. The first and most common way is through search engine optimization, or medical SEO. You can check out another article on Benefits of Medical SEO.

Another common way is to post content on social media and content sharing platforms. Social media such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn are great ways to build up traffic to your content. You can also use content sharing platforms such as Reddit, or Youtube for healthcare video content.

Some healthcare advertising companies use content marketing as a way to get a lot of eyeballs to your website, however this requires paying for advertising that could be better utilized by advertising your services directly to people who have shown interest, such as through search advertising.

Should I Invest In Content Marketing?

The answer is yes, however there are some things you should consider. First, content marketing requires content creation. Blog posts require time and energy, or the funds to pay a blog writer. Videos are even more expensive and time-consuming to produce. You’ll want to understand the cost of creating content before you commit to a content marketing strategy.

There are content marketing companies that can help you produce content, but before you choose one, you’ll need to understand what kind of content they’ll produce for you. Not only that, you’ll want to see the quality of this content to gauge whether you’re willing to put your brand name on that content.

Guideway Care provides patient engagement solutions, including content creation and medical content marketing services. Learn more about what Guideway Care can do for your practice!

Online reviews have become extremely important for all types of businesses. It’s been shown that people trust online reviews more than they trust the copy on your website. They want to read about a real experience that someone actually had and is willing to share. Not only that, but people’s attention is driven more toward reading negative reviews than positive ones.

What this means is that it’s paramount to make sure that people who have a good experience with you also talk about said experience. One easy way to do that is to create a Google Reviews link for your medical practice.

How To Create a Google Reviews Link for Local Doctor Reviews

This process is a very simple one and only takes a few minutes. It requires you to have your business already on Google My Business. If you don’t have a Google My Business account, simply register for one and follow the directions: How to Set Up A Google My Business Account

Once you’ve confirmed that your business is visible on Google, just follow these steps:

1. Go to Google Places API
2. Type in your business’s name and location
3. Get the Place ID for your medical practice

Now that you have your Place ID, all you have to do is append the ID to the following link: https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=your place_id

You can put this link in automated emails, text messages, or on your website to make it easier for people to write a review.

The Importance of Google Doctor Reviews

People who are searching for medical services online are looking to see how good of an experience patients have had. Patients will often provide their own experiences by dropping a Google review. However, people who do review on their own are rare and often need to be reminded to do so.

People are likely to give a review if they’ve either (1) had an amazing experience and would absolutely go again, or (2) had a bad experience and want to warn others to stay far away from that doctor. Both are ways that patients help other prospective patients make decisions about who to see for their medical issues. It stands to reason, then, that a practice that has an abundance of good reviews and a dearth of bad ones would be more likely to get new business.

Of course, not all reviews are relevant. Some people may write reviews based on things that aren’t in your control, such as insurance billing issues or isolated incidents. For this reason, you may want to invest in reputation management services. These companies will not only dispute and respond to negative reviews, but they will also help you get real positive reviews from your clients by giving you the tools needed to request these reviews.

Read more: Google Business Profile: What It Is and Why You Need It

One bad review can outshine several good ones, but it’s important for a practice (or any business) to maintain a high ratio of good reviews to bad ones. This shows prospective patients that bad experiences are few and far between.

Guideway Care provides healthcare engagement solutions. They include healthcare marketing services, healthcare call centers to take a load off of your staff, and access to a powerful healthcare CRM that syncs with your program’s EMR and website. Learn about Guideway Care vast array of patient engagement solutions!

Marketing for healthcare businesses is not quite the same as marketing for other businesses. There are different considerations, such as HIPAA compliance, and marketing healthcare services requires slightly different tactics than marketing a store or a professional service. But marketing is still important for medical practices and other healthcare businesses, and there are things you’ll need to do in order to fine-tune your medical marketing strategies.

4 Steps to Optimizing Your Medical Marketing Strategies

Use past data to figure out what works.

If your business is brand new, you won’t have access to historical internal data. But, if your business has been operating, you can use what you’ve done to help figure out where your marketing dollars should go in the future.

