Medical Clinic Marketing – The Complete Guide

Medical clinic marketing can attract new patients, grow your healthcare practice, build upon your online presence, and improve the patient experience. What kinds of marketing strategies are suited for your industry?

Here are the top marketing strategies for medical clinics:

• Website design
• Content marketing
• SEO
• Online reviews
• Social Media Marketing
• Video Marketing
• Email marketing
• Reputation management

In this guide, we’ll delve further into the above strategies for medical clinics and expound on the value of a marketing agency to drive your goals!

Why Do Medical Clinics Need Marketing?

Whether your medical clinic is newly established or has been around for years but is suffering in the growth department, let’s begin by going over the advantages of medical clinic marketing.

Attract New Patients

Patients of a medical clinic can drop off all the time, often for reasons having little to do with the clinic itself.

For instance, perhaps a patient’s healthcare plan changes so they can no longer see the same service providers. The patient could even move and need to find a different clinic.

To ensure that the clinic’s bottom line doesn’t skip a beat, it’s critical to have an ever-growing influx of leads.

Marketing efforts can introduce your clinic to new potential patients, inspire them to come in, and remind existing patients of your presence so they might schedule a checkup as well.

Grow Your Audience

More than merely attracting leads, your medical clinic needs the means to convert leads to patients. Medical practice marketing is the answer.

Your website will be freshly designed with opt-in forms and lead magnets. You’ll have an inviting email marketing strategy that nurtures leads until they’re ready to come in.

Once they do, you’ll wow them with your exceptional customer service.

Differentiate Yourself from the Competition

According to research resource Wonder, in the United States alone, up to 34,752 ambulatory or non-hospital medical care clinics exist, with 7,100 of them offering urgent care.

The average patient has more options than ever before. Why should they choose your healthcare practice over the abundance of others in their city or town?

You can use marketing ideas for medical clinics to answer that question. Your marketing measures will present your clinic to your target audience as a viable solution for all their health needs.

Increase Sales

As more patients come through the doors than ever before, your medical clinic will see a higher rate of revenue that allows you to pour more dollars into medical practice marketing.

Improve the Patient Experience

The last benefit of medical clinic marketing is by far the most important, and that’s elevating the patient experience.

By discovering your target audience, appealing to them, getting them through your doors, and then serving them as best you can, you’ll keep your patients happy.

They’ll leave positive reviews, not to mention use word of mouth, and your clinic could spread. You’ll also continue to retain those patients for a long time to come.

Marketing Strategies for Medical Clinics

Next, per the list in the intro, let’s delve into the best medical clinic marketing tactics at your disposal.

Target Audience Discovery

Who is your clinic’s target audience?

By reviewing your current patient roster, digging into healthcare trends, and creating customer avatars or personas, you can discover which segments of patients you’re most appealing to you with your marketing efforts.

We recommend audience segmentation as well so you can deliver more personalized services to various portions of your audience, be that through advertising, social media posts, or email marketing.

Website Design

According to Blogging Wizard, a website visitor will form an opinion on your site in only 0.05 seconds. That’s practically the blink of an eye!

Some users today prefer a simpler approach to website design while others appreciate flowery details.

No matter which design elements you embrace, consistency is key.

The brand colors that you selected as part of your medical clinic’s identity should be present on your website, as should your clinic’s logo.

Navigation is another major concern. The old dropdown menu is still an option, as is traveling navigation that follows a user down the page. Navigating across your website should be a delight not a challenge.

To improve your rate of conversions when visitors land on your website, you need clearly optimized content, call to action buttons and links, lead magnets, and opt-in forms.

Content Marketing

Content will always rule as part of a marketing strategy, and so it should be a pillar of your medical clinic marketing plan as well.

One area of content that we’d recommend your clinic focus on is blog posts.

Blogging is a stellar way to spread the word about your clinic, share critical benchmarks, advertise services, and establish yourself as a trustworthy and authoritative source.

You might use the blog to produce infographics and in-depth insights about the latest healthcare trends or which trends are supposed to be coming down the pike.

You can use your blog as a vehicle for posting on social media, cross-promoting content to drive more traffic to your website.

Other forms of content marketing that we’d recommend for medical clinics (besides video, which we’ll talk about separately) are case studies, eBooks, infographics, how-tos and guides, checklists, and whitepapers.

Local SEO

While companies serving customers on a broader scale should focus on search engine optimization as a whole, for a local medical clinic like yours, local SEO is an optimal approach to medical practice marketing.

Here are some local SEO strategies to implement today.

• Join business listings and directories, which we’ll talk more about in just a moment.
• Use local keywords when producing content.
• Use XML sitemaps on your medical clinic website.
• Add an FAQs page to your site.
• Incorporate more conversational keywords and phrases on your website for voice searches. Marketing resource Startup Bonsai predicts that, in 2022, at least 27 percent of mobile users already rely on voice search around the world. That number will only go up.

Business Directories and Listings

Let’s talk more about business directories, as they’re a valuable local SEO strategy and a medical clinic marketing tactic we’d recommend on its own.

