Manish Kumar Chauhan

To take your practice to new heights, you need to have a strong marketing strategy. For customer satisfaction, you need to offer quality care and good treatment, but for your practice's outreach, you need to make more people know about you and that's possible only through marketing. Although the benefits of digital marketing outweigh traditional marketing, both have their own significance.

Before deciding between digital and traditional marketing or both, you need to set your goals for launching a marketing plan. For instance:

To strengthen your presence and publicize your services in your locality

To thank your existing patients and offer facilities to them

To increase referrals from other doctors, etc.

Once you are done with setting goals, it's time to decide the marketing type to put into practice.

Traditional marketing includes marketing through television, newspaper, and radio advertisements. Brochures and event marketing are some other ways of traditional marketing. Traditional marketing always follows the 'push marketing' concept. In digital marketing, the 'pull' strategy is followed.

Digital marketing is constantly evolving. More than 

 of people use online reviews for finding a physician or making a physical visit. People avoid visiting a doctor with no online presence. Digital marketing can involve creating a website, using search engine optimization, PPC (pay-per-lick), email marketing, social media, YouTube advertising, etc. Let's discuss its advantages in more detail below.

Digital Marketing vs. Traditional Healthcare Marketing

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Here are a few reasons why practices need to invest in digital healthcare marketing over traditional methods.

Tips to gain patient referrals

Referral management is an effective technique for a physician to grow their practice. A strong referral network helps you grow and sustain your revenue stream. Beyond paid ads and emails, establishing a referral network is something that can offer your practice exponential growth.

Building patient referrals requires time, not money. Here are some ways to help you get more patient referrals.

Patient referrals can improve your work atmosphere as well as your bottom line. Here are some tips for gaining patient referrals

To make your practice grow you need to have more patients, while making sure the existing ones keep coming back. The increasing competition practices face in the health care industry has made things tough, but not impossible. Your practice needs both new patients and retention of existing ones.

Here are some ways to encourage regular patients come back to your practice.

After the first visit, it's the follow-up visit that concerns every patient visiting your practice. Scheduling a follow-up visit before a patient leaves your practice is a simple and effective way to make them a regular visitor. A prompt front-desk office person can engage with the patients and encourage them to revisit your practice. He needs to explain the need for repeated visits for treatments and be able to schedule a follow up.

It's not necessary that every patient will schedule a follow-up appointment before leaving the practice. In such a scenario, it is your responsibility to remind them through email. For the smooth execution of this process, you need to maintain a track of patients’ next visit. When you find the due date is approaching, send reminder emails or messages to encourage appointment booking. Here, don’t forget to place the online scheduling link and phone number in the email body for quick response. You can also try sending personalized postcards. Offer a reminder postcard to all patients visiting your practice. This will save you from losing any of your patients’ contact details and offer them more personalized service.

For better treatment, a patient needs to visit the doctor for his well visits, not just in sickness. This message should be well communicated to all your patients. Youngsters and healthy adults often don’t value this message. They are reluctant to go for regular visits to their doctor. You need to make them understand the need for regular appointments and health checkups, because prevention is better than cure.

A verbal education to the person visiting your practice is not necessarily the only way to explain the importance of appointments. Different modes of communication can help to spread this message quickly, such as website banners, newsletter or email campaigns, social media posts or blogs with detailed information. Nobody would want to see such an information every day, so make it a monthly or quarterly practice. You can share relevant information from reputed sources such as the American Public Health Association and others.

Make them aware of the prevention and screening services that can be availed without any financial burden. You need to proactively contact your patients and inform them of the preventive services.

Another great way to encourage patients come back is to organize health camps or programs, such as weight management, tests, physiotherapy, and diabetes management, etc. Educate patients on how these programs can help them. Use emails and flyer to promote participation. You should also request for word-of-mouth marketing to increase the number of participants.

Discounts and promotions are another way to boost patients’ re-visits. This works well with aesthetic treatments, such as skin or dental services. For instance, you can promote discounts or free consultation on the second sitting of laser or dental checkup. During checkout, pitch the offers to encourage the patients to choose you over the rest. Try to create packages, such as one service free on first three sittings, etc. In addition to informing patients while leaving your practice, you can promote these offers on your website, blog page, social media pages, or emails.

Manish Chauhan is Digital Marketing Manager at 

 which is an easy-to-use reputation management solution for physicians to help monitor, protect and promote their medical practices at all times in the simplest way possible.

Articles

Practices are facing stiff competition in health care these days, here are five ways to ensure your patients keep coming back.

5 Ways to Encourage Patients to Come Back to Your Practice

Today, online reputation management is crucial for the survival and growth of any practice. The ever-growing competition is making it tough for practices to outshine others. So instead of getting worried about what others are doing, it’s time to learn from them and improve yourself. Let’s see how your competitors can benefit you by improving your online reputation.

Your website is the first impression a new customer will have of your practice. It is the first thing they see during their online research. So you need to have a well-designed website to make the right impression on your potential patients.

Check out your competitors’ websites to see what kind of an impression they are leaving on their visitors. Are their sites clear or cluttered? Do they have clear navigation and can they be accessed on a mobile device? Take a look at every aspect and then compare them with your website.

In addition to a good-looking website, you need to have educational and easy-to-understand content. Content includes information such as office details, your bio, specialty, and services that put the patient at ease and understand your practice in a better way.

In addition to informative content, it is necessary that you have good SEO. If your competitor outranks your website, you are likely lacking good SEO strategies and quality content. Check your competitors’ websites content and implement new ideas in your web content. Always remember your content should be unique, informative, and original.

Your online reputation is influenced by your online reviews. There are numerous review platforms such as Yelp, Healthgrades, Vitals, YellowPages, etc. that allow consumers to post reviews and others to read what users have experienced. So you need to proactively check review sites for any patient reviews and reply accordingly.

You should check what people are saying about your competitors and how are they handling reviews. Also, take a look at their ratings on various review sites. Knowing what your competitors are doing better than you can help you formulate strategies around it and improve your practice’s marketing and operations. Don’t forget to ask for reviews from your happy patients when they visit your practice or through mail and messages.

To manage your online reputation, you also need to learn how and when to interact with your customers. Responding to online reviews is one element. You should know how to deal with negative reviews without taking them personally and welcome the scope of improvement.
Social media platform, mailers, seminars, etc. are other interaction spots. You need to keep a close check on your competitors’ initiatives of interaction. You can send interactive mailers or conduct surveys to get your patients comfortable with you. Whenever your patients make a physical visit to your practice, ask them about the mode of communication they prefer and if they have anything to share about your practice or their experience.

Everyone is on some social media platform. In addition to socializing with friends and family, these platforms let you share your knowledge, reviews, concerns and much more. It has made the world a small place where anyone can be in touch with another person.

Take a look at various social media platforms to see how your competitors are replying to their patients and how are they engaging their target audiences. This analysis will help you build stronger marketing strategies.
If you don’t have an active account on social media platforms, create one as soon as possible. Implement social media marketing strategies and post relevant forms of content that showcase your thought-leader personality in front of your existing and potential patients. This will help you build a strong online reputation. 

which is an easy-to-use reputation management solution for physicians to help monitor, protect and promote their medical practices at all times in the simplest way possible.

Looking at your competitors' website, online reputation, and social media presence can help you improve your own marketing efforts.