When you think of healthcare marketing, you might picture TV ads for prescription drugs with smiling couples and a fetching golden retriever. While this may be a form of healthcare marketing, it’s not really the kind used by regular doctors for their practices.
Doctors who are working to build their own brand or grow their practice require a more personalized marketing approach that will target their specific needs, goals, and audience. Hiring a healthcare marketing agency is a good way to start, and it will allow you to focus on your job, which is treating patients.
Healthcare marketing professionals are trained to develop campaigns, messaging, and creative tactics that will bring tangible results to your practice. Here are 4 ways in which doctors can benefit from the help of a healthcare marketing agency.
An Expert Healthcare Marketing Team
There’s no better sales tactic than quality care, great customer service, and showing true empathy to your patients. Patients interact with each department in your clinic, allowing each employee the opportunity to make a positive or negative impact on the patient experience. When there’s a need to “get the word out” about a new service offered or provided at your practice, a physician generally doesn’t have the time or expertise to effectively engage in marketing.
Maybe you want to set up an interview with the local newspaper, display a billboard educating the public on mammograms, or make updates to your website. Whatever it is, your time is valuable as a physician, and a marketing professional is an expert at creatively executing the right strategies and tactics. There’s no need to burn yourself (or your staff) out simply because you are trying to be a marketer, as well as a physician.
Strategy & Planning Analysis
A marketing professional can help you perform a deep dive into complex business development challenges and implement solutions to keep your practice afloat and profitable. Have you seen a dip since a new practice opened in town? Are consumers going elsewhere based on online reviews of your practice? Hiring a healthcare marketing team can help doctors determine things like, what number of patients and “sales” will guarantee enough income for overhead costs, how to set a goal for profit, and how to put an action plan into course in order to reach more people and drive conversions on your site.
Improved Patient Reviews
Consumer-driven review websites like Yelp and Google are influential to consumers when looking for everything from a new hair salon to a doctor’s office. As a consumer, why ask one or two friends for a recommendation when they can have instant access to dozens of reviews to get a variety of perspectives and help make their own decision?
These reviews can really make or break a practice, and they may be the reason you aren’t seeing return patients or even new patients. Having a healthcare marketing team on your side can help you analyze these reviews daily and help you understand a common theme of either good or poor service. It’s important to know what your consumers are saying about your office to help decide what change is needed to improve patient quality and happiness. Once you know what to fix, we can launch campaigns to promote these changes and get more patients through your door, who will, in turn, leave better reviews!
Help With Referring Physician Marketing
If you’re a specialist, you are probably communicating pretty frequently with your patients’ primary care providers. But when your business relies on referrals it’s important to maintain positive relationships with the providers sending patients to you. Having a healthcare marketing team will allow you to bridge the gap between your practice and the referring physicians in order to build a positive relationship and ensure referrals!
More Information
Doctors understand the value of healthcare marketing, and even when they know what to do, oftentimes they don’t have the time to put together a creative campaign or visit each of their referring providers’ offices. Doctors should allow themselves the opportunity to focus on medicine and treating patients and let the experts help with their healthcare marketing needs. To learn more about our healthcare marketing agency and how we can help you, contact us today or request a free consultation!