Web Marketing Increases New Patients by 100%

Posted by Peter McEllhenney on 3 October 2011 | 0 Comments

Tags: Medical Practice Marketing

At 5G Health Marketing, we’ve found that web marketing is a highly effective way for doctors and other health professionals to get more new patients. But we asked ourselves recently – just how effective?

To find out, I dug into the answers our clients get to the question “How did you hear about us?” and correlated them with website analytic, web advertising, and other web marketing data.

My conclusion? Web marketing can increase the number of new patients a medical practice gets by 100%. Here’s how it breaks down:

New Patients: 50% from Word-of-Mouth

The first result isn’t a surprise because word-of-mouth has always been an excellent way to build a medical practice. Our clients typically get 50% of their new patients from personal referrals.

For example, if a health practice is getting 100 new patients a month, 50 of those new patients come from word-of-mouth.

Our clients promote word-of-mouth referrals by networking with colleagues in complementary specialties and becoming involved in community organizations. And of course, they promote referrals by offering excellent, compassionate care that makes patients remember them.

New Patients: 30% from Websites

The second result is that 30% of new patients come either directly or indirectly from the practice website. Using the 100 patient example, that means the website earns 30 of those new patients.

Many of these new patients are what we call “website-supported word-of-mouth”. That means the patient has come to the website by a search on the doctor’s name or the name of the practice.

They are visiting the website because they want to learn more about that doctor before they make an appointment. According to Pew research, 35% of adult Americans do just that.

We know these visits help earn more new patients because we’ve consistently seen website visits and new patient visits rise and fall together. We can also tell from the analytics that many of the web visits last 5 to 10 minutes or more.

In addition, a properly search engine optimized medical practice website helps people searching on a term such as “family doctor” find our clients, not their competition. These patients don’t come from word-of-mouth. They come from having a website.

New Patients: 20% from Web Advertising

The last result is that 20% of new patients come from paid web advertising – that is, 20 of the 100 new patients in the example I’ve been using.

I recommend using a pay-per-click advertising service like Google AdWords because, dollar for dollar, it offers the best return on an advertising investment. Pay-per-click advertising allows doctors to target people in their community looking for a health professional just like them.

Not all of our clients choose paid advertising. It makes the most sense for doctors who are establishing themselves in a community or who want to grow their medical practice quickly.

For details on how search engines and websites work to help grow a medical practice, read our blog post on how to get new patients with web marketing.

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