Answer the following questions:

• What marketing strategies did we invest in last year?
• Did we see growth in the following KPIs:
  • Patient volumes
  • Patient values
  • Overall revenue
  • Overall profit
• What strategies worked the best, based on the data we have?

If you don’t have data, or your business is brand new, your priority should be to make sure that you are able to collect that data this year. Companies like Guideway Care can help you collect and analyze patient engagement data in a HIPAA-compliant way.

Brainstorm new ideas.

At this stage, what you want to do is figure out what new marketing strategies could be used to generate new patient leads. Healthcare advertising, medical SEO, social media marketing, traditional marketing strategies such as radio or news… there’s a lot that can be done! But not all of these ideas will be equally viable.

Take insights from people in your company who work patient-facing roles and who are intimately familiar with the initial stages of patient onboarding. You’ll also want to use the insights from people who work with the website, the social media, and anything else related to your practice’s online presence.

Assess the ideas and come up with a strategy for each viable one.

Not all ideas will be right for this year. You will have likely settled on a few strategies that are viable for your practice. Not only that, but you’ll also have the original strategies that you’ve been using that have worked thus far.

Now, it’s time to come up with a strategy and an action plan for these initiatives. You’ll want to come up with the following:

• Tasks required
• Team members & their responsibilities
• Timeframe
• Costs involved
• Ideal outcomes

Set SMART goals for these strategies.

SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. The goals you choose should be based on KPIs that directly contribute to the bottom line.

Of course, not all strategies will work in the end. You will want to assess the results at the end of your chosen timeframe and decide whether or not it’s worth pursuing in the future.

If you run a medical practice, you might have found that getting people to find you is not as easy as you first thought. You might have a website, a GoogleMyBusiness profile, and some social media pages, but people who are searching for you still can’t find you!

This is where medical SEO comes in. With medical SEO, your business becomes more visible to people who are looking for you on search engines like Google. So what is medical SEO, and why is it so important?

What Is Medical SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it’s the process by which a website is optimized in order to be more easily found on search engines. There are many advantages of SEO for doctors, including increased website traffic, greater brand recognition, and higher patient volumes.

There are several aspects to medical SEO, such as content creation, on-page code and content optimization, link building, and reputation management.

Medical SEO services are offered by companies like Guideway Care, who also provides healthcare advertising and medical digital marketing solutions to help grow medical practices.

What Are The Benefits of Medical SEO for Practices?

Medical SEO is highly beneficial for one key reason: with SEO, you can get a much higher rank on the search engines. You may notice that when you Google a certain search term, some results are shown before others. You may also notice that you’re most likely to click on websites that are on the first page of the search engines. The goal of SEO is to have your website content hit that front page for the search term that you want.

Here’s an example to illustrate the point. If you Google “chiropractic clinic near me”, you will see a variety of results (including results from advertisements and from Google Maps). People who are searching for that term are likely going to stay on the first page, and any chiropractic clinic that is on the first page is more likely to be seen by people who are searching for them.

This visibility leads to a lot of other benefits. People who are searching for your desired search term are more likely to find out about your practice. As a result, people are more likely to visit your website and, ultimately, book an appointment with you.

Without medical SEO, you won’t be able to take advantage of the vast number of people searching for practices in your area.

Guideway Care provides medical SEO and patient engagement solutions for practices and hospitals all over the USA.

When social media first came to the scene in the early 2000s, nobody expected that it would become a mainstay of our lives. But now that social media platforms are used by billions of people around the world, governments and businesses of all types have had to adapt.

One of the major impacts that social media & healthcare digital marketing has had is on healthcare. People are now getting healthcare information faster than ever before. They’re also getting misinformation more than any time in our history. Our focus in this article is to detail the impact of social media on healthcare businesses and how healthcare business owners can take advantage of it while still staying within legal and ethical guidelines.

Impact of Social Media on Healthcare

The ease of sharing information.

Thanks to social media, it’s easier than ever for people to access and share information about any topic, and healthcare is no different.

