Best Healthcare Marketing Ideas Medical Clinics Should Focus On
Marketing a medical practice can be an overwhelming undertaking. Even if you have found some success things are continually changing and evolving and it is easy for initiatives to become stagnant or ineffective.
Shaking it up or trying something new is always a great idea with any practice. Good marketers understand the value of regular A/B testing and innovative new ways to reach and engage with their patient base.
I whole heartily agree so I have compiled a list of the most effective and some slightly out-of-the-box clinic marketing ideas to try for your medical practice.
Table of Contents:
- Performing a Medical Website SEO Audit
- Leverage Search Ads to Target Treatments and Conditions
- Grow an Email List and Send Monthly Specials Newsletter
- Utilize Geofencing Ads to Convert New Patients
- Create Videos that Feature your Physicians
- Backlink Building to Grow Organic Search Traffic
- Google Business Profile Optimization
- OTT & C-TV for an Omni-Channel Marketing Approach
- Test interactive lead generation strategies like Quizzes
- Use LinkedIn to Connect with Local Physicians for Referral Growth
- Healthcare Marketing Ideas Wrap Up
Top 10 Creative Medical Marketing Ideas
1. Perform a Medical Website SEO Audit
How can you decide on what medical SEO strategies you need to move forward if you don’t know what’s going on now?
Your website is the single most important digital asset to your medical practice, especially when it comes to ranking highly in SERPs for keywords related to your practice specialty or geographical area.
With the 100s or 1000s of algorithm updates that Google releases annually, it is critical to check, recheck and continuously update your website content and site structure.
An annual SEO audit will identify any errors, weak points, or areas of improvement on your website and provide a roadmap for your SEO for doctors plan.
Is your website speed affecting your SEO?
An audit can quickly tell you the top things to correct to increase your website load times.
Page speed and load times play an important role in page ranking and the overall SEO of your website.
Do you have quality backlinks and good domain authority?
Backlinks are one of the more critical ranking signals for pages. Having high-QUALITY backlinks to a page shows Google the page has “authority” and makes it more likely to be ranked higher in local or national search results.
Broken internal links or toxic backlinks can do the opposite and hurt your standings, so you need to pay attention to building quality backlinks and fixing any broken links along the way.
Using a tool like SEMRush will give you a detailed backlink audit report that is extremely useful.
Are you showing up for the right medical services and procedures?
Have you ever even run a report or started tracking where your pages are ranking for the keywords that matter most to your practice?
This is essential to tracking your local SEO efforts, and there are 100s of useful tools out there both paid and free to do so.
Start with Google Search Console the handy (and FREE!) Google tool that will show you where you rank for queries, impressions, click-through rate, and much more.
Above is a screenshot from a large orthopedic client that showcases the organic impression (purple) and click (blue) growth on their website.
Do you need to restructure the pages on your website, so it’s easier for Google to crawl them?
Google relies almost 100% on bots to crawl the web and send signals back to their algorithm for ranking billions of websites. There is no way an army of people could manually check trillions of data points, so this is the only way to make it happen.
Therefore, your website needs to be set up to “speak” those bot’s language and make it as easy as possible for them to understand where things are, what content is more important, what your business is and does, and more.
Without that, you are leaving this up to chance and just crossing your fingers and hoping Google will make the right decision about what queries your pages need to show up in.
2. Leverage Search Ads to Target Treatments and Conditions – Clinic Advertising Ideas
In 2023, it has gone past a creative medical marketing idea to essential for practices to be leveraging Google ads or PPC advertising to drive new patient appointments.
Search ads are one of the more effective ways to generate new patient appointments for practices.
The reason is patients are further down the buyer/sales funnel when they are searching on Google for a particular practice, treatment or condition.
We call this “pull” versus “push” marketing.
It lends itself to high-quality patient leads that tend to need fewer touchpoints to convert.
