6 Effective Digital Marketing Strategies to Acquire More Patients for Doctor & Surgeon

There was a time when doctors or practitioners were getting patients through physicians’ referral or word of mouth of their existing patients or relatives. But in this internet era, people are leveraging online platforms to find a doctor for their treatments.

Any modern practice that wants to stay ahead in the current digital era will need to adopt digital marketing as part of their marketing strategy. By leveraging right digital marketing strategies you can reach and acquire more patients for your practice.

Here are 6 digital marketing strategies that will help doctors or surgeons to grow their practice.

Before you start working on your digital marketing strategies, you need to define your goals and clear about what do you want to achieve from your digital marketing efforts? For example- if your goal is to increase brand awareness you can consider social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn etc. and start posting informative content. If you want to reach potential patients who are looking for your service you can run PPC advertisement. If your goal is to generate leads, then you can create a high converting landing page and use a form to capture leads. If you are planning to increase traffic to your website then you can implement a content marketing strategy.

If you want to have a strong online presence and gain visibility, then you need to have a website. Build a website which is easy to navigate, mobile optimised, use high quality visuals, highlight your unique selling points, provide valuable information to patient through blogging, and option to book an online appointment.

Here are some key features that you can include in your medical website to grow your medical practice.

A Clear Value Proposition in Your Homepage

On your website’s homepage provide a value statement which will convey to your potential patients about the quality and type of care you offer.

Contact Information

Ensure your location and contact information is correct and up to date. Make this information easily accessible to patient, you can add this information not only contact us page even in other pages as a call to action.

Online Appointment Booking Form

You can add a booking appointment form to make it easier for your potential patients to book an appointment at their convenience.

Make a List of Services/Specialised Areas

It is essential to showcase the list of services you are offering, if you are specialised on a specific procedure for example liver transplant you can highlight that as well. So, when potential patient looking for a liver transplant, they will contact you.

A Dedicated Page about your Qualification/Experience/Achievements

Include all the information about your qualification, experience like how many surgeries you have completed and success rate, if you received any award or got recognition for your contribution to the society.

Patient Resources

Keep all the useful information like insurance provider, patient registration form, list of frequently asked questions available for your patient.

Patient Testimonials

Get as many as testimonials or reviews from your existing patients and include them on your website, Google my business, or post in different social medias. This will help to build more credibility and become trustworthy to your potential patients.

If you want to improve your medical practice website traffic, get higher rank in google search for specific condition or treatment, attract new patients without paying for any ads, increase more queries and appointment bookings. This can be achieved with SEO for doctors or surgeons.

Here are some important factors you need to consider for your local SEO strategy:

Mobile Optimised Website

Most of your potential patients are using mobile devices to search information online, make sure your website is mobile optimised to give them seamless experience when they are visiting your website.

Do Extensive Keyword Research

First you need to research the keywords your potential patients are using to search for a medical speciality. For example, if someone is looking for an “alternative to bariatric surgery” you can include following keywords “non-invasive bariatric surgery”, “bariatric surgery alternative” in your website content, or google business listing.

Online Review Play a Crucial Role

Online review plays an important role in Google ranking, make sure you have some patient reviews listed on your website.

Claim your Google my Business Listing

To rank higher on Google as a doctor or surgeon, you need to ensure your business is listed on Google my Business. You need to claim, verify and update your name, address, and phone number.

Create a Business Page in Facebook

If you don’t have a business page in Facebook, you are losing visibility from your potential patients. Facebook business page is critical for first page search results.

Creating Informative Content

Once you have a list of keywords, create informative content based on those keywords and start posting in your blog, social media, include in your landing page

Building Backlinks

Backlinks can help improve your website search ranking. Try to get links from credible sites which are relevant to your medical practice or speciality.

Content marketing is an integral part of digital marketing strategy. By crafting a content marketing strategy for your practice, you will be able to provide useful information to your patient, generate more traffic to your website, and grow your practice.

