How To Market Online In The Medical Industry (Without the Overwhelm)

Did you know that people are spending an average of 3 hours per day on social networks and messaging? (Globalwebindex, 2018).

Your competition has most likely caught on. It's your turn.

Does this sound familiar?

1. Your practice is built on referrals and/or local Chamber of Commerce or referral groups, resulting in unpredictable, slow growth.
2. You know you should use “social media,” but you’re being bombarded with so many offers and you don’t know where to begin. Perhaps you even hired some marketing agencies and they didn’t deliver what they promised.
3. Your practice is mission-driven and great at what it does; You know that if more people knew about the quality of care you deliver, your medical practice would be overflowing with patients.

If you resonate with any of the above, then this article is for you.

I am going to reveal the strategy that we used to help a medical center in Arizona make $1 million in additional patient revenue last quarter while improving their online reputation and helping them expand to multiple locations. You can model this exact strategy for your own practice and achieve significant results.

There are five pillars to any effective social media patient acquisition strategy. These pillars work together to form a system that, once set in place, delivers predictable, stable, and potentially exponential growth. The system does this by getting the attention of someone who has never heard about your practice, then turning them into a new patient. Lastly, the system gets them to leave a raving review online since the new patient is now a fan of what your practice does and is excited to share their experience with others.

Let’s break these down one by one.

1) Clear Understanding Of Your Ideal Patient

Every marketing strategy requires a clear understanding the ideal customer. If you try to target everyone, marketing can get expensive really quick. Here are some basic questions to consider when identifying the ideal patient:

• How old are they typically?
• What are they most afraid of and/or what is keeping them up at night?
• What are their hopes and dreams?
• What do they read/consume regularly?
• What false beliefs are keeping them from doing business with you?
• What would motivate them to take action on the health solution that you are offering?

These are some starter questions that can help you brainstorm some demographics and psychographics of your ideal patients. Once we know who they are, we have a better idea of A. Where to find them and B. How to speak to them to get their attention. 

One of the best ways to map this out is to interview your best patients and ask them these questions. It’s obviously impossible to completely put yourself in the minds of others. So, asking them directly will always yield the best results.

2) Identification of Best Social Media Channel to Advertise

With so many options for social media channels, it is tempting to make either of these two mistakes:

1. Try to market on every social media channel; thus spreading company resources thin and not doing a good job on any of them.
2. Get overwhelmed by all the choices and not try anything at all.

The good news is that you only need to master one to experience the growth that you are looking for. There are plenty of people on just one popular social media platform to make your campaigns profitable.

Also, let me be clear: The only way to be successful on social media is to advertise. All the platforms are pay-to-play and you will get nowhere fast if you think you can post something and that your ideal patients would see it.

The best thing about advertising is that, if you track your metrics correctly, your growth is measurable and scalable.

For example: When you launch your campaign, if you determine that you are paying Facebook $20 per lead, and that 1 out of 5 of those leads are setting up an appointment and coming in as new patients, then you know that you paid Facebook $100 to acquire a new patient. If you know that on average you make $1,000 for each new patient, then you can see how you can quickly scale your practice by simply paying Facebook more in a advertising because you are getting a 1:10 return on your ad spend.

In other words, if you knew that if you put $1 into an ATM you would get $10 out, how many dollar bills would you put into the ATM? 

Choose a platform where your ideal patient is most likely to spend the most time on. 

If you are a practice that targets the local market, Facebook and Instagram are typically the best platforms to begin with because of the 2 billion+ people on these platforms and the sophisticated targeting capabilities. However, to be effective, you must follow the rest of these pillars or else you risk draining a lot of money into advertising without seeing results.

3) Pattern-Interrupting Message

Experts estimate that we are bombarded with over 5,000 ads a day. This means that it has never been harder to grab people’s attention because of their decreasing attention span. 

This means that we need to be good at interrupting people’s patterns before they give us the light of day to hear what we have to offer. This is especially true if they are on social media scrolling for cat videos. Nobody goes on social media to be advertised to!

Here are some examples of how to get people’s attention and get them to stop scrolling:

• Ask an intriguing question
• Provide a startling statistic
• Use an image or video that induces curiosity
• Make a bold promise in the headline

For example: 

"Did you know that mistakes on a doctor’s note, mainly due to messy handwriting, kill over 7,000 people in the U.S. each year?"

Or 

"On average, 21 people in the United States die each day from the lack of available organs for transplant. Do you feel comfortable relying on the generosity of others to stay alive?”

