Article

Madelyn Wilson
Madelyn Wilson 27 May 2022

Increase Your Practice Revenue Through Digital Marketing

This article discusses ways to increase your healthcare practice revenue using online digital marketing to generate more new patient acquisitions.

Gone are the days when you had to spend big money on traditional advertising such as print ads in newspapers and magazines, radio and TV commercials, and printed collateral materials to promote your practice, educate your patients and generate revenue. When the Internet went mainstream in the mid-1990s, the world as we once knew it changed forever.

Today, thanks to our Internet, healthcare marketing has shifted mainly to online (digital) strategies. Savvy healthcare practices are now using the Internet as their primary marketing tool. They’re using healthcare digital marketing via electronic media to create optimal results that generate more practice revenues.

The trend began with hospitals, who first ventured online by creating websites so they could share their knowledge and information about various aspects of healthcare with the general public.

They created websites that combined original content, graphic design, and photography to convey information about their health services and their own healthcare providers. As the technology evolved, so did digital healthcare marketing.

Understanding the Role of Digital Marketing in Healthcare

Today, the best way to reach a large audience or a targeted local audience is through digital marketing. No other medium ever known to mankind has the Internet’s reach, which is now estimated in the billions worldwide.

If you combined all the previous traditional forms of media we once used, the total wouldn’t come close to matching the awesome power of the Internet for reaching fellow humans anywhere on planet Earth.

No other medium allows you to engage more effectively with more prospects while turning them into leads and converting them to patients and practice revenue. Digital marketing now plays several critical roles in the healthcare industry, including:

• A repeatable, sustainable process for revenue generation
• A way to add value to your practice and grow fiscally
• A tool for data analysis, market analysis, measuring results, and seeing what works
• A precise, statistical analysis of what people respond to and what they ignore
• Data-driven marketing decisions that benefit your practice’s growth
• A bridge for building better relationships with current and potential new patients
• A stronger sense of your practice’s brand through an online presence
• An easier road to building brand loyalty, which ultimately leads to revenue
• An inexpensive, highly cost-effective way to reach large numbers of prospects (think email and SMS text marketing)

Attract More Patients and Target your Most Desirable Prospects

Digital marketing allows you to share everything from special offers that lure new patients to prompt appointment settings, visitation reminders, and patient follow-ups that are beneficial not only for you but also for your patients’ health.

Digital marketing allows you to segment your marketing campaigns and precisely target certain communities, local areas, and nearby geographic territories where your target audience prospects can be found.

The foundation of every digital marketing program is a practice website. So, it pays to invest in a professional-looking, responsive, SEO-optimized, content-rich website that’s user-friendly, easy to navigate, and facilitates easy patient feedback. Be sure to include all of your best patient reviews and an interactive page where visitors can write new reviews.

Prospective patients value a good reputation and are most likely to check out your reviews before deciding to call for an appointment or pay you a visit. Digital marketing gives you a plethora of free and low-cost digital tools that help you tell your story and engage more prospects, which is incredibly important in our competitive healthcare environment.

A Level Playing Field with Hospitals

Medical marketing for doctors now competes with digital marketing for hospitals. By switching to digital marketing, local and private practice physicians can share the same map and reach as hospitals.

In other words, digital marketing has leveled the playing field for all healthcare providers. Their websites and social media presence are a hub for advertising strategies.

By engaging in digital healthcare marketing, hospitals and independent providers alike can boost their practice revenues. They start by appealing to patients and visitors and compiling prospective patient information right on their websites. Their main weapons are:

Simple contact forms: These help you gather basic information, such as names, email addresses, and phone numbers. By keeping your contact forms short, you will increase your response rate and gain greater numbers of new patient leads. Prospects do not like filling out lengthy fields, especially when they are just browsing.

Mobile-friendly web designs: Over 90% of the US population uses smartphones daily. The average person now uses their cell phone for quick web searches as opposed to using their laptop or desktop. That’s why your website must have a responsive mobile-friendly version. Your mobile-friendly version will allow potential new patients to explore your website with ease and interact with it most efficiently.

Clear calls to action: Your website should have a clear, concise, obvious call to action that stands out on every page. In the world of healthcare digital marketing, you need to remind visitors to take action. A call to action should include contact information (i.e., your phone number, address, and email address) that is clear, readable, and easy to find on each page. Make sure that your contact information also appears on your homepage and “Contact Us” page.

HIPAA compliant websites: The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act requires that your website protects all health information and is transport encrypted. Your data must also be backed up, accessible only by authorized personnel, permanently disposed of when not needed, and located on secure web servers to be HIPAA-compliant.

ADA-compatible websites: Another underserved market you can reach with digital marketing is the millions of Americans with disabilities. By following the Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines and making your website compatible with their needs, you can increase the size of your potential market and generate even more revenue.

By attracting and engaging with a wider cross-section of prospective patients, you can dramatically increase practice growth and revenue. On the flip side, by reducing your marketing costs, you can automatically increase your ROI.

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