What we mean by “push” is similar to Facebook ads where you present an ad in front of a person on their social media even though they may not know who your practice is or have a need for it.
So you are, therefore, pushing ads in front of patients.
When you leverage Google ads, you are “pulling” them into the website by positioning yourself at the top of search for the keywords they are searching for.
3. Grow an Email List and Send Monthly Specials Newsletter
Go for the low-hanging fruit!
Retargeting past and current patients to promote services and procedures is an all too often overlooked for a successful healthcare marketing campaign tactic.
This is extremely effective if you offer ancillary or cash-based services in your practice.
Current and past patients are a great way to boost select services for the medical practice and increase high-revenue procedures. Existing and previous patients have used your services before and may not know about the benefits of other procedures offered by the practice or may need a reminder.
Appeal to them and reward them by building patient loyalty with unique and exclusive promotions just for existing and past patients.
Often healthcare marketing promotions are focused on just bringing in new patients, but applying them to existing patients increases the value per patient and boosts sales as well as patient loyalty. When the practice marketing promotions focus on attracting new patients, they tend to be low-commitment patients and low revenue procedures involving a longer sales cycle and more touch points to close.
New patient-focused promotions often discount low revenue and low-commitment services which can attract patients that are clearance shopping and not likely to return for any full-priced services or long-term commitment.
Promotions explicitly designed for current and past patients eliminate the long sales process and tend to be the higher revenue procedures and packages. Focusing marketing efforts on previous patients can be highly successful due to the fact they are your ideal target and have confidence in your capabilities as a physician and are more likely to return.
4. Utilize Geofencing Ads to Convert New Patients – Clinic Advertising Ideas
I would put geofencing near the top of the healthcare marketing ideas list to focus on in 2023.
This has really been on the rise over the last few years and has been a slower adoption (as most things are) in the medical marketing space.
What geofencing allows you to do it to target potential patients specifically in areas they go with their devices.
For instance, if you are a urology practice wanted to do more vasectomies you need to target male patients.
You could geofence gyms, barber shops, golf courses etc…
When “Jim” goes to play a round of golf at the local gold course he will be added to a geofencing audience.
You can then being to target him across his devices with video and graphic-based ads.
Once he is ready to make an appointment, he will be counted as a visit when he breaks the geofencing barrier of the practice which is up to as little as 15 feet outside the front door.
This means, no more counting leads as people that filled out a request appointment form.
You can count them as walking through the front door. Powerful stuff.
5. Create Videos that Feature your Physicians – Creative Medical Marketing Ideas
Video content is quickly becoming the new source for the future of SEO. Youtube is the second most popular social media platform behind Facebook and the second largest search engine behind Google.
This means video content can help your medical practice market to potential patients by providing credible information about the physicians and services. Establishing a Youtube channel to feature physicians, top medical conditions, and treatments can help boost your SEO and digital presence.
Making videos is easier than ever if you use video creation tools. Tools like this help amplify your reach and build brand awareness.
Check out the example below? Imagine being a rheumatology practice that leverages video marketing. Dr. Amy was able to generate 107K+ views just by expanding on the topic of the difference between Osteoarthritis vs. Rheumatoid Arthritis Symptoms. You can see people are eating up information on topics related to your area of practice.
When setting up a Youtube channel make sure you are uploading relevant and unique videos featuring your physicians. It’s essential to add your medical practice logo and branding template overlay on your videos to add that extra level of professionalism.
Do not forget Youtube is its own SEO universe! Take the time to add in the proper descriptions, tags, locations and more to make sure your are leveraging search and people are finding your videos.
Once you have established a medical Youtube channel for marketing utilize your website, email and social media platforms to distribute your content and grow a loyal following.
6. Backlink Building to Grow Organic Search Traffic – Healthcare Marketing Ideas
Backlinks are a great healthcare campaign idea to add to your medical SEO strategy.
While generally thought of as a national level SEO idea, this is very effective in local SEO when done correctly.
