Are you interested in growing your healthcare practice using top dental marketing or the best medical marketing? What’s the best healthcare marketing strategy?
You’ve likely read countless blog articles and healthcare marketing guides on how to grow your health practice, which produced mixed results.
You’ve likely also noticed that many digital agencies use similar marketing and advertising strategies, but why do they produce vastly different results for their clients?
Here, we’ll show you the step-by-step dental marketing methodology we used to grow Highmoor Dental from a small dental practice with one dentist, into an award-winning dental practice that eventually sold to a large dental organization for a generous multiple of earnings.
Problem
We met Dr. Justin Highmoor in early 2018 when he was operating a small dental practice in downtown Edmonton. Dr. Highmoor was working with a marketing agency that specialized in creating dental educational content, so he thought they were producing great business results, but he wasn’t sure how to confirm his assumptions.
Solution
First, we conducted a Practice Checkup to provide Dr. Highmoor with a second opinion on his existing business and marketing results. Then, we collected Patient Surveys to hear feedback on the patient experience; what patients like or dislike about their experience, how they first heard about the dental practice, what attracted them to the practice and more.
Results
We found several gaps in their marketing strategy and made small adjustments to improve the overall patient experience. We redeveloped their Dental Website Design and marketing strategy and focused on Local Dental SEO and organic content to attract new patients to their dental practice.
Combined with better focused Google Ads for dentists campaigns that were geo-targeted to their patients’ location, we increased their website traffic by over 350% in their first year. We also implemented Dental SEO to get their website ranked on the first page of Google for high volume keywords, like ‘dentist’ and ‘dentist near me’.
Success
As a result of our marketing performance, Dr. Highmoor grew his team, renovated his office, and eventually sold his practice for a generous multiple of earnings. He remained a dentist in the practice and continues to enjoy the success of our marketing results.
How to Grow Your Dental or Medical Practice with the Best Healthcare Marketing Strategy
You can follow our healthcare marketing strategy steps above for your health practice to achieve similar results. Here’s how:
First, based on the market research we’ve conducted (primary and secondary), we’ve discovered that most of your patients are likely going to come to your practice from two primary sources: referrals and Google.
So, what can you do to increase patient referrals and improve your visibility on Google?
Step 1: Patient Referrals
Many of your patients will voluntarily refer their friends and family to your practice because of the quality of care and overall patient experience. Keep in mind that during most patient visits, patients spend time not just with the health practitioners, like therapists or dentists, but with an entire team of associates, hygienists, administrators, and more.
Be mindful of optimizing the entire patient experience, from the time patients first interact with your brand online, to when they call and visit your front desk, as well as their dental or medical appointment. One amazing experience with a team member could leave them singing your praises to their friends and family. Unfortunately, the opposite is also true.
You can also create a digital patient referral program to better manage your patient referrals, including sending referral campaigns and providing incentives for referrals (if possible). Providing people with an incentive to refer their friends and family to your practice will strongly motivate your patients to send you more referrals. But, if you ask your patients for a referral on the spot, most can’t think of who to refer.
Instead, you can send your patients a referral link for them to share with their friends and family using digital channels, like SMS text, email, social media and more. Sending a digital referral link that’s easy to share increases the likelihood you’ll be able to find new patients from your patients’ existing online and social networks. Our Optiimus patient referral program provides a referral link for you to share with your patients.
Step 2: Online Reputation
“88% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.”
BrightLocal’s Annual Local Review Survey
One of the best ways to encourage patients to provide more referrals is to provide an amazing patient experience with a positive reputation. Your reputation is best expressed online through online reviews, which help you attract more referrals.
According to BrightLocal’s Annual Local Review Survey, “88% of people trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations“.
Collecting online reviews will attract more referrals, but it’ll also persuade those new referrals into following through with booking an appointment and purchasing your services. According to a survey conducted by Dimensional Research (2013), “90% of customers said that their buying decisions were influenced by online reviews.”
Similarly, many people make decisions to hire a new healthcare service provider, like a doctor or dentist, based on the reputation of the provider and the practice. The more you can improve the reputation of your team and practice, the easier it’ll be for you to attract new patients.