Of course, this has its downsides. Because social media is a free space where anyone can say what they wish, there’s nothing stopping people from spreading or sharing misinformation about health. Those who own practices need to be careful about the content they share. Healthcare business owners are also encouraged to use their platform to refute misinformation that they see. A study published in 2017 shows that people’s comments influence how others interpret information and that commenting on misinformed opinions can be effective in changing people’s minds.

The new connections that medical professionals can have with their audience.

Medical professionals have started to take on authoritative positions, regardless of their research experience and published works, building a base of readers entirely through social media. Doctors and researchers can share their point of view with the world and connect with those who benefit from what they have to say.

It’s become a lot easier for medical professionals to have a real relationship with their audience, taking in feedback as soon as it comes in, and sharing the stories of those they helped.

The rise of patient influencers.

Patients are taking to social media to detail their experiences dealing with their condition. Some people have spoken at length about receiving bariatric surgery or chiropractic treatment, whereas others talk about what it’s like to have a chronic condition with no cure.

These patients, who are not medical professionals, share their stories and what worked for them. As a result, other patients listen to them and sometimes take their advice. This can be a good thing, but it can also be very dangerous.

Patient influencers are not qualified to give medical advice but are free to share their stories. It’s important that healthcare entrepreneurs understand a little bit about where patients get their information while also ensuring that patients do not misconstrue a fellow patient’s narrative for medical advice.

If you would like to learn more about how social media can be used in healthcare, contact Guideway Care

Check out our post where we share 4 ways that patients use social media to chronicle their weight loss journey

Most doctors get into medicine to save lives and make a real impact on their communities. They did not go into medicine because they wanted to run a business. The problem is that medical practices are businesses, and they need to be run as such if they’re going to succeed. Part of running a business is marketing it effectively, making sure that people know who you are, what you do, and what you can do for them.

Doctors often report that the operational and business aspects of running the practice are the most stressful parts of their job. We’re here to make it a little easier. In this article, we’re going to go over a few tips on how to market medical practices.

4 Secrets To Marketing Your Medical Practice

Be where your people are, and engage with them.

Where do your people hang out? Apply this to your community. Sponsor community events and spend time with your local chamber of commerce or board of trade. Be active on social media, as well, so you can share content and company updated with the people who care the most. You need to be visible on the search engines so you can be seen by those who are actively looking for you. Investing in search engine optimization (SEO) and pay-per-click advertising (PPC) is an important part of making sure that people can find you.

Ask for reviews from patients and referring physicians.

In the digital age, people trust online reviews far more than they trust marketing material. Use this to your advantage!

Get patients to leave honest reviews of your practice on Yelp, Facebook, Google, and other places online. How do you do this? Just ask! When your patients are about to head out the door, ask them to leave a review about their experience. Send reminders to patients via email. Or, call them and ask if they’d like to share their experience.

Become an authority.

One excellent way to market your practice is to provide quality information for the wider online community. Blogging and videos are a great way for you to engage with people while also giving people the education and information they’re looking for.

By sharing your point of view and giving people real help through blog posts and videos, you can eventually become a trusted resource for people looking for info.

Embrace new ideas.

At the dawn of social media, some people became early adopters. Those who were able to find their audience on social media early on gained a distinct advantage from those who didn’t.

Of course, not all new ideas make sense, but by giving them a little more thought and diving a little deeper into the latest technologies, you could find a goldmine for your practice. There’s always room for new ways to communicate with patients!

Elevate Your Practice with Strategic Digital Marketing

In today’s interconnected world, the success of your medical practice hinges not only on exceptional patient care but also on a robust and forward-thinking marketing strategy. By actively engaging with your community, leveraging the power of online reviews, establishing your expertise through valuable content, and embracing innovative technologies, you can significantly enhance your visibility and attract new patients. The “4 Secrets” outlined in this guide provide a clear roadmap for modernizing your outreach and ensuring your practice thrives in a competitive landscape. Implementing these strategies can be a complex endeavor, and this is where expertise from a partner like Guideway Care can prove invaluable. Remember, effective communication and a strong online presence are no longer options—they are necessities for growth and patient engagement.

Contact us today to transform your medical practice marketing.

Are you in need of some ideas for medical online marketing? Check out this article for more ideas for marketing your medical practice!

