3 Easy Digital Marketing Strategies Every Healthcare Practice Needs to Know

In today's competitive healthcare landscape, effective marketing strategies are crucial for getting new patients, retaining your existing ones, and growing your practice. Whether you’re a dentist, chiropractor, plastic surgeon, physical therapist, dermatologist, orthopedist, podiatrist—no matter you’re speciality, mastering the art of healthcare marketing will significantly impact your practice’s success.

The strategies below are three easy, timeless marketing strategies you should learn if you want to effectively market your practice. 

1. Consistently Post On 1-2 Social Media Channels 

When it comes to social media marketing, we often get asked three questions by doctors:

• Is social media marketing really needed? 
• What’s the best social media channel to focus on? 
• How often should a practice post?

Regarding the first question, the answer is yes, but it’s important to know the why behind the answer. For many practices we work with, most of their new patients are coming from paid advertising channels like Meta or Google as well as direct mail and SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Some patients come organically from social media, but not nearly as much as we’ve seen from the channels mentioned above.

That being said, social media is a great way to reinforce your brands presence online and help potential patients make a firm decision to come to you versus your competition.

The typical patient journey will start on Google, where a user will type in “best dentist near me,” “back pain chiropractor,” or “top plastic surgeon in Miami.” The user will then browse through your landing page or website. However, they may not be ready to make a decision right then and there, so they might leave, check your Google Business Profile’s reviews, and then go to your social media channels. If that same patient sees an up-to-date Instagram with fresh, original posts, then that will reinforce that patient’s decision to call you.

Now that you realize the benefit of social media marketing, it’s time to decide which social media channels to post on. We recommend starting with Instagram and Facebook. They’re easy to use and often looked at by patients in their journey.

Regarding your posting schedule, our recommendation is to create a schedule that you can stick with. If it’s posting once a week, great. If it’s posting twice a week, even better. 

The important thing to remember is that it should be done consistently. There’s no sense in posting 7x a week for 2 weeks and then dropping off (like what happens with most practice’s social media accounts). If you’re deciding you’re posting schedule for Facebook or Instagram, Buffer recommends that the best time to post on Facebook is 9 a.m. – 10 a.m. on weekdays and the best time to post on Instagram is 7 a.m. – 8 a.m. on weekdays. If you’re interested in learning more, check out this post from Buffer: https://buffer.com/library/best-time-to-post-on-social-media/ 

2. Focus On Getting More Google Business Profile Reviews

In the previous strategy, we recommended to focus on posting on social media regularly since it will reinforce your practice’s brand and a patient’s decision to come to you. Remember: the typical patient journey will start on Google, but it could end on places like Facebook, Instagram, even Yelp. That’s why it’s important you look at your overall brand presence as opposed to simply whether or not one aspect is up-to-date. 

One key channel that has to be managed is your Google Business profile. The Google Business Profile helps you manage how your practice shows up across Google products, like Maps and Search. We typically recommend our clients to encourage patients as they’re checking out to leave a Google review of their experience. We’ve seen a direct correlation with our best performing clients and our clients with the highest Google Business Profile reviews. In other words, our clients that have more reviews tend to see overall better marketing performance.

Here’s an example of what a great Google Business Profile looks like from one of our clients that works with our dental division, Boost Dentistry

Here’s another example from a client that works with our Chiropractic division, ChiropracticMarketing.com:

What makes these profiles great is that they have recent 5-star ratings and are optimized with photos of the actual practice on them. This makes it easy for a potential patient to get all the info they need when their doing their research on a practice.

3. Implement Automated Email and Text Marketing Campaigns 

Another low-hanging fruit that has huge upside is running automated email and text marketing campaigns, which is a fancy phrase for texting and emailing your patients. It’s not enough to have a patient book an appointment—you want to stay top of mind with appointment reminders, promotions for additional services you offer, and alerts of any events you have coming up. 

There are tons of HIPAA-compliant software that allow you to implement this level of automation. If you’re interested in learning more about how you can set up automated texts and emails to go out to your patients, reach out to us at team@tophealthcaremarketing.com and we’d be happy to discuss different options you can start with right away.