Your online reputation is best captured in the form of patient reviews and testimonials. Even if a prospective patient is referred to your practice, many will still research your reputation by looking at online review platforms, including Google, Facebook, RateMDs, Yelp, and more.
Asking each patient for a review can be time consuming or easy to forget for a busy dental or medical practice. You can automate this process of collecting reviews using Optiimus reputation and review management technology that automatically sends an email or SMS text message request, asking patients for feedback.
Their feedback can then be stored into your online review platforms, like Google or RateMDs. Responding to each review improves your reputation, but also your local SEO rankings. Forgetting to respond to each review on each platform can hurt your reputation and rankings, so it’s helpful to use a central review management hub to manage and respond to all reviews.
“90% of customers said that their buying decisions were influenced by online reviews.”
Dimensional Research
Different state and provincial colleges and regulators have different rules around patient reviews and referrals, if/when/how you can solicit them and advertise them. Check with your local regulators first, but if possible, it’s helpful to implement a reputation management and digital patient referral program as part of your healthcare marketing strategy.
Step 3: Online Visibility
Next, once you’ve improved your online reputation and setup a digital referral program, you can evaluate your website’s online visibility. In other words, how easy or difficult is it for prospective patients to find your practice online?
You can conduct a Practice Checkup to get a digital report card on your online visibility, including your website backlinks and key indicators, keywords rankings, local business listings, online review and reputation summary, as well as a Google Business profile audit.
This helps determine your website’s areas of improvement for elevating your online visibility. If you’re unsure on how to interpret the report data, please contact us with any questions about your healthcare marketing strategy.
Step 4: Healthcare Website
Your healthcare website is the online headquarters of your entire business and your digital healthcare marketing strategy. Even if your patients are referred to your practice, over 80% will still review your website and online reputation before they visit your practice in person.
Patients want to learn more about you, your team and your practice environment to ensure it’s the right fit for them and their families. The best way to do this before visiting your practice in person is to see your practice online with professional photography showcasing your clean, inviting office and warm, friendly team.
Making improvements to your healthcare website design through ‘on-page SEO’ is one of the biggest opportunities to improve your website’s online rankings in Google to attract more traffic and patients. Google’s algorithms scan your website to evaluate the relevancy of your website’s content to a user’s search query. The algorithms scan not just the body text, but also the H1-H6 headlines, media files, URL, page title and more.
Step 5: Healthcare SEO
Once your website’s on-page SEO is fully optimized, you can then move on to creating SEO optimized content for your website, such as blog articles and guides. According to a study published in the Frontiers of Public Health journal, “about 80% of Internet users search for health information online“.
Writing dental blog articles or therapy health guides with high-volume keywords that your patients are searching for attracts them to your website searching for that information.
Next, once you’ve created a content strategy for your healthcare practice, you can start promoting your health website online by building backlinks from other websites back to your own. The more you can build high-quality website links from other industry relevant websites and platforms, the more your website’s rankings will improve on search engines.
In addition to being visible on Google Search, you want to be visible on Google Maps using local SEO strategies. One of the first steps in local SEO is ensuring consistency in your business name, address and phone number across all online listing providers, business and healthcare directory platforms. Some of the most popular listing providers include:
- Google Business for Google Maps
- Business Connect for Apple Maps
- Bing Places for Bing Maps
- RateMDs
- Healthgrades
and more.
Building and managing hundreds or thousands of listing providers can be time consuming and challenging, especially if you change any of your core business information (Name, Address, Phone, Hours, etc.). Using Optiimus listings management, we can build and manage listings from one central hub, allowing us to manage and update your listings at once.
Although dental, medical and healthcare SEO provides the best long-term value in digital marketing, it’s also the most time consuming to produce a return. On average, many businesses find that SEO produces a positive return in about 3-6 months. This may be fine for a healthcare practice with a steady stream of patients from other sources, such as referrals. But, for a new practice without any patients, or for a practice in desperate need of patients, waiting 3-6 months isn’t going to work.
“80% of Internet users search for health information online.”