Once you’ve got their attention, you can continue with a message that connects the pattern interrupt to your offer. 

Finding the best messaging that gets the lowest cost per lead will most likely require split testing different marketing hooks and keeping your eye on the metrics to understand which ones perform the best for your market.

4) An Irresistible Offer

Everything up to this point would be in vain if you don’t make an offer that is irresistible to the cold market. The “cold market” is defined as potential patients that have never heard or had any exposure to your practice. 

The best offers are those that incorporate something “Free” in it. People love “Free” and it also serves as a pattern interrupt as well. Ideally, you will also want something “Free” that has a high perceived value in the market.

For example:

• If you are a dentist, offering a free dental whitening kit with their next appointment.
• If you are a chiropractor, offering free x-rays with their next spinal adjustment. 
• If you are a surgeon, offering a free comprehensive full body evaluation.

Keep in mind that it may appear that you are losing money up front by performing a “free” service or giving something away, but a significant percentage of those new patients will end up becoming very profitable for your practice because you have established trust and rapport once you brought them in. 

You will be able to identify different ways to serve them and make an offer on the spot. Since insurance also covers many procedures, a lot of times it will be a no brainer for them to oblige to the additional offer you are making them that you’ve determined they need.

If “Free” is not an option, then a severely discounted offer may also do the trick to get initial traction and new patients in the door.

5) Proper Lead Handling/Nurturing

The goal of the pillars up to this point have been to simply get potential patients to “raise their hand” and identify themselves as leads through targeted social media campaigns. A “lead" is defined as someone that may be interested in your business solution. 

A lot of businesses believe that the problem that they have is that they are not generating enough leads.

In my experience, a more urgent priority for most businesses is establishing a proper lead handling and nurturing foundation to avoid the mishandling and waste of new opportunities.

As the Dan Kennedy expertly illustrates in his book No B.S. Guide To Direct Response Marketing, the absence of proper lead handling and nurturing is like having holes in a bucket: Even if you pour water (leads) into the bucket, the water will just leak back out through all the different holes that exist in your back end systems. 

As an aside, this is also where a lot of marketing agencies fail because they do not take ownership of this aspect of a client’s process. They just simply send some cold leads to their clients and blame them when the leads don’t convert to sales. They take no responsibility for educating their clients on proper lead handling. 

The best lead handling/nurturing systems contain the following (and yes, this is about to get a little technical):

• An immediate notification with the contact information of the lead to the team in charge of outreach
• A friendly outbound call within the hour to that lead to get them to schedule an appointment to come in
• Immediate SMS text messages congratulating the lead on claiming the offer
• Email follow ups and voicemail drops to the phone of the lead to build rapport and trust
• A CRM that tracks every interaction with the lead for organized management

All of this (except the friendly outbound call) should be automated to handle significant volume and measure the success of each aspect of the campaign. 

In order to scale faster, you will also benefit from multiple people on the phones to work on getting the leads to set appointments. 

Remember: Just because someone raises their hand as potentially interested in what you have to offer doesn’t mean that their interest will remain. People are fickle and get distracted easily. They are quick to forget what they felt at the height of their intrigue while they were reading your ad. 

So, knowing this, you must strike while the iron is hot with outreach and in a way that builds the most trust and rapport for the highest success rate in converting that lead to an appointment.

Bonus: Online Reputation Management

Online reputation is extremely important these days since everyone seems to be Googling for other’s reviews. 

So, once the patients come in for an appointment, deliver professional and friendly service. Then, make sure to have a system in place that asks for reviews in a systematic way. 

The best systems to achieve this send the patient a text message with clear instructions on how to leave a review to make it as easy as possible for them to do it. 

Once you have a lot of reviews, Google will reward you with an SEO boost and your practice will stand out among your competition when people are searching for you online. 

Establishing these pillars is how we helped a medical center generate $1 million in additional revenue last quarter and turn cold prospects into raving fan patients that leave excellent reviews for our client.

I sincerely hope you got value out of reading.

So now, you have two options:

1. Take this information and go apply it to your practice on your own. 
2. Apply to have us map out a system and a strategy for you that will make your practice first choice in your community and implement these pillars into your #marketing.

If #2 sounds like something that would be useful to you, feel free to send me a message here on LinkedIn. 

Good luck,

Andrey Seas, J.D. 

#medicalmarketing #marketingautomation #marketing