How to Promote Your Practice with Practice Management Software

This is the first in a series of articles on medical marketing. Based on our experience of working closely with our clients’ clinics, we disclose how to configure your ads properly for an audience that is unlike any other.

What Makes Medical Marketing So Different

Healthcare is a complex and highly competitive market in which you must advertise and promote yourself if you want to succeed. At the heart of any clinic should be a carefully considered business strategy, supported by medial practice management software and unconstrained by any particular format or approach.

Medical marketing is what generates real success for clinics. Without good promotional material based on data collected by a practice management system, you won’t easily be able to generate enough revenue nor compete with other clinics. Hence why it’s so important that you stick to a strict marketing plan. After all, relying on word-of-mouth referrals alone no longer works to provide you with a stable patient flow in the private sector.

Marketing in healthcare is distinguished from more traditional forms of self-promotion in a number of ways. First and foremost, there is a distinct difference between a client and a patient. Since going to see a doctor is nothing like availing oneself of typical services, patients expect a special approach and rapport. Just as you would never forget the fact that your patients’ health and well-being is in your hands, it’s vital to understand that solving their problems in full is never limited just to clinical treatment.

For digital marketing to work properly, you need to promote your clinic in search engines, work with social media, and keep a close eye on how many patients are coming to you from each acquisition channel. This is where private practice management software and end-to-end analytics comes in handy, and it’s how the Medesk platform will help you to collect and analyse all your marketing data.

Medesk is a practice management software platform specially designed to support you in building and managing effective business processes for your private practice. With our help, your receptionists, doctors, and all manner of external partners will be able to collaborate more efficiently to provide the best possible services for individual patients and even corporate clients.

Our goal is to assist managers to build the most effective marketing strategy, boost revenue, and strengthen patients’ loyalty to your practice all through our clinic software. Naturally, this results in repeat visits and, overall, raises the image of your clinic.

Fundamental Conclusions on Medical Marketing

Based on our extensive experience of running patient management software, we have singled out the blindspots in the knowledge base of most practice managers when it comes to handling a clinic’s marketing. The fundamental issues have to do with the following:

1. Your clinic’s main patient acquisition channels

2. The process of selecting a new acquisition channel

3. Working with Google Ads and context marketing in general

4. Attracting patients via social media - Facebook, Instagram, etc.

5. Booking via partners and other referrers

6. Online booking on your practice website

7. End-to-end analytics

8. Knowing what to look for when hiring your own in-house marketing specialist

9. Your clinic’s image on social media and online booking portals

10. Indoor advertising and other offline channels as the basis of promoting your brand

If you want to achieve good financial results in the private healthcare market, then you need to be mindful of its peculiarities and make sure you use the latest clinic management software to promote your services. We will reveal which channels you should be using for your kind of clinic, including the nuances to be aware of when setting up your ads. You’ll end up with a transparent plan to optimise your marketing strategies.

Part 2. The Right Patient Acquisition Channels for Your Clinic

While some people find it relatively easy to learn about medical services online, others find it significantly more difficult. As a result marketing specialists must heavily promote clinics in order to get them noticed. Fortunately there are all sorts of means by which to promote your clinic online from context ads and paid placement on search engines to publication in traditional media as well as in blogs and on social media platforms. Based on our experience with patient management systems, let's explore these in more detail as each channel can secure you a stable patient flow.

You shouldn’t forget that there are many different forms of patient acquisition. Medicine is built on trust so it is vital that you use everything at your disposal to promote yourself properly. Every single channel is important for your image and can be used to make your clinic stand out.

The main patient acquisition channels that a clinic should be using are as follows:

1. Paid ad placement in search engines,

2. SEO keyword promotion in search engines,

3. Context ads,

4. Booking portals,

5. Social media,

6. Professional referral partners,

7. Geolocation,

8. Other partners, e.g. corporate,

9. Recommendations from patients, i.e. word of mouth,

10. Outdoor ads,

11. TV and radio ads.

Let’s discuss two patient acquisition options you can easily track with clinic software and examine the problems you may have to overcome when using each of them.

As a result, clinics lose prospective patients because a receptionist wasn’t able to pick up the phone right away or due to not having the right training to deal with a given situation.

