Marketing for Small Clinics

When you’re a medical practice, a chiropractor, or an acupuncture physician, there’s a different way you need to market your practice, partly because there are obviously some regulatory restrictions in terms of what you can say, but also because it’s really the marketing of an individual expert, and you’re your brand. 

When you’re a medical practice, a chiropractor, or an acupuncture physician, there’s a different way you need to market your practice, partly because there are obviously some regulatory restrictions in terms of what you can say, but also because it’s really the marketing of an individual expert, and you’re your brand.  When it comes to healthcare marketing, the most important thing to remember is that when someone visits your website, they want to see a solution to the health problem they’ve been having. They might not know to Google your particular treatment modality because they don’t know if it’ll work for them. They are aware of their predicament.

When they’re in pain, they are aware of it. They are aware if they have skin concerns and are seeking for a solution, so make sure you have content that is really focused on resolution, obviously without making promises that will get you in trouble, but you can absolutely quote results from other patients.

It’s a little different if you’re running Facebook advertising because the wording you use with healthcare marketing is quite specific, but there are ways around that. The most important thing is to make sure that your website converts. Once you have that solid foundation, local SEO is probably your next strategy because many patients will be looking for a doctor near them who can solve a specific health concern, so making sure that you show up on that google map is crucial.

If you think about the anatomy of a search, the first section is AdWords, which is a bidding platform where the higher your bid and the more closely your ad is tied to that particular keyword phrase, the higher you’ll appear, and the second section is the map, which is populated by the more directory listings you have, not just the ones you have. Google prefers five-star reviews, so make sure you’re asking your patients for reviews, and there are ways to do that as well. For example, we work with a number of health care practitioners and help them reach out to their patients on their behalf to ask for those reviews because it can be awkward to do so as a professional.

So making sure you have strong reviews and strong social proof is what Google looks for when returning those results. Social proof comes from making sure you’re publishing content on social media, that there’s a lot of engagement on social media with respect to what you’re posting, and that you’re thinking about posting content elsewhere, like blogs. However, we have found that in terms of getting a health care practitioner to the first page of Google, a local search can be a very effective way to do so, depending on the budget that you may have for AdWords. AdWords is always going to be the strongest ROI in terms of a marketing strategy, regardless of your specialty, but it is not a ch. You can make connections in other places. So having a solid website, a local SEO plan, optimizing the website itself for organic search, which is referred to as on-page SEO, as well as having a strong video strategy and a good social media presence, and depending on your expertise LinkedIn may also be extremely helpful, is really crucial.

If you get referrals from other doctors, connecting with them online to make sure they’re aware of your presence and seeing your professional content on LinkedIn is critical. We work with a lot of health practitioners who are trying to transition their practices from insurance to cash patients, and many of those cash patients are going to a LinkedIn profile. As a result, you want to be where they are and visible where they are. And there are a number of health care practitioners and doctors who have established themselves as online social media influencers in their own right, both in terms of the content they post (you may recognize some of them on Instagram) and in terms of being known as the expert for a specific specialty. So, in healthcare marketing, that’s what you’re aiming for.

It’s not easy to complete everything at once, but you can surely stage your strategy to get your practice to where you want it to be over time.