Why Digital Marketing is Important for Doctors
Imagine this scenario: you’re an experienced and well-known medical professional who is in high-demand. Your patients all highly recommend you for expert treatment. However, you’d like to grow your business and add some new patients. But, even with referral bonuses and other incentives, you’re simply not getting the results you would like.
Now picture this scenario from a prospective patient’s viewpoint: a patient needs to find a doctor that comes highly recommended. Where does this patient go to find that doctor? If you don’t have a personal recommendation from family or friends, you’ll be heading to the Internet. And page 1 of search engine results is where you’ll most likely find a medical professional that is well-rated.
As you can see, digital marketing is extremely important – even in the medical field. If you’re not making an effort to be seen online, you’re virtually invisible to patients who need to find you. And this could be doing your practice more harm than you realise.
Branding Yourself in the Digital World
Your job as a medical professional goes beyond the examination room or surgery. Understanding your own online reputation and brand is vital for your practice. Monitoring and marketing yourself online can help keep you in-demand in your respective medical field. But this takes a direct, concerted effort to find success.
This is especially true if you’re in a small office or practise medicine independently. Larger-scale hospitals or medical facilities may handle the marketing for you. But when you’re on your own, what type of strategy do you have in place for success?
Visibility Strategies
Results-oriented medical marketing and branding encompass all the following areas and more:
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
SEO remains the #1 focus for any digital marketing campaign. Your ultimate goal is to funnel prospective patients to your website or social media accounts. And that objective is best achieved through competitive ranking based on your name and related keywords.
Local SEO
Speaking of related keywords, local SEO is growing increasingly important as localised results are becoming more common. Obviously if you practise in Perth, you’re probably not going to need to target prospective patients in Sydney.
By aligning your SEO campaigns to local areas, you can expect better results. These localised campaigns can deliver better qualified leads to your website.
Social Advertisements
People are talking on social media. And your practice could be part of the conversation with a targeted social media advertising campaign.
Sites like Facebook deliver targeted ads based on relevancy to these platforms. That means that when a person is talking about finding a doctor, your ad could appear directly on that page. This type of targeted advertising could potentially achieve outstanding results.
Paid Search Advertising
Have you ever noticed the 2 or 3 links at the top of Google search results? These results are known as paid search advertising. Within a marketing context, paid search can deliver remarkable results funnelling prospective patients to your website. From there, they can easily contact you to schedule a visit and become a patient.
When to Call the Professionals
In most cases, doctors simply don’t have time to market themselves across the web. They’re too busy practising medicine to spend time worrying about SEO and keyword ranking.
This situation is a catch-22: as a medical professional, you want to focus on your patients and your practice. After all, that’s what will help you achieve a good reputation. However, you also need to get yourself out there and improve visibility so that new patients can find you.
It’s times like this when a professional brand development and management agency such as The Gaswerx can help. We’ll work to develop your brand across all the important online avenues. From a high quality website to a precision social media marketing campaign, we have you covered in the online world.
We’ll get your name ranking competitively in your area so that more patients can find you.
If you’re ready to make a change to your brand and find even more success, contact us today. We’ll give you the results you need for your online brand. That way, you can keep doing what’s important: delivering high quality medical care to your patients.