If you’ve recently opened up a new medical practice, let us first say: Congratulations! You’ve taken your first step from physician to medical entrepreneur. This is an exciting step in your life and, hopefully, will be the first of many great things to come for your new business.

You might have a little bit of anxiety for the future. Growing a medical practice is not easy, and it’s not as simple as doing a great job as a doctor. That’s part of it, but growing and running your own practice is just like growing and running your own business. After all, it IS your own business.

If you’re like many doctors, then you want your primary focus to be on the patients. We’re going to give you some tips to help you grow your medical practice while keeping your focus on patient outcomes.

4 Tips To Help Grow Your Medical Practice

Be active in your community.

As a physician, you hold a special place in your community. People inherently trust you much more and hold you in high regard because of your profession. If you run a practice, you’re an important pillar of the community and you have to present yourself as such.

Join your local chamber of commerce or board of trade. Attend and/or sponsor events that happen in your local area, both virtual and in person. Provide articles and content for your local blogs and newspapers. Comment and provide conversation in local social media groups.

Get on social media.

Social media is here to stay, and in 2020 it’s more important than ever. Social media is, for better or for worse, where people get their news, learn about local matters, connect with friends and family, and interact with their local community. Be where your people are!

Many physicians feel awkward about being visible on social media. You might consider it somewhat unprofessional. It’s true that social media is NOT the place to post about sensitive matters. But, social media is an easy way to connect with your community and your patient base.

Get your patients to write honest reviews.

People trust review sites. When considering doing business with any local establishment, people often go straight to Google, Yelp, Facebook, Angie’s List, or some other review site and take a look at what people are saying.

When you first start out, you won’t have any reviews. But, as you start to get patients, you’re going to want them to talk about their experiences with you. Simply have your front desk staff ask them to write a review and remind them via email to provide feedback on review sites. Don’t incentivize reviews or ask them to specifically write a positive review. And definitely don’t get fake reviews! This could ruin any trust that you build in your community.

Make your processes more efficient.

As you grow, bottlenecks in your operation will be exposed. Investing inefficiencies early will help you scale up effectively and will allow you to take on larger patient loads early on. You want to make sure that your administrators, nurses, physicians, and other staff are able to do their jobs effectively. Invest in technology to make it easy for your staff to access medical records, input charts, access lab results, and communicate with other practices for patient referrals.

Using a patient portal system is one of the first things you should consider. This will give patients easy access to their medical records, make it easier for them to schedule an appointment, and make it easy to give patients the educational material they need to manage their condition when they’re not seeing you. Make sure your patient portal is accessible on mobile, as well!

Enhance Patient Experience with a Robust Patient Portal

Growing your medical practice requires a strategic approach that balances patient care with operational efficiency. By implementing the tips discussed, you can enhance patient satisfaction, streamline processes, and position your practice for sustained growth.

At Guideway Care, we specialize in providing tailored solutions to help healthcare providers achieve these goals. Our services include effective website design, digital marketing, healthcare CRM/EMR integration, and medical call center support, all designed to attract and retain patients while optimizing your practice’s performance.

Contact us today to elevate your medical practice.

Identifying your target market & its characteristics is a key aspect of any marketing initiative. No matter how large or small your business is, you need to know who you’re selling to and why!
But healthcare marketing is a little different. There are things that you can and can’t do according to HIPAA regulations, and the consequences for not following them can be dire.

So how does a healthcare organization identify and serve their target market? Here’s a simple guide that will help you out.

What Are Important Target Market Characteristics In Healthcare?

Geographical Area

Define your operating area. What communities do you serve? How large is the area? Is it urban, suburban, or rural?

Your geographic area is the first thing you should define, as you don’t want to market to people who can’t use your services.

Demographics

Demographics describe facts about a population. Age, gender, marital status, median income, education level all fall under demographics.

Demographic information allows you to infer a great deal about a patient population. For example, you might have a sizable Hispanic population in your area, which might make it wise to market in the Spanish language or deal with issues specific to that population.

Behavioral Characteristics

Behavioral characteristics, otherwise known as psychographics, can be considered a very general category. It consists of any information that you know about how your patient population behaves. What is their lifestyle like? Do they care a great deal about their health?