Frontiers of Public Health journal
Step 6: Google Ads
The best benefit of Google Ads is that you don’t have to wait 3-6 months to see a positive return. You can get your healthcare website listed at the top of Google using Google Ads management campaigns on day 1, and likely see a positive return within the first week. In other words, Google Ads produces one of the most immediate returns on your healthcare marketing strategy investment.
The other benefit of Google Ads is that you can be hyper focused on each campaign, creating a specific campaign to promote your most high profit services (e.g. Invisalign, dental implants, etc.) instead of lower profit services. This strategy yields an even higher return on your investment, as you’re attracting specific patients with a higher lifetime value (LTV).
Google Ads allows you to target your ads campaigns to a specific audience, focusing your message on a unique demographic set of people most likely to be interested in that service. For example, if you want to promote Invisalign for kids and teens, it’s best to focus your message to parents and mothers of those kids and teens. You can also geo-target your campaigns to within a specific radius of your practice (e.g. 5-15 kilometres).
Step 7: Improve Lead Capture
“Only 27% of leads ever get contacted and companies waste over 70% of leads.”
Steve Olenski on Forbes
Every prospective patient that’s considering your dental or therapy practice is often called a ‘lead’ in marketing lingo. You’re likely going to generate a lot of leads from various sources. The best healthcare marketing strategy often generates leads from the following sources:
- Patient referrals
- Google Maps (local SEO)
- Google Search (organic SEO)
- Google Ads (price-per-click, PPC)
- Social media, email newsletters, etc.
Ideally, these marketing channels are analyzed using data analytics tools to evaluate which sources are producing the most positive return on your investment. Then, you can adjust your budget and strategy based on these results.
Let’s review some of the most popular and effective lead capture and data analytics tools:
Live Chat
Once you’ve implemented an effective digital marketing campaign that generates more traffic to your website, you want to capture as many potential leads from this traffic as possible. Many website users have a quick question, but may be reluctant to call the front desk or to send an email. They may feel more comfortable communicating using live chat with your front desk team, and they’ll get a faster response. If your front desk is too busy to respond, let our Optiimus AI chatbot respond for your team, answering questions, providing customer service, capturing leads and booking appointments – 24 hours per day, 7 days per week.
Google Analytics
Considered the gold standard in website analytics, Google Analytics is installed in over 55% of all websites around the world. It provides you with data on your website’s performance, including where your users are coming from and how they’re interacting with your website. This data is helpful for making improvements to your website’s user experience, as many prospective patients will unconsciously evaluate the quality of your practice based on the quality of your website.
Google Search Console
The best way to determine how Google views your website on their search engine is by using Google’s Search Console. This free tool provides you with data about your website’s performance on their search engine, including what keywords or search queries are bringing the most traffic to your website, each web page’s indexing status, or if there’s an issue with a web page, the quantity of links you have from other websites, and more.
CRM
A customer relationship management (CRM) tool or software is a database to manage your customers or patients. Many practice management software has some built-in CRM functionality, but this is only for your existing patients. What about your prospective patients or leads? How can you manage these people to make sure you don’t lose them as leads?
According to research published by Steve Olenski on Forbes, Harvard Business Review and Inc.com, “only 27% of leads ever get contacted and companies waste over 70% of leads“.
Most healthcare practices receive new patient leads from various sources – people call the front desk, send text messages, send emails, use a website’s live chat or contact form, send messages from Google, Facebook, Instagram and more.
It’s easy to lose track of some of these messages, especially for a busy dental, medical or healthcare practice. By the time your front desk remembers to respond to the message, the potential patient lead may have already booked at another practice.
It’s an inefficient waste of your marketing budget to spend your ads dollars on generating leads, only to have them not book with your practice or book somewhere else instead.
The best solution to this problem is to organize all of your new patient leads into one central database of information, or a CRM for patient leads. Our healthcare CRM captures all of your new patient leads from every marketing source without any data entry from your team, allowing you to respond to each lead promptly.
We can also analyze each phone call to provide analytics on your staff performance or why the caller did not book an appointment, providing coaching opportunities for your team.
Step 8: Improve Patient Retention
“A 5% increase in customer retention rates can result in a 25-95% increase in profits.“
Bain & Company
Finally, now that you have a steady stream of patients coming into your practice from various sources, including patient referrals, improved reputation, better visibility on Google with SEO and Google Ads, you can focus on improving your patient retention.
