You know the value of a powerful, distinctive brand for your doctor’s or dentist’s office. A cohesive, recognizable brand that showcases your strengths and positions you uniquely among your competitors helps patients understand what you’re all about – and helps match the right people to your services.
But an amazing brand is nothing if people don’t know it exists. Here’s how to market your doctor’s or dentist’s office for optimal success.
Marketing is an Investment in Your Practice
Marketing can be the difference between a clinic that gets by and one that thrives. Healthcare practices that invest in marketing their brands grow their visibility, build their reputation in the community, and remain at the forefront of patients’ minds. Done well, and strategically, marketing should be a cash flow-positive endeavor.
One thing that’s important to note is that marketing is about more than just ads, although ads might form part of your marketing campaign. Marketing is all the different ways you put your brand out into the world, from your website to your newsletter to the interviews you do with your local newspaper. The more your brand “gets out there,” the more opportunities it has to resonate with people.
Try These High-Impact Marketing Strategies
With your marketing efforts, you can get creative as you want, but it’s always good to start with the classics. Some of our favorite marketing strategies for healthcare brands include:
- A website. Websites are today’s business cards. They’re one of the first things prospective patients look at when considering a new practitioner. Make sure yours showcases what you offer while speaking directly to your target audience. It should align with current SEO and web best practices, too. An easy-to-use online portal is also a great way to onboard patients and keeps them informed.
- Social media. Social media can be an affordable and effective way to reach patients in your catchment area. Be consistent, informative, communicative, and engaging – and tap into channels, hashtags, formats, and trends that are shown to boost engagement in your niche.
- Share your voice. Lend your expertise to local publications and news outlets. Interviews, op-eds, and advertorials are all a great way to build your reputation and share your skillset with a larger audience. Organizations like HARO are a great way to connect with journalists working for national publications, extending your reach even further.
- Build your location-based profiles. Keep your Google My Business listing updated with your current hours and services, and boost it with current photos and patient quotes. Ask your patients to share their positive reviews – the more you gather, the higher you’ll rank.
- Patient outreach. Care packages sent at key points of the year are a great way to encourage repeat visits and potentially expand your customer base. Send out a small care package during flu season with an invitation for patients to come in for a check-up and a shot, or a teeth whitening sample as an enticement for patients to come in for a professional cosmetic dentistry treatment.
- Create a pay-per-click campaign. A great PPC campaign can further boost a powerful SEO and content marketing strategy. Develop a series of high-interest text or image-based ads for Google or social media that target specific patients with key diagnoses or concerns – and watch your conversions soar.
- Content marketing. Blogs, newsletters, whitepapers, podcasts are all great for SEO and positioning you as an expert. Keep it consistent, high quality, and on-brand, and you’ll be able to continuously expand your reach and reputation.
Is Your Marketing Backed by Strategy?
There are endless ways to market your business, but whether those efforts actually work is determined by the strength of the strategy behind them. Posting a ton of photos to Instagram or spending a fortune on ads is no good if you’re targeting the wrong people or focusing on the wrong aspects of your business. When developing your marketing assets, make sure they’re:
- Relevant – do they show what you do and “sell” it to your clearly defined target audience?
- Strategic – is there a business case for the effort, or are you just crossing your fingers that “more is more”?
- Cohesive – are they part of a larger plan, and is your whole team working collaboratively or doing their own thing?
- Actionable – do they encourage patients to take a specific action?
- Measurable – can you measure how well your efforts are performing in terms of ROI?
If you’re ready to take your practice to the next level with a powerful marketing campaign that gets your brand in front of the right people, talk to the team at StellaPop. We can help you develop a cohesive strategy that meets your audience where they are – building brand loyalty along with your bottom line.
See Also:
The Doctor Is In – Branding Your Doctor or Dental Practice for Success?
Perfect Brand Sound: Start a Surround Sound Content Marketing Strategy
Why Your Business Needs to Balance Its Creative and Management Brains