Health Literacy

This is not talked about as much, however it’s extremely important when defining who your target market is. Different patient populations have different levels of engagement with their health. A general hospital is dealing with a very different customer base than a chiropractic clinic.

How do you define health literacy for a patient population? Health literacy refers to a patient’s level of understanding about their own health and care. Take your own experiences and the experiences of others in your field: do the patients understand what’s going on, and are they taking an active role in their own care?

How Do You Find Target Market Information?

The first place you’ll want to look is the US Census Bureau. You will be able to find demographic information about any geographical area in the US, including your own. This will help you understand what your population is likely to be like.

For behavioral characteristics and health literacy, you’ll have to do some market research. Constructing a questionnaire for your patients can help you understand what they’re like and how they treat their health. If you are collecting medical data, you must follow HIPAA guidelines! Do not use this data to advertise to people or create lists for use in direct marketing. Instead, use this data to inform your initiatives and to gain an understanding about your clientele as a whole.

We can help you with market research and developing your segmenting, targeting, and positioning. Contact us and we’ll assess your healthcare marketing needs for free!

On the Internet, content is king. This doesn’t just refer to written content, either. The average American spends hours every day watching online video. But this trend isn’t just limited to cat videos and video games!

Popular healthcare channels such as Dr. Pimple Popper, Healthcare Triage, and Dr. Beau Hightower are run by actively practicing medical doctors and get millions of views each month from people all over the world. It stands to reason that your medical practice or healthcare business can benefit by creating videos for a worldwide audience. But how should you go about it?

Why Invest in Video Marketing for Healthcare?

Builds Your Brand Image

Video marketing is an easy way to build a brand image. Why? Because on video, you can present your brand however you want. You can be seen as empathetic, knowledgeable, reliable, and all of the things that make an effective healthcare practice.

Makes You an Authority

By sharing information (especially new and valuable information), your brand can become an authority in your space. For example, if you provide bariatric surgery and you have a channel that talks about various weight loss options, protocols for patients, and success stories, your channel can become a host of important information. By connecting your business to your channel, your business becomes an authority on the back of your video content.

Provides Shareable Content for Social Media

Social media values video content, and it’s easy to see why. Video content keeps people on platforms like Facebook and Instagram, and video content is very readily shared by people who watch it.

By producing highly valuable and engaging video content, you can leverage the power of social media to your advantage.

Read More: Animated Explainer Videos For Healthcare Businesses

Healthcare Video Marketing Best Practices

Educate and inform your audience.

Your video content needs to impart important information on your audience. Medicine and health are very complicated, and most patients are simply not very health literate. If your video content improves the health literacy of your patients by using certain terms correctly, explaining what certain jargon means, and expounding on the impact and importance of said jargon, your content will be easier to watch while also being more informative as a result.

Be empathetic.

Health issues are worrisome for patients. Just thinking about going to a hospital or clinic makes some people uncomfortable. For this reason, you want the people in your videos to be relatable while also making your audience feel like they’re not dealing with their issues by themselves.

You want your video content to be receptive of your audience’s worries. The people in your videos need to show the audience that they care about their issues and that the videos are made to help. It’s not just about education: it’s also about showing that you understand how your audience feels.

Solve common problems.

Good informational content adequately answers questions that people have about the topic that you introduce. The easiest way to do this is to look for common problems faced by your prospective patients and solve them with quick video explanations.

Do people know what to expect before they come into your office? What are common questions people have about certain conditions or health topics? By addressing these, you can solve common problems that patients often have.

It’s no secret that a user-friendly website will help you generate new business for your practice. But how do you make a user-friendly website? Here are 5 tips to making a user-friendly website for a medical practice.

SEO is seen as an old and outdated tactic, with some even claiming that SEO is “dead”.

But is SEO truly dead for businesses in the healthcare industry? Let’s find out.

Is SEO Still Important in The Healthcare Industry?

Let’s get this straight once and for all: is SEO still important in the healthcare industry? The answer is YES.

