The marketing strategy for elective surgeries should be precise, targeted, and respectful of your prospective audience.
Good attempts to increase new patients will use the technology at your disposal to reach those you know are most likely to be interested in your services. That means building momentum.
It means using inbound marketing strategies and highly targeted tactics such as paid search to reach your more likely prospective clients online.
Here are five more medical marketing tips for how to implement such a campaign effectively:
Google's Pay-Per-Click ad network, AdWords, allows you to show ads only to those who search for terms you select.
This is incredibly important because it allows you to avoid advertising to the general public – often a substantial waste of budget and promotional materials.
Instead, create paid search campaigns in Google that target terms like "implants", "restoration", and "surgery options". The more specific you can be, the better targeted your ads will be and higher your return on investment.
Also consider targeting specific locations in which you want to increase patients. Here's an example of how such an ad would look:
This ad only appears when someone searches for "implant options in las vegas". The targeting ensures better qualified leads for the advertiser.
One of the most effective ways to increase patient volume and promote elective surgery is to show the benefits of what you can offer. Case studies, success stories, and patient testimonials are the lifeblood of your business, and a blog can help you broadcast these to your current followers and future prospective patients.
Create useful content, written from the perspective of the patient (not the way the surgeon describes the procedure), based on case studies and successes of your practice's patients.
This puts a human face on the services you provide and helps to build a relationship online, somewhere in which it is notoriously difficult to generate trust.
Content-based marketing takes time. A single blog post won't lead to a surge of new patients.
What will lead to new patients is consistent publishing over time.
Post content to your blog every week, update your social media channels every day, and run your PPC ad campaigns consistently for 3-6 months. If you can't maintain a high volume schedule, scale it back, but maintain consistency.
It's better to publish once a month than at random times once or twice a month. By building and maintaining this machinery, results will start to snowball.
You'll generate more and more traffic and in turn more leads for your practice. This affects both search engine indexing of your site and the relationship you build with your prospective patients.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make in content marketing and digital advertising is to try and cover everything. By diffusing your message and trying to promote everything you do to everyone, you lose sight of your marketing goals.
Narrow in and focus on one service at a time. Take, for example, a medical practice that performs Lasik eye correction procedures.
It's very likely they offer other services as well, but if they want to grow their LASIK business, they should focus on Lasik and ONLY Lasik in their digital marketing efforts (at least to start). Even if they would like to promote other elective procedures like eyelash treatment, or colored contact lenses.
Adding too many service options right away will only complicate the decision making process for their prospects.
The more targeted your goals are, the better your content will be, and the more likely you will be to increase patients because of these efforts.
These tactics can literally comprise a 6-month marketing campaign. When expedited properly, each effort delivers you as trustworthy resource on your website, with high visibility channels that drive traffic back to your site.
Over time, as traffic increases, content volume grows, and authority in your niche develops, you are far more likely to see the increase in patients you are looking for.
We know that you are busy running your practice. Yokel Local specializes in medical marketing for elective surgery centers. Contact us to get a plan or marketing your medical practice effectively and boost your patient volume.