It can be intimidating to create a robust marketing strategy for your healthcare practice. Most practice owners are unsure of where to start, especially today, as there are so many marketing and promotional channels to consider. To make the marketing strategy-crafting process more digestible, we can divide its development into four core components: 

1). Constructing a Healthcare Digital Marketing Foundation for Your Practice
2). Establishing Sustained Digital Visibility to Grow Your Practice 
3). Building Practice Brand Awareness to Engage Prospective Patients
4). Reactivating Your Potential and Existing Patient Base

By properly navigating these four components, you’ll position your healthcare practice for high-yield growth in your community.  In this four-part article series, we’ll be tackling each of these components one by one.

To garnish success in the long run, you must lay down an unshakable marketing foundation. Similar to constructing a building, you’ll certainly run into problems and incur greater costs over time without one. Identifying and crafting an integrated brand message that caters to your ideal patient profile, architecting a professional website, taking control of your Google Business Profile, and managing your social media accounts, are all essential components of a solid marketing foundation for your medical practice.

Identifying Your Ideal Patient Profile

A well-defined patient profile lays the groundwork for the success of any digital marketing campaign in the healthcare industry.

What, then, makes an ideal patient profile? To put it simply, an ideal patient profile identifies the kinds of patients your practice sees, describes the issues you resolve for them, and emphasizes the factors that influence their choice of healthcare provider. By orienting your marketing efforts toward an ideal patient profile, you can target the right prospective patients at the right time with messaging that nurtures and turns them into actual patients who generate revenue for your practice.

Fine-tuning your ideal patient profile could mean the difference between a marketing strategy that fails and one that successfully reaches your target market and generates a strong return on investment across all of your marketing endeavors. Regretfully, healthcare practices frequently neglect this straightforward yet effective exercise when developing their marketing strategy and plan.

To create the ideal patient profile for your practice, commence by identifying the shared demographic characteristics of your most profitable and best patients:

What age and gender is typical for them?
In what geography do they live?
What is their place of residence?
Are they single, or are they married?
Do they have kids?
What traits or preferences do they have in terms of health?
What is their state of finances?

The issues you resolve for your best patients and the reasons they pick your practice for their medical needs should then be your next focus:

For what reason are patients seeking your treatments or procedures?
What makes your practice special for patients, or why do they choose it?
In your local market, what specialty are you most well-known for?
Which patient issues are resolved by your high-value procedures?

Lastly, you must comprehend the factors that influence your ideal patient’s choice of healthcare provider:

When selecting a provider, what factors matter most to them?
How do they usually get in touch with you or your practice initially?
What wants or needs do they have?
For what reason are they looking for treatment?
Which inquiries do they usually make before making a choice?

You’ve now created the ideal patient profile. If you’re a multi-specialty practice, since every ideal patient will probably vary, you should finish this exercise for each specialty. Your digital marketing efforts should be built around your ideal patient profiles, which will also assist you in developing messaging that appeal to your most qualified prospective patients.

Creating a Consistent Brand Across All Marketing Channels

The use of a brand’s assets, which usually include logos, fonts, colors, and other elements, is subject to stringent guidelines for the most recognizable brands. This is because consistency in brand stylistics across various media channels is what enables brands to generate the greatest awareness amongst their potential audiences.

You, likewise, must create a distinctive brand identity for your practice that applies to all of your marketing initiatives; fundamental to this effort are:

a.) Your logo, which should be exclusive to your medical practice, should be your most recognizable asset. While it may be tempting to economize by using plain text for your practice’s name and logo, investing in a distinctively designed logo is worthwhile.

b.) Color scheme: A primary color scheme, secondary colors, and a usage guide should all be part of your brand identity.

c.) Imagery: You should consider the kind of images you want to use on your website and promotional materials when creating your brand identity.

d.) Font: Although it’s sometimes overlooked, font is a key component that shapes your brand’s identity. You should think about selecting a font for your paragraph texts, headers, and subheaders that will be utilized in all of your healthcare marketing assets.

It’s crucial to compile these while creating your brand assets into a single brand standard guide, also known as a “brand book.” Establishing your brand assets and making sure to apply your brand standards to each asset is a sound place to begin executing your marketing efforts, whether you’re starting a new medical practice or thinking about scaling up.

Your practice website serves as the basis for all other online marketing endeavors. In addition to having a website with a professional, engaging, easy-to-use UX/UI that facilitates patient conversion, a healthcare website must be developed for search engine optimization (SEO) readiness as well to successfully attract patients online. 

Some key facets that will differentiate a professional healthcare website from a mediocre one includes:

Aesthetic:  You need to have an attractive website. Even if your medical practice is the best in the world, you will still lose out on business if your website doesn’t look sleek, contemporary, and professional. As quite literally the very “first-impression” of your practice that most prospective patients will have, your practice website must accurately highlight your offerings in your own distinctive style.

UX/UI:  Even though the design of your website is crucial, if it is hard to use, comprehend, or navigate, patients will fail to convert. The optimal approach is to reduce the amount of thought your website’s visitors must undertake to navigate your site by grouping content and pages logically and efficiently, naming menu items sensibly, and organizing potential user actions sequentially.

Content:  Google, and other search engines, learn directly from the content of websites. Content written with specific keywords and phrases make your website appear to prospective patients searching with those keywords in Google. Beyond search engine friendliness, professionally written website content has the additional advantage of showcasing your industry expertise, thereby being attractive to patients and referral sources alike.  Furthermore, a comprehensive website with deep disease and treatment information is viewed as representative of the level of detail your practice provides patients in their care visits; this bolsters confidence in their selection of your practice over your competitors.

