WHEN IN ROME, DO AS THE ROMANS DO

This timeless piece of ancient advice for sure can’t be overlooked even in today’s modern scenario. In the constantly evolving dynamic world, if you rest, you’ll remain with the rest only. Thus, in today’s Digital World, it’s a must for every single business, to keep itself relevant & accessible, which is possible only with a digital approach & acumen.
Unlike any other industry, healthcare serves a broad audience. And today’s smartphone consumers feed highly on apps and websites. Today, when a person decides they need to see a new doctor or a specialist, they either go online and search for one or they ask their friends. Doctors just can’t reach potential patients through traditional print or TV ads, the way that they used to in the past. So to improve their visibility & accessibility, it’s important to incorporate a comprehensive, digital-driven plan that attracts and retains new patients, thus widening the clientele.

When the customers are impromptu online, how can docs remain offline just in their clinics? With medical digital marketing, we can help you track the digital footprints left by your potential patients to see which content is reaching them& influence them for conversions so that you can design future marketing tactics to capitalize on your successes. This is why it’s important for doctors & health care services to stay on top of digital marketing countdown.

Digital Marketing today is undoubtedly a necessity, not a luxury. Read this blog to know, why every doctor’s clinic needs digital marketing in order to obtain a stellar return on investment and remarkable results.

1. SHOWCASE YOUR SERVICES WITH A WEBSITE

Patients very well remember a more user-friendly experience. Today’s smart generation before visiting a doctor checks out every related detail online. Thus, you lose many potential patients if you don’t cater to your services online. A website thus serves as your portfolio & links you directly to the patient, wherever he may be living. It’s at this stage where a patient builds his trust in you, in which if your website succeeds, half of the task is already done. So, the key to generating leads is to deal as a problem-solver, because it’s for the solutions to their problems, they visit your website. To provide the best user experience, it is important to create a website or a landing page that’s extremely navigable and user-friendly, has AMP-enabled pages with the lightning-fast loading speed, to ensure that visitors stay on your website and do not bounce off.
All the significant details such as doctor’s profile, consultation timings, health departments, courses of treatment, appointment bookings, charges, etc. should be available on the website. Imagine a potential patient posting on Facebook writing, “Does anyone know a good back specialist I should see in Delhi ?” Your current patients will take the time to reply to someone like this and offer your name if your practice is convenient and easy to use, especially if they can quickly send a link to your beautiful website to book an appointment.

Thus, Digital Accessibility registers you on the World Health Map, which will not only benefit you in patient-retention, but it will also help you in patient-acquisition.

2. EDUCATE & MENTOR WITH BLOGS

Blogs are a medium to speak up in-person to your patients. So these blogs should be so true, convincing & engaging that while reading, the patient should be able to build an emotional rapport with the delivered content, and feel that he has personally visited you. So, it’s important that you deliver blogs on all possible subjects your patients may come online for a referral.

From informational content on symptoms and treatment options and FAQs to home remedies and simple tricks, blogs can also serve as a powerful medium to educate & instruct your customers. It’s a human tendency that a word-of-mouth referral definitely impacts us. So, if your blogs feature success stories of your patients & customer testimonials, it can greatly influence your website traffic and readership. To stay relevant, it is important to plan an effective content strategy by identifying the important dates and months in the world of health, so that you deliver valuable content at this time. In this way, your patients will become habitual of your content & remain your loyal customers.

3. LEVERAGE VIDEOS TO INVOKE EMOTIONS

The greatest advantage of videos is their storytelling aspect. The audience loves stories. And a video helps them to connect to the brand’s story and correlate their smiles & tears with that story. A video triggers a variety of emotions like hope, passion, courage, etc. which wins you brownie points.

Watching a doctor in a video describing a condition or procedure can make a patient feel more at ease about what they’re experiencing, and make a patient feel as though they’ve already met the physician and increase their comfort level by seeing their facial expressions, mannerisms and even hearing their voice.

A video not only provides deep insights on a particular disease or treatment, but also helps your patients feel at ease& safety, and assures them that they are in the hands of an experienced practitioner. It also serves as a patient manual highlighting what all precautions or measures he is required to follow. In addition to this, videos of customer testimonials can help build your credibility & reliability. According to Wordstream, one-third of online activity is spent watching a video. Thus, video is a very powerful & popular digital marketing tool.

