Incorporating branding strategies into your marketing plan will help you establish a connection with your target market and raise awareness of your practice’s offerings. An integrated branding strategy doesn’t produce leads by itself, but rather, it concretizes a foundation upon which your lead generating marketing channels can maximally operate to produce results.  Thus, branding supports lead sources such as click-through rates on Google, website conversion rates, and offline conversions that actually result in new patients. When investing in brand awareness campaigns, you should take into account the following five tips and tactics we’ve broken down for you to focus on.

Organize campaigns on social media for lead generation, traffic, and brand awareness. The sheer abundance of targeting options available in social media advertising channels account for their effectiveness. After identifying your Ideal Patient Profile (IPC), the next step is to target your audience with specific content. Numerous targeting options are available to you; however, you must keep them pertinent to both your target audience and the objective of this particular social media marketing campaign. Consider asking yourself… Are you attempting to raise awareness? Increase website traffic? Generate inbound phone calls? Your business objective will determine the purpose of your social media campaign. It may change as time goes on because your patients’ needs may vary throughout the year.

Connecting with individuals who have already liked your page on social media is made possible by organically sharing content on your pages; this is a great way to bolster engagement for retention. However, social media advertisements can assist you in connecting with individuals who may be interested in your services but are not yet familiar with you. While organic posts serve as a retention channel, new patient attraction is a pay-to-play game.  Your objective could be anything from building brand awareness to increasing traffic or engagement via generating calls or in-person visits.

Facebook and Instagram provide excellent targeting options to assist you in reaching your marketing objectives, including:

• Targeting demographics: age, gender, marital status, ethnicity, and educational attainment. Advertising to people whose interests generally coincide with those of your target audience is known as interest targeting.
• Custom audiences: building an audience from your email list (the more emails you have, the better), fans of your page, or data from a successful previous campaign.

Lookalike audiences: Using the custom audience you generated, you can create a lookalike audience to target individuals who are similar to them with your advertisement.

Patients of today desire to be actively involved in their care. More content and resources are available to them online than ever before, and they are actively using them.

For better or for worse, the reality is that in our digital era, patients are turning to the internet to verify the information provided to them by their physicians, assessing the most recent advancements in treatment relevant to them, and become ever-more informed about the expected results of a procedure or treatment.

This offers a fantastic opportunity to harness the power of online video to set your practice apart from competitors. Over the past decade, our consumption of video has changed significantly, and this trend of video consumption doesn’t appear to be slowing down.

Why is video marketing important for my medical practice? Think about this:  Over two-thirds of Americans watch YouTube, with over three million searches on YouTube are related to health every month. Furthermore, in the last few years TikTok has surpassed Google as the most popular global web domain. The truth is that patients are looking for and watching videos about health. Practices seeking to expand their patient base must devise a strategy that engages and guides patients throughout the decision-making process, with the ultimate goal of influencing their choice of provider.

For these reasons, ideally, you should set aside time and funds while creating your healthcare content marketing strategy to include video production.

Here are some video suggestions for practices:

• One of the most crucial kinds of content you can produce is a testimonial. Most people want confirmation from someone that they are making the correct choice when they make a decision. Testimonials contribute to that comfort.
• Tour videos are particularly useful for new patients who are searching for a new physician. Give them a tour of your practice.
• Meet the Staff: The practice is given a “human face” through the introduction videos.
• Educational/Procedural: Patients looking to learn more about a possible procedure or treatment can benefit from watching these kinds of videos. The audience should be considered when creating a procedure video. In the end, the patient will select your practice for their medical needs if you can educate them and make a difference.

 

Lastly, make a strategy for sharing your video content to engage patients. Here are a few powerful applications and outlets:

• Website optimization: Including video on your website can enhance the user experience for prospective patients and have a positive impact on traffic and organic rankings.
• Social media marketing: Posts with videos on social media have a substantially higher interaction rate than those with still photos. Consider it scroll-stopping material for users who are scrolling through their feeds.
• Email marketing: You can use video in your email newsletter campaigns.

Video marketing: Your medical practice can distribute paid video campaigns through a number of channels, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok to promote your practice and particular services/treatments/procedures.

Considering that the majority of people – nearly five billion worldwide – use email, creating an email marketing strategy can be a powerful mechanism for your medical practice to reach out to prospective patients and re-engage existing patients.

Here are a few easy pointers and strategies to remember when trying to send emails straight to the inboxes of potential patients.

• Create a targeted email list: There are several ways to get a list for email marketing. Working with a qualified partner who can provide a list of emails is one approach. Create your email list with particular targeting options in mind, such as interests, household income, geography, or demographics. In order to keep gathering email addresses, you should also make sure that you advertise sign-ups for your email newsletter on your website and social media pages. You might even want to put up a pop-up window on your website asking visitors to subscribe to your newsletters.
• Create a calendar for email content. Your chances of getting the patient to click through to your website are increased when you have a carefully planned email marketing strategy. Make sure your writing has calls to action to contact your practice throughout, and that the topics are pertinent to the reader. Another crucial aspect of content creation is intentionality. If you choose to create a monthly newsletter strategy, for instance, make sure the content is appropriate for the season and timeframe that your reader will be receiving the email.
• Track and evaluate your results: You can simply monitor and assess the campaign’s success if you’re using an internal email marketing tool or collaborating with a marketing agency partner. Assess open, click-through, and engagement rates to find out how much interaction your emails are getting from patients. Maintain the inclusion of blogs in your newsletter if you observe that patients are responding to and expressing interest in your writing. It’s crucial to consider your patients’ needs at all times in the production of your email content.