No one needs to be reminded of how crucial first impressions are, so it goes almost without saying that you must put your best foot forward when advertising your clinic on booking portals and then analysing the data in detail.

We recommend that you use the analytical tools and reports that we at Medesk have developed and proven to work in the creation of any optimised marketing strategy. Our specialists work closely with clinics to understand which promotional approaches are successful. The materials we produce are aimed at discussing the main marketing tools from the perspective of their implementation and configuration, as well as to demonstrate the aspects of medical marketing that might not otherwise have been clear to you.

Part 3. How to Choose a Suitable Patient Acquisition Channel

All marketing specialists and practice managers want to attract as many patients as possible. Despite this, they still tend to favour one channel while neglecting others, resulting in lost opportunities. The solution is incredibly simple - start making an effort to use all possible channels in some way. It’s the only real way to increase your audience reach and not lose out on potential patients. Results from different channels tend to vary, so your task is to learn from this and correctly allocate resources between the most cost-effective channels. This is where we can help you with a combination of the best clinical software and end-to-end analytics tools (the merging and matching of data from different systems) to allow you to understand the effectiveness of your strategies in any given scenario.

Each channel requires a different approach. To adapt, you will need to:

1. Understand your patients, where they live, and how they make choices,

2. Learn where you have advertised, and then fill the gaps,

3. Choose the best places and optimise them, but don’t forget completely about the less effective channels.

Example:

Now, let’s talk about the most popular patient acquisition channels:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO is a rather expensive and risky acquisition channel. However, when done properly, it can significantly boost your patient list and increase conversion on your site. This is especially true outside of major cities, where the competition between clinics is not so tough.

On average, you can expect conversion to be at 8-10%. That is to say, around 10% of your patients can be attracted by means of SEO.

We strongly recommend that you understand the semantic core of your site that best describe your services. You should aim to include appropriate keywords in requests related to specific disease names and symptoms, related medical specialties, as well as the names of local towns or areas.

Context Ads

When context ads have been properly configured for use in Google Ads, you can find the most interested patients with a minimum of expense. For example, you can set a specific geolocation to attract patients living nearby so as not to waste your budget on those living too far away to visit you.

Here’s some useful advice on how to configure your context ads:

Social Media

If you are to market medical services and increase your patient flow properly, you must work with social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram amongst others.

Your potential audience is far bigger on social media than for context ads, so you shouldn’t neglect this instrument or any patients who click through to your site this way.

Medesk online booking and private practice software helps you to understand how to increase conversion of visitors into patients on your site. You can place booking links directly on your social media pages, your website and in newsletters.

Advertising on Instagram happens to be more expensive than on other social media platforms. By sheer number of requests, patients are searching on Instagram ahead of other platforms. First and foremost, Instagram is all about photos and videos, so you should focus on creating interesting material, including video clips that plant a seed in your prospective patients’ minds.

Advertising with Bloggers

It can be useful to work with micro bloggers and the results are favourably comparable to those of targeted ads. An additional advantage is that bloggers often help you raise brand awareness and attract a loyal audience.

Inform People of Your Expertise

An excellent way to win the trust of your patients is to prove your expertise. To do so, you’ll need the help and opinion of a well-known practitioner in your field. They could be a doctor specialising in the same area as your clinic or chosen booking portal. Most importantly, any such co-promotion should not be a direct advertisement of your clinic, but instead should take the form of an expert peer review.

The main thing to remember before you head out and do all this is that there exist several rules and regulations to do with the promotion of medical services. You would do well to take note of them and we’ll provide you with more information in future articles.

Anyone who needs to engage in medical marketing and wants to understand how to choose acquisition channels must realise that it all starts with studying your patients closely. For example, if your patients are mostly coming from surrounding areas, then it makes sense to place targeted ads using geolocation.

When you are thinking about which would be the most effective patient acquisition channels without forgetting about the rest, it is vital that you consider the ways in which your specialty differs from other areas of medicine. You can do so in a trial-and-error fashion by assigning an insignificant proportion of your budget to each kind of advert, and then utilising end-to-end analytics to compile a summary of data about your patients. This is what the Medesk practice management system and CRM does in particular. Once you have chosen your channels and allocated your budget, you’ll already have started pushing your clinic in the right direction.