4. OPTIMISE TO GET DISCOVERED

Everyone loves you if Google loves you. This means your online visibility is impactful only if you rank higher in Google Searches. Imagine you have a great website, blogs, email lists, and videos. But, your patients can’t find you on Google. Then what?
The only escape route is SEO. It’s important to optimize the published content in terms of images, headline tags, written content, etc. SEO is done in 2 ways: On-page & Off-page, both are crucial to the success of an SEO campaign.
On-page SEO (also known as “on-site” SEO) is the act of optimizing different parts of your website that affect your search engine rankings. It’s stuff that you have control over and can change on your own website, like
• Title tags
• Headings
• URL structure
• Alt text for images
• Page load speed
• Page content
• Internal linking etc.

Off-page SEO includes all possible methods to fetch more & more links from other websites. It includes various techniques like :
• Creating content that is compelling & valuable enough to attract linking from outside
• Social media sharing
• Influencer Marketing
• Guest blogging etc.

5. LEVERAGING LOCAL SEO

As per the latest statistics, 39% of patients choose their practitioner from a Google search. This clearly indicates that registering your clinic or medical practice on Google My Business list can serve as a magic wand for you, in driving traffic to your website. The added features of the list help you provide go-to information like updated phone numbers, complete address, services, working hours and a link to your website, which can directly make you easily accessible at your visitors’ fingertips. Sharing reviews of older patients & visitors, relevant blogs, etc. not only educate your audience but also build your credibility. Thus, being accessible to local as well as outside visitors helps in creating your brand awareness.

SEO involves infusing keywords into your digital content to make it more likely to appear on search engines. What’s cherry on the cake is that SEO not only makes the digital footprints of your visitors incredibly easy to track, meaning you will know what is reaching patients and what isn’t but also analyses what strategies are worth investing in and which strategies need to be dropped.

6. BANKING ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Social media is the most loved platform worldwide. Thus, digitally handling the social media profile, can work wonders for the doctors in brand building. Once the people would start loving you as a brand, that is bound to drive conversions & revenue.

Social media is equivalent to ‘word of mouth’ marketing, which creates an ever-lasting impact on the people, especially in the healthcare sector. If many people around you, recommend an XYZ doctor, you are more likely to consult that doctor. There’s no denying to the fact that social media makes the digital marketing experience even more worthwhile. Thus, a digitally-driven marketing strategy serves as a magnet in attracting revenue for your business.

In fact, according to Infographics Archive, doctors earn the trust of 60% social media users, over any other group, for their content. Thus, posting blogs, videos & images of staff caring for patients, upcoming events, patient reviews, etc. help build the trust of the people in you.

A great feature is a “Book Now” button that takes patients to the hospital’s physician page, so patients can easily locate a doctor for their needs.

7. PPC ADS TO GET IMMEDIATE RESULTS WITHOUT EXTRA COSTS

PPC is a free online advertising service in which no initial fee is charged to the advertiser for ad placement. He’s charged only when the ad gets clicked. No doctor/health agency today can underestimate the recent statistical study that, 88% of patients start with a search engine while hunting for a health service.
PPC ad campaigns can help flourish your business in many ways :
• Online Ads Give You Full Control of Your Medical Advertising Strategy
• Paid Advertising Gives You Better Targeting Options
• Help Target Local Customers Online
• Protect Your Reputation With Instant Review Alerts
• Expand Your Reach On Your Behalf In New Markets
• Bring You Directly In The Reach Of Your Target Audience & Target Geography

8. E-MAIL MARKETING

E-mail Marketing is a choice & favorite among the digital early birds. Think for a while that, why’d anyone search a query outside if he already has its remedy in his inbox? Thus, e-mails, newsletters are a resourceful tool when it comes to educating your audience before they can even think of it. Planning & executing your content & serving it voluntarily at the ease of your audience, help you move ahead.
The e-mails can feature a video, a current blog post or provide industry news as per the demand of the situations in which your target audience lives, will give readers valuable information on various topics.
This newsletter email sent out by Akron Children’s Hospital in August helped parents of young children with issues facing pre-schoolers going back to school. Parents who had subscribed were dealing with many of these situations just before school starts, and this email was timely in providing answers to their problems.