One of the most popular types of advertising available today is display brand advertising. It’s the process of purchasing Google Ad space, akin to the conventional method of investing in a roadside billboard. But with display advertising, as opposed to billboards, you can specifically target people who match your ideal patient profile. Therefore, display advertising has the potential to be a very powerful tool for branding your practice to the appropriate audience when used properly.

The following advice can help you create a highly successful display campaign:

• Create a custom audience: Creating a custom audience is a crucial first step in creating an effective display campaign. Google provides you with a wide range of targeting options to select from. Which targeting options to select should be guided by the type of patient you seek to target. For instance, if you are a dermatology practice and would like to launch a display campaign to inform people that you now provide Botox, you should base your targeting on the demographic of what you would deem to be your normative Botox patient. These indictors could be average age, average income, gender, geography, among other factors! Establish as precise targeting as possible to produce favorable results.
• Construct the creatives: You should begin creating your graphics once you’ve delineated your target audience to maximally resemble your ideal patient. You want to be certain that your ad creatives will catch the attention of prospective patients. You also want to avoid overly complicated ad creatives. Although it may be tempting to stuff in as much information as you can onto the graphic advertisement, resist the urge. The size of display ads are modest. It may be difficult to read and confusing to understand what you’re offering if you have too much information stuffed into them. The best display advertisements have a comfortable amount of white space, few words, and clear, to-the-point images. It is imperative that you incorporate a definitive call to action. You should use words such as “Book Now” or “Schedule Today” as your call to action on your website. If you want to get the response you want, it’s critical that your request be precise and brief.
• Select the appropriate landing page: Nothing is more annoying than clicking on an advertisement and being taken to a page that you did not anticipate. This is bad for your website’s health in addition to being annoying for the user. If you selected an irrelevant landing page, you should definitely anticipate an increase in your bounce rates. Although it seems straightforward, practices frequently make this error when developing their display campaigns. Using the dermatology practice example above, you would have to make sure that the display ad links to the Botox page on your website if your objective is to schedule more Botox appointments. Remember that you should include a clear call to action on your landing page, just as you should have on the advertisement. If you want the patient to schedule an appointment, make sure the landing page has a form they can fill out or a phone number they can call to do so.
• Establish objectives and monitoring: Lastly, you should be aware of your objectives and ensure that you are monitoring your progress. You should pay close attention to your CTR, or click-through rate. You can tell if you’re targeting the correct people or if your ad creative is effective and relevant by looking at your click-through rate. Redo your targeting or creative design structure if your CTR is low. When it comes to display ads, A/B testing is also a wise practice. Try comparing the outcomes of two simultaneous advertisements. This will help you determine which advertisement the patient is resonating with most. Iteration is the key to optimizing successful ads.

Now that you know how to get patients to your site, you need to be able to get them there over and over again until they are ready to actually move forward with a booking. After their initial visit to any website, the majority of people will not convert. Typically, a prospective patient needs to revisit a website twice before they are willing to call or complete an online form. The good news is that they have a 70% higher chance of converting if you can get them to return to your website.

Adding a remarketing tag from paid traffic sources such as Google and Facebook to your website should be your first step. You might want to ask your digital marketing and website development agency to do this for you if you’re not comfortable working with code on your website. Following the tag’s installation, your website will immediately begin remarketing visitors in accordance with the parameters you specify. There are numerous approaches to establishing remarketing guidelines. A wise guideline to adhere to is not to remarket to website bouncers. It usually makes no sense to re-send an advertisement to someone who bounces because they probably didn’t intend to visit your website in the first place.

Counterintuitively, in the healthcare industry, it is also important to drive remarketed traffic to general landing pages (like your website homepage) rather than specific ones; the reason for this is because remarketing trackers specifying diseases/treatments/conditions can be considered a violation of HIPAA. Why? Because if you close your computer and someone else opens it and is served ads about your specific diseases, they may gain insight into your health conditions that they otherwise would not have. Herein, the intersection of healthcare law and advanced marketing best practices intersect, and working with professional healthcare marketers may be your best course of action.

To remarket to potential patients, you have a variety of channels at your disposal. Depending on how you structure your primary ad campaigns, you’ll have to weigh whether it makes more sense to remarket your medical practice on social media platforms like Facebook or Instagram or on search engines like Google. The best course of action is to find out which channels your patients are most engaged with and keep promoting, and re-promoting, your practice there.

In the end, remarketing gives you the chance to attract qualified patient leads who have already expressed interest in you. Don’t overlook this simple step, which has the potential to dramatically impact the success of your marketing initiatives as a whole!