It’s generally less expensive to retain an existing patient than to find a new one. In their famous book published by Harvard Business Press, Bain & Company found that “a 5% increase in customer retention rates can result in a 25-95% increase in profits“.
But, how do you improve patient retention? What are some of the most common reasons that patients are leaving your healthcare practice?
There’s always going to be a natural attrition of patients and customers in any business. According to Statista, the average patient retention rate in healthcare is 77%, which results in an attrition rate of 23%.
Some of this attrition is natural or unavoidable, but some of this attrition is avoidable. According to a survey by Esteban Kolsky, founder and principal of thinkJar, ‘only 1 out of 26 unhappy customers complain. The rest churn,’ or leave without saying anything.
To avoid having patients leave without saying anything, it’s helpful to capture their feedback so you can identify any problems to resolve before they escalate and drive further patients away. The easiest way to capture patient feedback is through patient surveys.
“The average patient retention rate is 77%, which results in an attrition rate of 23%.“
Statista
Patient Surveys
Although your practitioners and associates likely already collect patient feedback verbally, many people are polite in person and may likely be more honest and candid in surveys. Also, it’s difficult to collect feedback from every patient while also completing their dental or healthcare treatments, or to get a big picture perspective of your entire practice from verbal feedback.
Instead, you can send your patients a patient satisfaction survey after their visits, either through SMS text or email, for them to complete from the comfort of their phones. Their responses can be saved and stored in a digital database to be analyzed using AI technology.
Instead of reading each response manually (there could be hundreds or thousands), we can use our Optiimus AI technology to aggregate each response to provide sentiment analysis and look for trends. This can help us easily spot potential problems from patients to address before they escalate into larger problems.
Best Healthcare Marketing Strategy: Final Thoughts
The best physio marketing or top therapy marketing strategies consider the entire patient journey, from beginning to end. Your new patients are most likely to be referred to your practice by your existing patients, or they found you online on Google.
Improving your patient experience and online reputation encourages your patients to send you more referrals, especially if you can provide incentives through a digital referral program. Elevating your online reputation with reviews also increases your online visibility on Google.
Increasing your online visibility on Google with geo-targeted ads campaigns and SEO optimized blog articles provide a steady stream of new patients to your healthcare website. You can then best capture that traffic using live chat tools integrated with your CRM to make efficient use of your marketing budget.
Finally, you can maximize your patient retention with patient surveys, to keep a close finger on the pulse of your practice, identify problems before they escalate and improve your profits.
Incorporating these top optometry marketing and best vet marketing ideas will consistently attract new patients to grow your healthcare practice. The best healthcare marketing strategy is the one that you consistently measure, monitor and improve.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
What is healthcare marketing?
Healthcare marketing is the process of strategic communication and outreach to attract and retain patients. The best health marketing involves creating, communicating, and delivering health-related information and interventions using patient-centred and evidence-based strategies to protect and promote the health of patient populations.
What is healthcare advertising?
Healthcare advertising is a subset of healthcare marketing focused on creating and placing promotional messages in various media outlets to inform and persuade potential patients about healthcare services, treatments, and products. The best health advertising aims to increase the visibility of healthcare providers, medical practices, or health-related products to your target audience, encouraging patients to take specific actions, such as scheduling an appointment or purchasing your health-related products.
What are the best healthcare marketing strategy ideas to grow your practice?
The best healthcare marketing strategy ideas include delivering the best patient experience with a digital patient referral program to consistently attract new patient referrals and a strong online reputation with clear visibility to make it easy for new patients to find you on Google.
How can a healthcare website design help you attract new patients?
The best healthcare website design is beautiful, intuitive to navigate and easy to find online on major search engines, like Google. Developing a website with healthcare SEO best practices will make it easier for new patients to find your healthcare website when they’re searching for your health services.
How can healthcare SEO help grow your practice?
Since 80% of Internet users search for health related information online, creating helpful digital content that’s easily found online attracts new visitors to your website. Creating high quality blog articles that are optimized for SEO attracts new potential patients to your practice and establishes your online brand as a health expert.