What is a backlink?
Backlinks are any links that point from another website back to yours.
What they can do for SEO is help build trust and authority in Google eyes for your website, as a whole, and treatments and conditions pages on your website.
With an effective backlink-building campaign, we always tell our clients that it is critical to focus on quality over quantity.
That is what will drive results.
7. Google Business Profile Optimization – Healthcare campaign ideas
Localized SEO should be a significant focus of a practice’s innovative healthcare marketing strategy. Why? Because generally, patients will not drive (especially in urban markets with high competition and traffic) over 15-20 miles max to visit a practice location.
Add that to the fact that Google is becoming increasingly more local searched focused. An easy way to see that is by searching on desktop and you will now see the Google “Local 3 Pack” is the first search results with the map above the other organic listings. That shows how crucial localized search has become.
Most practices know what Google Business Profile (GBP) is but just in case you do not it is IMPERATIVE that you do. Your GPBlisting is the listing you see in Google Maps and the “Local 3 Pack”. Below is an example of a physician GPB.
If you are not sure if you have one, before creating one go to Google Maps and do a quick search for your brand name or exact address. If you have been around for a few years chances are Google has already created a listing for you. If you find it, claim it by clicking “Own this business?” and follow the prompts.
If you have already claimed and updated your listing make sure you have completed all areas of the account including five categories, photos, business description and more.
Pro tip: For the business description ensure that location keywords are used in the first 1-2 sentences of the description. Example: if you own a dental practice in Austin, TX make sure “Austin dental practice”, “dental office in Austin” or some variation occurs right out of the gate to help Google in a proximity-based search.
8. OTT & C-TV for an Omni-Channel Marketing Approach
OTT & C-TV is another one of the more creative medical marketing ideas.
What is OTT & C-TV?
OTT is the umbrella term that covers the delivery of video content via the internet with any device.
C-TV refers to the physical device that delivers the video content, like the Amazon Fire Stick, Apple TV, Roku, or Chromecast.
A good example is if you are watching your favorite on-demand TV show on your Apple TV and you see those ads every 10-15 mins that pop up.
You can utilize this to deliver TV commercial quality ads in a much more cost effective, trackable and targeted way to potential patients.
This has massive applications depending on your subspecialty and what you are promoting.
Say you just opened a new ASC center you want to promote as an alternative to in-patient surgery.
You can create a 30-60 second promotional video and leverage OTT & C-TV to market it to local patients.
9. Test interactive lead generation strategies like Quizzes – Clinic Advertising Ideas
Quizzes are one of those fun and interactive medical campaign ideas to test.
If you have a treatment or procedure that requires some level of pre-qualification or screening this can be an effective lead generator.
A great use case example is we have a women’s health facility that focuses on menopause treatment.
We utilize a quiz focused on menopause symptoms to deliver ideal leads for HRT therapy.
Fun, interactive, and effective all at the same time.
10. Use LinkedIn to Connect with Local Physicians for Referral Growth
When COVID shut down the traditional referral marketing efforts, LinkedIn became a hospital marketing idea that really developed legs.
You can utilize LinkedIn to connect and network with local physicians and fellow physician liaisons to increase referrals into your practice monthly just like you would if you visited in person.
We recommend leveraging LinkedIn’s advanced tool Sales Navigator so you can search for specific titles in your area like “Referral Coordinator” for outreach.
This will allow you to target the front lines in these specialty practices and engage them to generate new referrals for your physicians.
Healthcare Marketing Ideas Wrap Up
In conclusion, healthcare marketing offers numerous platforms and creative ways to grow your practice but make sure you are choosing the best fit. These are 10 marketing tips to help you grow your medical or dental practice and reach new patients. If you are looking for a healthcare marketing professional to help you implement these marketing initiatives, we would love to help!
Go book a free practice assessment and meet with one of our healthcare marketing ideas experts via Zoom!
