What’s the best approach to marketing for doctors? All too often in the medical field, marketing is little more than an afterthought for the thousands of private practices in the US. After all, sick people aren’t too picky about who treats them, so the common wisdom goes.
In reality, your marketing strategy can make a massive impact on the success of your practice. Here at Crystal Clear Digital Marketing, we recommend content marketing for doctors. Today we’ll show you how it works and all the advantages that this method has to offer.
How Does Content Marketing Differ From Other Kinds of Marketing?
Traditionally, doctors have relied heavily on print marketing via flyers and brochures in their offices to entice customers to seek out other services. TV commercials and radio ads have also been common ways to lure customers in. But as these methods have become outdated, content marketing for doctors has become a better solution.
Content marketing revolves around creating useful content for your potential and existing clients. This content can come in the form of articles on your website, short videos, and static images that provide useful information. The key word here is useful. Otherwise, your content will be seen as useless spam.
As we talk about the advantages of content marketing, we’ll mention some of the ways you can create good content that benefits your clients. Keep reading to learn how you can put content marketing to use.
What Are the Advantages of Content Marketing for Doctors?
Content marketing is a natural fit for doctors because of their technical expertise and medical knowledge. Medical issues are complex subjects that often trigger feelings of fear and worry in potential customers. Effective content marketing will help your practice get noticed, make customers more confident, and ultimately lead to more sales.
What’s more, a solid content marketing strategy can be much more affordable than the traditional methods we mentioned before. Let’s analyze some of the benefits that content marketing has to offer to doctors.
Better Website Visibility
First of all, a content marketing strategy starts with pages on your website for each of the services you provide. You can also create pages that address common illnesses or injuries that you routinely treat. If you’re a pediatrician, for example, an article on pink eye and how to treat it is likely to be useful to parents.
These pages need to be designed and written properly in order to be seen by Google’s search algorithms. This process is known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. With properly optimized pages, patients who search for information about their problems may just find themselves reading your content.
That in turn will make them more likely to book an appointment at your practice. Of course, your content needs to be readable and easy to understand, as well.
Remove Customer Apprehensions
Many people are afraid of doctors, and mistrust in medicine has only grown in recent years due to disinformation spread online. You can undo some of that damage with your high-quality content. Reassure your potential patients and existing customers of the safety of your treatments and procedures.
A thorough description of what a particular treatment involves prepares your patients mentally for what’s to come, which will strengthen their resolve. Consider making articles or short videos that specifically address some of the common fears people might have.
Establish Yourself as an Expert
When you demonstrate your advanced medical knowledge of a subject through content marketing, clients are more likely to trust you. On the other hand, if your website has very little content explaining your practices, people may become wary of your work.
Quote statistics and link to your sources to show that you keep up to date on the latest technology and procedures. Discuss emerging treatments and show that you are on the cutting edge of medicine. Your clients will be more confident and more likely to book that first appointment.
Better Conversion Rates
Compared to traditional marketing, content marketing can generate three times as many leads, according to Demand Metric. This is because the content is actually useful to the person reading or hearing it. Good content marketing leaves people curious to learn more about the topic.
This means that your marketing is more likely to result in phone calls to the office and appointments. Encourage your clients to ask questions about your services in your content.
Improved Feedback From Customers
Another reason that Crystal Clear Digital Marketing recommends content marketing for doctors over other methods is that you can obtain valuable feedback from your customers. For example, you can ask them to share their experiences with you on social media regarding a common issue. Connect your social media engagement with your content for maximum effect.
For example, make an article about flu season and promote flu vaccines in it. Then hop on Twitter and Facebook to ask if people have gotten their flu shot and what their experience was like. You can then use that information to tailor your practice to your patients’ concerns.
Stand Out Above the Rest
Without a good marketing strategy, your business may be surviving solely on word of mouth or parents taking their children to the same doctor they went to. While that might be enough to keep the lights on, other practices can poach your patients easily.
Make it a point to direct some of your content to specific clients through email. For example, if you’ve treated a person for an ankle sprain, send them a link to your article about how to care for sprains and prevent them in the future. That personal touch will make your clients remember you and recommend you to others.
Increase Your Sales
Ultimately, the goal of any marketing strategy is to increase your sales. That is exactly what a solid content marketing strategy will accomplish if executed properly. All of the aforementioned factors are more likely to stimulate sales.
Increasing consumer confidence in both the treatments you offer and your practice as a whole will lead them to choose you over the competition. By making your website more visible, you’ll naturally end up with more phone calls than ever. And by targeting your existing clients with valuable content that is relevant to them, they’re more likely to come back more often.
Your content can also be designed in a way that sparks people’s interest in things they might have overlooked. For example, 40% of people skip annual checkups, a vital part of the prevention and detection of potential problems. Use your content to encourage the behavior that benefits your customers, and your business.
Reduced Costs
If all that wasn’t enough, content marketing for doctors will keep more of your hard-earned money in your pocket. Traditional marketing via TV commercials and radio ads can be very expensive. In addition, those mediums are losing viewers in today’s modern online world.
The same goes for print ads. Not only are they more damaging for the environment, but they’re unlikely to be read in their entirety.
In contrast, a content marketing plan will cost very little in comparison. The main costs come from making the content itself, and these days creating content has never been easier. Even making a short video for your website can now be done for hundreds of dollars, rather than thousands.
How to Start a Content Marketing Campaign
So, if you’re interested in content marketing, where do you begin? First, you’ll need to determine what content needs to be created.
Make a list of all of your services. A good way to do this is to look at your billing system and review all of the possible treatments and procedures that you routinely bill for. Each of these items is going to need its own content page on your website.
Using Customer Data
Once you know what content you need, you then need to think about where it should go. Your existing customers are a great place to start. Using the data from your patients’ history, you can easily determine what content would be most valuable to them. Try to market it directly to your patients via email.
Reaching Out to New Customers
Add some “current events” content to your list. What is going on right now that most affect the people in your local area? Promote this content on your social media platforms.
By using your data and publicly available repositories of data, you can easily target your local community and drive more engagement with your practice. This is how you make your content useful and beneficial to your potential patients.
Get Professional Assistance
If the first thought that comes to your mind is that you’re a doctor, not a writer, we understand. Contact Crystal Clear Digital Marketing today to find out how we can help you build an effective content marketing strategy. Our staff specializes in marketing for medical professionals. We will build a plan tailored to your practice and your local area to maximize its effectiveness.