Here are some tips for crafting your content marketing strategy:

Define a Goal

Before you start investing your money and energy in content marketing, define what goals you want to accomplish through content marketing.

Identify your Target Audience

Once you have defined your goal, next is identify your potential patients and create a customer avatar.  Do some research about where they are spending their time, what kind of information they are looking for, and what type of contents they are getting engaged.

Create a Content Roadmap

Now you know who is your target audience and their preference, based on this information create a content roadmap and include information like channels for your content distribution, frequency and time of posting etc.

Start Creating Content-

Start working on writing content, it can be a blog post, social media post, video etc. If you are a plastic surgeon, you can write a blog post about advanced technology used in plastic surgery, you can also create a video and share some tips on healthy lifestyle, you can post about launching a new service or open a new clinic in social media.

Keeping a Track of your Content Performance

Just publishing your content your work is not over, you need to keep a track of your published content performance. You need to see what type of content getting more views or getting more engagement from your audience, this will help you to customise your content marketing strategy.

Majority of your potential patient spends their most of the time in social media, so you can’t ignore the importance of social media in your digital marketing strategy. There are several advantages of social media marketing for doctor or surgeon. Use social media you can share useful and informative content to build trust among your potential patients. It can also help to drive traffic to your website by sharing a link of your website to your social media post. You can also nurture a relationship with patients by responding to their questions or comments. You can use social media to share latest news and update in your field, it will show you as a thought leader in your respective area.

Here are some social media post ideas for doctor/surgeon:

Facebook- You can share updates about your clinic, go live in Facebook and engage with your audience, also share the picture of any event or conference, conduct free webinar and answer patient’s question.

Instagram-If you are a dentist, you can create reel about common teeth brushing mistakes, if you are a dermatologist, you can create a reel about 5 super foods for skin.

YouTube– As an orthopaedic surgeon you can talk about the benefits of heathy bone and what food you can take for healthy bone.

Patient Testimonial– You can share video of patient success stories and testimonials; this will help you as a credible healthcare practitioner.

With PPC ads for doctor or surgeon, your practice can quickly reach to more targeted patients than other marketing strategies like search engine optimisation or SEO which will take months or years to get results, but PPC ads can deliver results right away. With advance targeting settings you can target potential patients who are actually looking for your service. Best thing about PPC ads is you only pay when someone click on your ads.

Define Desired Outcomes

Before you start working on your PPC advertising strategy, you need to first determine your goals from your PPC ads. Do you want to create brand awareness or interested in getting more quality leads?

Keyword Strategy

Potential patients often use a specific location or speciality to find a doctor or surgeon for their treatment. For example- plastic surgeon in San Diego. Since their searches are targeted, you should consider targeted keywords for your keyword strategy.

Set your Ads Budget

In PPC ads, you will be charged when someone click on your ad. You need to decide how much you are willing to spend on every click.

Determine an Offer

Based on your marketing goal you can decide an offer, if your goal is to capture leads then you can offer them an e-book or any other lead magnet which will provide a solution to their medical condition. If you want to create brand awareness, you can dive them to your website.

Write your ads Copy

Once you are ready with an offer, you can develop creative or ads copy of your campaign. It is important to have multiple versions of your ads, when you are running multiple ads, some ads perform better than other this will help you to decide which one to pause and which one to continue.

Track your Result

Keep an eye on your ads performance, if you are running Google ads it will give you an insight about the performance of your ads campaign, you can tweak your ads campaign accordingly. In addition, you also need to have analytics on your website, to identify which advertisements are generating more queries for patient appointment.

Conclusion

Above mentioned digital marketing strategies are very powerful, if you implement and execute it strategically it will increase your online visibility and build a strong brand.

Ready to Grow your Practice with a Dedicated Healthcare Digital Marketing Agency?

Healthbizcare is a dedicated healthcare digital marketing agency, helping doctors, surgeons or other healthcare practitioners to grow their business with customised digital marketing strategies.