Creating an Effective Digital Physician-Based Marketing Plan
Traditional healthcare marketing uses advertising, branding and promotional methods to interact and build trust among the community in addition to highlighting specific medical expertise in order to acquire new patients. Whereas physician marketing heavily focuses on specific physicians highlighting their unique accomplishments, qualifications, and services.
The goal of physician marketing is to build trustworthy relationships between doctors and patients inside and outside of the office. This type of marketing is essential to not only gaining new patients, but also maintaining the relationships doctors have with their existing patients.
When creating your strategic digital marketing plan, it’s important to keep the goals for your physician’s campaign in mind. For example, it’s imperative to increase the physician’s visibility, improve brand recognition of the practice, and prove that the physician is a thought leader in their specialty.
In order to reach these goals, there are a multitude of digital strategies you can implement. A few possible elements to include in your marketing plan are content marketing, social media marketing, digital advertising, and search engine optimization.
If all you currently have is a website, the easiest way to begin your physician based marketing plan is to start blogging as it’s free and you’re already directing people to your URL.
Did you know almost half of all internet searches are directed towards the topic of healthcare and 66% of users search online for information about specific medical problems or diseases?
If you publish new content regularly about your specialty on your blog, you will stand out from the crowd immediately. Plus this simple action means you’re a medical professional who’s entered the world of content marketing! Not to mention that your blog posts will help to rank your website higher in Google’s SEO search when you start using relevant keywords related to your specialty throughout the blog posts.
There’s nothing more comforting than finding a medical professional online who provides you with tons of knowledge before even walking into their office. Doctors contain a wealth of knowledge and educating others online is a free, encouraging way to give prospective patients confidence that you care more about their well being than the bottom dollar which ultimately encourages them to schedule an appointment with you versus a competitor.
Another way you can contribute to your community and reach prospective patients using your wide medical knowledge is through guest posting or appearing as a guest on popular health-related podcasts. When guest posting on other blogs whether it’s WebMD or a local news site, it helps you to reach a new audience which can then help you land new patients. Plus who doesn’t love to flex their knowledge and share their expertise with the world? I think the real question is when will you start implementing these new ideas in your physician-based marketing plan?!