SEO is an important part of any business’s marketing efforts. Making sure that your practice’s website ranks for the keywords that prospective patients are searching for is an important part of making sure that your practice is found by those patients! If you don’t rank, you won’t be found on the search engines!

The reason why some argue that SEO is dead is because it’s not nearly as easy as it used to be. Good SEO requires effort, and this effort needs to be focused on good website experiences, excellent content, quality backlinks from authoritative sites, and a website optimized for certain keywords.

So why is SEO so important for healthcare businesses?

Why SEO Is Important for Healthcare Businesses

Visibility

If you’re not doing any SEO, then chances are nobody’s finding you through the search engines. You might be spending a lot of money on paid ads, but if all your traffic is coming from ads, you’re missing out on a key segment of users who aren’t seeing your ads at all!

By focusing on SEO for keywords that are relevant to your services, more people will see your practice. This increases overall visibility, and, if you’re focusing on local SEO, more people in your area will know who you are, where you are, and what you do.

Authority

Focusing on SEO means that you will be able to rise in rankings for important search terms. When you hit the top spot, you’ll be seen as the most important, most relevant, and possibly the best choice.

If, for example, you offer bariatric surgery in Dallas, and you rank #1 for bariatric surgery in Dallas, people in Dallas who are searching you are most likely to check out your website because you appeared first.

Free Traffic

Even though investing in SEO efforts may not be free, the marginal cost of traffic generated from SEO is $0. That means, as you rise up the rankings for a keyword, you get more and more free traffic. The top spot gets the most traffic, and almost all of the traffic goes to people on the front page.

Best of all, if a keyword gets more searches in any given month, you don’t pay to get that traffic. That traffic is yours. For this reason, SEO is still important in the healthcare industry, and without investing in it, you would miss out greatly!

If you run a medical practice, you may have asked this question: “What’s the best way to get the word out?” Marketing your practice may seem complicated because of all the regulations surrounding it, but it’s still important to do. Without marketing, it’ll be harder for people to know who you are and what you do.

So how do you market your medical practice online? Here’s how.

6 Ideas for Marketing Your Medical Practice

Send Promotions to Existing Patients

Your patient list is a goldmine. They’ve got a higher level of trust because they’ve already used your services. For this reason, focusing your promotional efforts on existing patients is much more likely to produce a return on investment.

It’s important to keep HIPAA regulations in mind. Don’t use medical data to create promotional material. At the same time, you want to keep your promotions as targeted as possible without using medical data to do it. Separating by demographic or ZIP code can help you send promotions to those who need it most.

Create Videos with Your Physicians

Your physicians have a wealth of knowledge that can be shared with the world. By creating videos with them in it, you can share that knowledge while providing good marketing material for your practice.

If your physicians become authorities on social media, your practice by extension becomes associated with that authority. This makes you a more attractive choice for prospective patients.

Ask for Honest Reviews from Patients

People trust reviews more than they trust marketing. For this reason, if you know your patients are having good experiences, you want them to share those experiences with everyone!

You can ask for honest reviews from patients by sending them emails, postcards, or by simply asking them when they leave. Ultimately, you want to have a system for getting patients to leave reviews on various platforms.

Guest Blogging

If you want your practice to be presented as an authority, there’s no better way to do so than by appearing on other people’s content. Guest blogging is a great way to do this.

Websites need excellent blog content in order to stay relevant. By providing blogs with content, you can give them what they need to grow while also putting your practice’s name out there. This can also help your SEO efforts!

Targeted Digital Ads

Targeted ads allow you to get the word out about your practice while focusing your ad dollars on the people that are most relevant.

Keep in mind that even your ads and ad targeting need to remain HIPAA compliant. Targeting people based on condition is not allowed, and using electronic medical records to make advertising lists is also against the rules. Target based on what you know about a particular demographic, location, or interest.

Invest in Local SEO

Local SEO is the practice of using the search engines to make it easier for people in your local area to find you. This makes it so your medical SEO efforts are focused on people who are the most relevant to your business: that is, people who are in your operating area.

Some practices have a wider reach, but most practices focus on their local area. For this reason, local SEO should be your focus!