9 Ways Doctors Can Market Their Medical Practices More Effectively

Posted by Peter McEllhenney on 1 July 2011 | 0 Comments

Tags: Medical Practice Marketing

If you are starting a new medical practice, hiring new doctors, adding new services, opening new office locations, or want more new patients, you’ll want to market yourself. Here are nine ways (plus two more!) to do it.

1. Earn Referrals and Recommendations

When people need a doctor, they ask their current doctors for recommendations. So taking the time to develop relationships with doctors in specialties complementary to yours is a good idea.

How do you do this?  Consider regularly attending a local civic club like Rotary to expand your network.  Start a LinkedIn Group for physicians in your community and actively invite other doctors to join and give them a reason to interact with the group.  Research individual doctors on the web and call to introduce yourself.  Be friendly, proactive, low-key, and confident.  And keep at it.  It takes time.

Friends also ask friends they trust for recommendations. How do you earn recommendations from your patients? Engage with them as people and provide outstanding care. And remember that every member of you staff -- clinical and administrative -- plays a role in making patients feel welcome and important.  

2. Build a Website for Your Practice

Today’s patients want to research doctors and health professionals on the internet before they make an appointment – even when you’ve been recommended to them.  The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 35% of American adults look on the internet for information about physicians.

A website helps patients find information they want, such as your board certifications and clinical experience, the conditions you treat, and the medical insurances you accept.  We've found the practice directions page is viewed frequently, too, even in the age of Google Maps and GPS.

A website can also help patients find you without a recommendation. Every month across the United States, people perform more than 10 million searches for doctors, surgeons, and other health-care providers in specific locations.  Emphasizing your specialty and your town, city, or state on your site can help them find your practice.

3. Optimize Your Site for Search Engines

Building a website for your practice doesn’t help you if people don’t see it. So when you are creating your site, keep basic search engine optimization principles in mind.

Make sure you have useful content that search engines can read (videos and words in pictures are hard to index). Create descriptive Page Titles and Page Descriptions for your site. Use keywords in the web addresses you choose for each page.

You should also develop separate pages for the biographies of each doctor or provider in your practice. Search engines like web pages to be focused on one topic, such as the name of one doctor. Dedicating a separate page to yourself makes it more likely patients will find that page when they search on your name.

Social media is having a bigger and bigger influence on search engine results.  HIPAA and doctor-patient relationship ethics make social media sites, like Facebook, complicated tools for health-care providers, however.  We recommend doctors move slowly, focus on health education, and keep their personal lives separate from any practice-related social media pages. 

4. Sign Up for the Local Search Services

Many health-care practices – particularly those in the primary-care specialties – get most of their patients from their local communities.  So showing up in major local search engines is extremely important.

You’ll want to create pages for your practice in Google Places, Yahoo! Local, and Bing Local.  These services are free and often allow you to include a link to your website (which can help with your search engine optimization) and details about your services.  Making sure you are in the local online Yellow Pages is worthwhile, too.

Local listings are a good idea even if you are a regionally or nationally recognized specialist.  

5. Create Profiles on Review Sites

Some of the websites on which patients post reviews of their doctors are specifically devoted to health-care, such as vitals.com and healthgrades.com. Other sites, like Angie’s List and Yelp, feature reviews of many kinds of businesses including health practices.

Right now, review sites are important but their impact is limited. The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 15% of American adults read reviews of doctors posted online.

The influence and visibility of these sites is growing rapidly, however, and their reviews are often ranked highly in search results for your name. So make sure the information about you in these sites is correct, especially if you don't have a website of your own.  

Many sites will also help you respond effectively to a person who has posted a negative review.

6. Buy Pay-Per-Click Web Advertising

Web advertising programs like Google AdWords and paid ads on Facebook can help you build your practice quickly. It can take months to raise the visibility of your practice in search engine results. Google AdWords can put you on the first page in less than a day.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising offers the best results in primary-care specialties such as pediatrics or dentistry. If you are the first person people call when they have a health problem, advertising programs like AdWords probably make very good sense for you.

Medical and surgical sub-specialists should think about Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising before making the investment. If most of your new patients come from the referrals of other physicians, then PPC advertising is less likely to be effective. If you also get self-referred patients, then I would think about AdWords and Facebook paid advertising.

7. Print Brochures for Your Practice

Having practice brochures on your front desk is a good way to encourage patient-to-patient referrals and raise awareness of your services. If you offer health education programs to the public, take the brochures with you. Ask local real estate agents to include them in their welcome packets for new home-owners. The more people see your brochure, the more likely you are to earn a new patient.

8. Send Out Direct Mail

Direct mail can help you market your health practice successfully. However, you typically need to send several 1,000 pieces of direct mail to find 100 people who might be interested in your health services.  Direct mail also has high fixed costs from printing, mailing list rental, and postage which you have to pay each time.  

As a result, direct mail makes the most financial sense for large group practices and physicians whose care is expensive – although it can work for every health-care provider.

The right design, the right messaging, and the right mail list are all important to your success, so plan campaigns carefully. Introductory offers, such as a free exam or no co-pay on a first office visit, can increase response to your direct mail.

In general, I think you shouldn't spend money on direct mail before you've spent money on a website.  Almost all of the costs of website development are one-time costs and most website visitors will be interested in you.  Neither of those is true for direct mail.

9. Buy Newspaper & Magazine Ads

Print advertising is like direct mail. You need 1,000s of people to see your ad to find 100 people who will read it. Print advertising can also be expensive, since ads need to run several times to make an impact.

Both direct mail and space advertising can be good choices for reaching people who are not internet users. The Pew Internet study found that people 65 years and older are significantly less likely to look on the web for information about doctors.

The same study also found that households with incomes below $30,000 are significantly less likely to look for health professionals online.

9+1. Create good signs for your practice

If your office is in a location that gets a lot of foot traffic -- for example, right off the sidewalk -- have signs that tell people you are there.  If your practice is located in a large office building, make sure there are signs in the lobby and ask if you can get something more than a line on the board listing the tenants.  Medical offices in shopping malls will want signs as big as the one for the coffee shop next door, and in all the same places.

All other things being equal, people prefer to visit a health-care provider who is close to them.  If they know you're there, they may choose you.  

9+2. Send a health-education newsletter to your patients

Patients recommend doctors more often when those doctors are in the "top of their mind".  A newsletter that has useful health and wellness tips is a good way to keep you in your patients' minds between visits.  It also gives your patients something they might share with their family and friends, which will spread your name in the community.

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