Fortunately, it doesn’t cost your clinic anything extra out-of-pocket to get on most directories and listings. From Google to Moz, Yelp, Yahoo!, and Foursquare, you can get listed free of charge.

For some listings, you’ll have to get in touch and request your inclusion. For others, you can claim your business.

Make sure as you fill out your contact information that you’re accurate and consistent. Misspelling your address or mistyping your phone number, for example, won’t help people find you.

Online Reviews

What inspires the purchasing decisions of the average consumer? Online reviews.

Exploding Topics states that 93 percent of consumers are swayed by online reviews and make a purchasing decision after reading reviews.

Even though your medical clinic is catering to patients instead of customers and you provide a service instead of retail products, the premise is the same.

If anything, your potential patients will be even more dependent on reviews since they’re entrusting their health to you. Should they see enough negative reviews, they’ll find another medical service provider.

How do you encourage your patients to leave reviews?

When you send a follow-up email after the patient leaves your clinic, you can always ask.

Attach incentives to the process. For instance, maybe if a patient leaves a review, they’re entered into a raffle for a gift card or a free electronic.

You also want to make it as easy as possible for patients to review your services. Send them links to your review page and make the reviewing process expedient.

While you can’t help the nature of the reviews (that’s dependent on your patient service), these tactics will increase the number of reviews your medical clinic receives.

Social Media Marketing

To grow your online presence, social media marketing is another marketing idea for medical clinics.

You can engage more with your customers via social media, communicate during any emergencies and crises, and continue to build your audience.

What kind of content can you post that’s not dry or too technical for the average person? Here are some ideas for what to post on your social media accounts:

• Educational content designed to keep patients in the know and reduce their rates of self-diagnoses.
• Infographics, videos, and other visuals.
• Behind-the-scenes images or videos that showcase what really goes on during an average day at a medical clinic.

Remember, your social media posts require you to always be compliant with patient privacy laws such as HIPAA.

Even if you shout out a patient, which some medical clinics will do on social media, you cannot divulge any information about that patient that could be deemed as sensitive.

Video Marketing

More businesses than not use video today, with 86 percent of companies harnessing the power of video in their marketing, says HubSpot.

Videos can inspire, entertain, and educate, sometimes all at once, so the average consumer cannot get enough. That’s why we so strongly recommend video as a medical clinic marketing strategy.

The same kinds of medical topics that you broach when writing blog content or posting on social media are fair game for videos.

You might do a quick how-to, produce a video checklist, or even put into layman’s terms certain medical terms.

Video marketing technically counts as content marketing and can be a form of social media marketing as well, but it’s so valuable that we wanted to shine the spotlight on it separately.

Digital PPC Advertising

When it comes to spreading the word about your medical clinic, advertising is one of the most powerful tools you can rely on, especially digital PPC advertising.

Your clinic will first have to establish an advertising budget, as you pay each time a user clicks on a PPC ad.

Make sure as well that your website is optimized and ready for the traffic it will receive, as it’s going to be a lot.

Lead Generation

How does your medical clinic generate leads?

Outside of digital PPC advertising, we recommend strategies such as social media marketing, email marketing, online reputation management, landing pages, content marketing, and SEO.

Email Marketing

Through your website marketing, your medical clinic should have amassed a significant collection of email addresses that wish to receive future correspondence from you.

Email marketing can achieve many objectives for your clinic. You can use emails to nurture leads, engage current patients, inform your audience, send out review reminders, and drive more follow-up appointments.

Online Reputation Management

Your reputation is everything, which is why online reputation management is such an important part of your medical clinic marketing strategy.

Per the link above, here are some methods we recommend for increasing and maintaining your online reputation:

• Write an about page that’s connective and engaging, not boring and flat.
• Encourage patients to leave reviews, using incentives as we talked about before.
• Showcase patient testimonials (with their permission, of course).
• Create a Google Business Profile listing and maintain it.
• Focus on offering the best customer experience possible.

Patient Support

Providing a high-quality patient experience includes outstanding customer service as well. Your medical clinic should go out of its way so that booking appointments, checking out, rescheduling, and any other nature of clinic-patient communications is streamlined.

Traditional Advertising

While the bulk of the medical clinic marketing we’ve discussed today is digital, traditional advertising and marketing channels are good for your clinic to pursue as well.

From radio and television ads to billboards and print advertising, save some room in the budget.

Patient Referral Program

The last marketing idea for medical clinics is a patient referral program.

When one of your long-term patients suggests someone else join your clinic, you might give them a discount for services or another perk.

The more members of your referral program, the greater the network of potential customers your clinic can build.

Why Should You Hire a Medical Clinic Marketing Agency?

Now that you know the pillars of what a medical marketing campaign should be, the next stage is getting there.

A medical clinic marketing agency is well-versed in the varying needs of healthcare companies. You can count on their expertise whether it’s with more complex marketing concepts such as SEO or advertising budgeting or even simpler ones like content ideation. Mediaboom is a marketing agency that specializes in med spas and healthcare. You can contact us today to get your medical clinic marketing plan underway.