Website performance:  Time is the only asset that, once lost, you can never win back, and in todays fast-paced society, rapid website loading speed is an absolute must. Mere milliseconds in website loading speed and time-to-interactive (time it takes for clickable navigation on your site) makes the difference between a web visitor staying on your page, navigating through it, and becoming an actual patient, versus them simply leaving the site and moving on to the next competitor’s site, never knowing what they missed had they actually stayed to view your site.  You can run all the best digital marketing campaigns in the world, but if your site performance is poor, your prospective patients are bound to look elsewhere for their care.

Establishing a Google Business Profile is crucial, regardless of whether you’re marketing a start-up or already-established practice. If you run a practice and haven’t claimed your GBP, do so as soon as possible by going into Google and entering your company name, city, and state. It’s likely that Google will display your business profile on the right side. You can claim your profile by clicking the “Claim This Profile” instructions.

So why is your GBP essential? When a prospective patient Googles you, your services, the conditions you treat, or your procedures offered, your practice can appear on Google Maps as well as in the local “Map Pack” in the map section at the top of search results only if you have a GBP. In fact, you can increase your visibility on page one of search results when someone looks for the services you offer or conditions you treat by having a claimed business profile that is optimized, contains accurate information (especially your practice name, address, and phone number), and displays an ongoing accumulation of recent positive reviews.

To create a GBP for your practice, proceed to the GBP and Sign In. After completing the business setup process, Google will send you a postcard with a code in it in roughly one to two weeks.  You must log back into your GBP account after receiving the code and enter it there to validate your practice account.  Google may render some different validation steps like asking you to upload a document proving your location, or having you record a brief video of your location.

To optimize your GBP and get the most out of it, here are some tips:

Make sure the name, address, and phone number (NAP) of your medical practice in your GBP exactly resembles the NAP on your website.  Google dislikes confusion, and if you have any non-conformity in your NAP, it could seriously hurt your rankings on Google.

Add the primary services your practice provides in the Category and Service sections. When someone searches for the services you offer on Google, this will help Google know what services you offer.

Enable text messaging on your business profile so that visitors can text you directly (so long as you have a HIPAA-compliant SMS-enabled phone for your practice).  Texting is the preferred method of communication for millions today, so it’s a positive for your practice to enhance ease-of-appointment setting by providing prospective patients with the means of contacting you in their preferred method.

Upload your logo and an ongoing slew of photos of your practice and staff.  Research conducted by Search Engine Land indicates that there is a direct link between the quantity of images on your GBP and the amount of clicks, website visits, and clicks for directions a business gets.

Request online reviews on a regular, ongoing basis. Firstly, a rating above 4.4 stars establishes confidence and trust in your practice by prospective patients.  Also, if your company receives more positive reviews in an ongoing manner, it will be more likely to appear in the Map Pack section when someone is seeking a practice like yours.  The three Google-selected businesses displayed in the localized Map Pack section are very valuable to increase potential patients clicks from GBP to your website, win more direct phone calls straight from the GBP, and have patients ask for directions to your practice.

Just like with your website, Google and other search engines crawl social profiles and index them in search engine results pages. Therefore, establishing social media profiles with ongoing posts and regular community engagement is critical to maximizing your digital presence.

These days, there are a lot of social media sites to take into account, and it could be difficult to keep up with them all. It’s important to keep in mind that having numerous distinct social media profiles is not nearly as important as being active on the social networks that are pertinent to your Ideal Patient Profile—quality over quantity.  You’ll gain a more concrete understanding of which social sites your current patients visit and gain informtion from regarding their health, beauty, or new industy trends via your Ideal Patient Profile, and that will tell you which social sites to be active on.

Irrespective of the social networks you select, here are some key tips to keep in mind:

Select your username carefully. A good username should represent your practice. Usually, you’ll use the name of the physician or practice. Make it succinct, suitable, and simple to spell. Your username should ideally be the same on all social platforms. Before deciding on a name, check all social media accounts to see if it has already been taken. The goal is to make your username such that when prospective or current patients look you up, they can do so across platforms while being able to relate it back to your other brand assets, website, and digital profiles.


Select a profile photo that embodies your brand.  Visualize your website as your medical practice’s storefront, with your profile photo serving as a window into it. Before patients even walk in the door, you need to make sure that your branding is accurate and trustworthy. They should have no trouble identifying you. Using the same profile photo across all of your platforms is one way to achieve that. Generally-speaking, the best way to go about this is to use your practice’s logo.

Create a bio that summarizes your practice’s goal and unique value propositions.  This is your opportunity to stand out and entice new patients with just one or two sentences. Consider including industry-specific keywords and a call to action at the conclusion. Write a brief preliminary positioning statement; here’s a sample template you can use:

(Practice Name) a leader in (Specialty), serving (Target Audience) in (Geographic Location) because (Reason for Excellence).  (Call To Action). 

Include a link to a particular website, landing page, or piece of content you’ve created. The link’s visibility will vary depending on which social media channel you use.

Customize your cover photo:  Medical offices frequently overlook the crucial function of a cover photo. It’s essential to craft it so that it’s polished and professional. Since it’s an extension of your practice’s storefront, think of it as the building facade patients see before entering your practice. Using a graphic design with words taking up no more than one-fifth of the area of the image gives you a way to tell a story that visually relates your practice to your Ideal Patient Profile.

Now that you are aware of the most important things to include or change on your social media profiles, don’t be afraid to observe what your rivals are posting. Gather inspiration from them, but avoid copying. Crafting your core social media profiles is the first step toward harnessing social media to build a community of followers and staying top-of-mind of your existing patient base.

With these foundational aspects of your healthcare practice’s marketing in place, the second article in the series will take a deep-dive into establishing your practice’s online visibility.