Creating a marketing strategy that’s going to be successful and effective for doctors or medical practices can often turn into a very confusing or daunting task.

Since there are hundreds of options in terms of marketing and advertising for doctors and medical practices, it’s quite difficult for them to choose the right one.

After all, the last thing that a practice wants to do is make a wrong decision and spend all of its resources to figure out that all it did was waste time.

Website

These days potential patients tend to turn to the Internet, and more specifically search engines when looking for healthcare services or local physicians.

That means most patients have started taking their health status into their own hands which means they also started caring a lot more.

In turn, they care a lot about learning about their health status and developing a trusting relationship with potential doctors or medical practices before deciding to book an appointment with them.

One of the best ways that companies can cater to the needs of their potential patients is to learn more about them by optimizing the website of the medical practice or the doctor for the patient experience.

This way, any doctor or medical practice can significantly improve the lead generation and retention rates for patients.

However, that’s not all, as medical practices also need to invest in having a website design that has custom features and is interactive, mobile friendly, and loads quickly.

Another important feature that every website needs to have is mobile optimization, which means the company has to have a mobile version of its website.

That’s because most searches these days are done through a tablet or mobile devices, and websites that don’t have a mobile version of them don’t function well on those devices.

Social Media

Social media marketing efforts have become essential for most companies these days across practically every industry, including the healthcare and medical industries.

Social media platforms are a great way for medical practices to reach their ideal patients and share content with them that will nurture the relationship that the practice has with potential patients, and engage the current ones.

Social media platforms have also become a great contributor to generating website traffic and improving the ranking of that website on the search engine results pages because they’re helpful in lead generation, as well as reaching a broader audience of people that can become patients one day.

Furthermore, most social platforms also have free analytics tools integrated inside them that provide companies with different abilities to track their promotional efforts and optimize any social media marketing campaign they are utilizing for their medical practices.

However, before a medical practice can start using any social media platform it first needs to evaluate which platforms are preferred by the target patients, so that the practice can meet its audience where it already is.

Marketing Medical Practices

Healthcare and medical marketing efforts have to rely on the right strategies to be able to reach the target audiences and gain more patients.

After all, if a patient isn’t familiar with a medical practice, when they’re in need of some help, they won’t be looking to the healthcare facilities that they don’t know in the first place.

Search Engine Optimization

Most medical practices tend to operate locally which means they have to focus on optimizing their websites for search engines in a local manner.

What that means is investing time and effort into ensuring that the website of the medical practice ranks highly on search engine results pages around the location of the practice itself.

Some of the most important elements that companies have to take into consideration when creating or optimizing their websites for search engines is to make sure that the name of the city is inside the title tag and then that it’s mentioned on the page itself a few times.

The medical practice also has to obtain and regularly update the Google My Business profile and add its name, phone number, address, and operating hours for that location.

If a medical practice has a few different locations, then it needs to create separate landing pages for every single location and follow the same essentials to increase its ranking on search engine results pages and reach more potential patients.

Content Marketing

With the help of content marketing efforts, medical practices can generate more organic website traffic, improve brand awareness, and their organic search efforts, as well as position the practice as a thought leader in the industry.

The first thing that goes into a well-planned content marketing strategy is creating a blog aside from the business website.

That’s because a blog that performs well and has a good structure can generate up to half of the organic traffic of a website.

Once the medical practice has established its blog, it’s time to start brainstorming content ideas for it.

However, the best type of content that a medical practice can create for its target audience is by basing that content on the data that the practice already has on the target audience.

There are a number of tools that any business can use online to figure out what potential customers are searching for when they’re looking to find solutions to their pain points that a company caters to, including which search queries and keywords you’re using, and even which pages they tend to frequent to find the solutions they need.

This is the type of information that every medical practice needs to start using to create content around because the potential patients are already using those search queries and keywords to find the solutions they need.

That means to improve the ranking of the business website of the medical practice, as well as the blog, medical practices can start creating content that is similar to what the target audience is already looking for based on the available information.

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Matthew Caiola serves as CEO at 5W Public Relations, managing the overall growth, direction and day-to-day business of the Corporate & Technology Communications Divisions and Digital Marketing.

With more than 17 years of PR experience, Matthew leads teams in launching and building high-growth tech companies, disrupting industries, building global brand resonance through thought leadership, C-Suite profiling, and speakers’ programs, as well as crisis communications across a variety of industries.