Medical Marketing Services

I’m Greg, And Here’s Everything I Know About Healthcare and Medical Marketing

Prior to about 2012, physicians and hospitals rarely had to focus on online marketing—but then the online search demand for healthcare marketing exploded in 2013-2014. It was about 2012 when I realized that a medical marketing strategy would be one of the most important things a physician or a medical group could do to grow their practice.

The advent of review networks such as Google Reviews and Yelp, and directories such as Healthgrades and Vitals became a go-to resource for patients as they did their due diligence while looking for a physician.

I found many older physicians were reluctant to spend time, energy, and resources on their internet presence. But soon it became apparent that the younger physicians who focused on getting better reviews and building a better website were starting to take a big share of the new patients in a given locale. All of this happened because people began using the internet and social media for everything they did.

How The Internet Changed The Healthcare Industry

Physicians could no longer be “low tech.” There was pressure on them to have nice websites, offer patient portals, and ensure their information was easily found on the first page of Google with accurate information across all of their directory listings.

There was even a patient demand for them to create useful content for their patients. Here’s an example of a video we produced for one of the largest Nephrologist Groups in California. We created a series of diet and cooking tips for their patients who suffered from CKD.

People began to be drawn to physicians whom they considered to be “up with the times” and technologically savvy. They also, for some strange reason, began to associate a doctor’s web presence with his or her competency as a doctor. Sad, unfair, and insane…I know…but nevertheless, it was true.

Depending upon your specialty and the level of competition in your respective city, it would be helpful to implement a few of the following medical marketing services in order.

1. Healthcare Website Development

This is your starting point. This is where everything comes together for you with your web presence. This is the hub—everything else about your online presence is the spokes.

You’ll need a clean, modern-looking website with plenty of “trust factors” on the page. You’ll also want your website to be built in WordPress and properly search engine optimized.

Here’s an example of a website we built for a group of kidney specialists:

There are various kinds of healthcare websites. You can see a list of the top 50 healthcare websites in the world and their associated traffic. Most of the top medical sites in the world are used specifically for research, but the sites we build for doctors and medical offices are built to help potential patients pick up the phone and schedule an appointment. Our goal is to instill trust in the doctor or medical practice so that they can grow their practice.

But most importantly, when it comes to your website… NEVER use a company that is replicating the same website over and over again for thousands of other doctors. Some companies provide websites for doctors by repeating the same format. They’ll change the name of the doctor and a few pictures, but the overall site is an exact replica of thousands of other doctor websites. They also use the same content over and over again in their blogs and on the actual website. Google will penalize your site for having duplicate content on it.

You’ll also want to make sure that you stay away from DIY or Do-it-yourself website builders. There are too many limitations to make it worth your time and it will stifle you when you’re trying to generate new patients with internet marketing.

Spend the time to write your own authentic content and have a custom website built for you. Your practice is valuable, so don’t sell out when it comes to your most important digital asset.

2. Healthcare SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Once your website is complete and hosted on blazing-fast, secure, and reliable servers, you’ll want to begin performing medical Search Engine Optimization or SEO on your website.

SEO is the process of getting your website to come up near the top of the search engine results for people who may be looking for a doctor in your area of expertise.

Many factors go into whether a physician’s website will rank at the top of the search engines. Some of those factors include:

• Competition
• Age and credibility of their domain name
• Directory listing unification (How many directories you’re listed in and if they’re accurate)
• Online reviews
• Backlinks
• Website structure and readability
• No canned or duplicate content
• How the code is organized on the backend of the website
• Internal linking
• and many other technical factors such as page speed and hosting factors

More often than not, the doctor doesn’t have the time or the desire to worry about all of these factors. They just want more patients and they’d prefer to spend their time getting better at their specialty.

If you do have the time or the desire, this beginner’s guide to SEO can help you perform healthcare SEO on your site if you decide to do it alone.

3. Healthcare Content Marketing

Content marketing for healthcare service providers is among the most effective medical marketing strategies out there. You can build blogs, resources, infographics, videos, podcasts, and many other types of relevant and useful content.

For instance, you can build trust by shooting a video like the one below and then posting it on your social media accounts or your website as a resource. This type of content builds trust like nothing else when it comes to new patients.

When doing content marketing, you’ve got to make sure you’re not using a marketing company that is just throwing up canned content. There are marketing and website companies that get rich by buying or writing one piece of content and then selling it to thousands of doctors.

If you’d like to find out if a healthcare marketing company is providing their clients with copied or duplicate content, ask them for an example website that they’ve worked on for another doctor’s office. Then go and find one of the blogs on that example website. Then go to Copyscape and enter the URL of that blog. If nothing comes up, you’ll know that the company writes and produces original content. If other articles come up, you’ll know that the marketing company is trying to pull one over on you.

Not having original content is one of the primary ways to get your site penalized by Google. So when you think about it, it’s no fun to pay a marketing company to ruin your online presence.

Content marketing can be one of the most effective strategies for acquiring new patients. But doing content marketing wrong is just asking for trouble.

4. Paid Search Marketing For Physicians

Using Google Ads or Bing Ads, we are able to bid on keywords that you as a physician might want to come up with in the search engines. There is an associated cost per click every time someone clicks on your ad, but it can be used effectively to achieve a very lucrative ROAS or Return on Ad Spend.

Most doctors aren’t aware of Pay-per-click, so you can really take advantage of the lack of competition in this advertising niche.

A couple of things to stay away from though:

• Make sure you don’t try and run PPC campaigns on your own using Google Ads Express. You will most likely spend a lot of money with very few conversions.
• Stay away from bad landing pages. If you spend money to drive someone to your website or landing page, make sure that your landing page is conversion-ready. If it’s not, then you’ll just waste money sending them to a page that is not ready to convert.

5. Healthcare Reputation Management

We build review wizards that encourage patients to leave reviews about the physician or group. This increases the trust that people have in you when they search for your name online.

Notice the sequence below for one of our current multi-location Nephrology Groups. It’s a series of easy-step questions to make it easy for patients to review your practice.

Through our review wizards, we help you mitigate bad reviews by giving you an opportunity to try and fix the situation before someone goes and posts about it online.

If you’re wondering how some of your competitors have 25, 50, or 100 5-star reviews, then they are most likely using this tactic.

6. Competitive Analysis

We can tell you every single detail of your competitor’s digital marketing strategy. After analyzing the competition, we’re able to better identify the exact actions we need to take to overtake the competition and ensure that you are outranking them in the search engines and getting more clicks when people are searching for your service or niche specialty.

7. Measuring and Growing

We don’t implement any of our strategies blindly. We live by the mantra, “What you can measure, you can manage.” We’ll be with you every step of the way to help you build, grow, and sustain a thriving practice.

Lemonade Stand Offers Our Professional Digital Marketing Support

I’ve trained a substantial team to help physicians and medical groups all around the country. We’d love to support you and increase your online presence with our medical marketing services.

Give us a call or fill out this form if you’d like to know more about the healthcare marketing program we’ve developed for healthcare practitioners and groups.