Marketing Your Healthcare Practice in the 21st Century

Healthcare marketing is a multi-faceted organism. To correctly market your practice, you need to be able to differentiate yourself from the countless other medical providers that are looking to draw patients to their practice and you also need to be able to understand just where your target audience is, and how to best reach them.

Ultimately, consumers have been changing the way they look for and interact with their medical providers for quite some time now. Generational differences have surfaced as a new generation enters the healthcare market all on their own, and it turns out they don't go about things the way older generations did. This is not a surprise to those of us that keep a finger on the pulse of consumerism, but unfortunately, there are still practices that think their patients are searching for them in traditional print media or through television advertisements.

Marketing your healthcare practice in the 21st century is all about establishing your brand and your brand identity. It's just as important to engage your customers outside of the medical office through social media and blogging as is providing high-quality medical care. Interacting with patients through popular social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter is worth much more than worrying about some isolated comments about your practice on Yelp. If you're able to establish a patient following because of the brand you built, then your online and offline activities will spread out to every corner of the world.

Think about this: You're a small medical provider that provides Family Medicine services. You have an outdated and non-user friendly website that offers nothing apart from your business hours. You don't have a Facebook or Twitter account, and you certainly don't use Google Adwords or Facebook Ads. Your patients love you, but your practice isn't growing. You decide to take out a small ad in the local newspaper, or maybe pay ridiculous amounts of money for a 30-second ad on late night television that will barely be seen. You don't really track your return on your investment, and all you end up doing is hoping your patients love you enough that they spread the word around and eventually (hopefully) you'll get some business in like that.

Did the above sound painfully familiar? You're not alone.

There's a couple of basic things medical practices (regardless of their size) can start doing to increase patient engagement, draw in new patients, and increase patient retention.

1) Track your Marketing data. Track new patients, ask them where they heard from you, collect and analyze the data. Figure out what the return on investment is for your time and efforts. Run patient retention and utilization reports all of this data should be accessible to your practice. If it's not, then you should really get in touch with Pixel Health Consulting as quickly as possible.

2) Update your website to contain the following: Home page with your practice's mission, vision, and values; it could also contain a section where your practice is sharing the latest industry news. You should obviously also have a list of service offerings with hours of operations and a page dedicated to informing patients about the medical team (not just doctors) you've employed. Let patients request appointments through your website if possible. Make sure your website is mobile-phone friendly, and make sure you have a page for blogging on your website. Blog at least once every couple of weeks on topics related to patient care, make the topics easy to understand and read. Remember who your audience is! Lastly, make sure your website has had proper Search Engine Optimization (SEO) done to it.

3) Create at least the following social media accounts: A company Facebook page, and a company Twitter account. It helps if each individual provider also has their own Twitter account. Encourage users to leave feedback on Facebook, and make sure that you have at least one staff dedicated to answering Facebook inquiries and complaints. Twitter is your medium for sharing your posts, blogs, announcements, and other industry news. Facebook is for sharing your blogs, announcements, and sharing pictures and videos of satisfied customers.

There's a lot more to be done in the Healthcare Marketing world, and we're here to help. Get in touch with Pixel Health Consulting at [email protected] to learn more about what we can do for you.