by Marcus Sandhu
Marketing for a medical practice has evolved beyond phone books, ads in magazines or newspapers. The Internet offers much more effective tools for advertizing, which makes having successful online marketing for your medical practice imperative to remaining competitive in the market for medical services.
Most medical practices have now established some sort of presence online, be it a paid listing through a third-party site or a website of their own. The problem is that many of these practices have stopped there, when they should be trying to make themselves easily found in an Internet Search. Just having a website does not mean that it will be picked up by search engines. Something needs to be done to get the attention of people who are searching for the medical searches they offer. Choosing a good marketing strategy for a medical practice is just as important as having a presence on the Web because without marketing, a practice won’t show up against the competition.
Let’s start off by identifying the objective of an outstanding online marketing strategy. It simply is this. For the kind of medical services and/or surgical services your practice provides, you want any patient within a drivable distance of your practice to know that your practice is available, able, and easy to deal with for the condition that they need to have addressed. In particular, you want to be the medical practice which is identified as the leader and the most well-reputed in the medical service in which that patient needs care. In a few words, that’s essentially all any online marketing strategy needs to achieve.
Well, if you have a web site, you’ve taken the initial step but by no means have you developed a marketing strategy for the Internet. In order to develop a truly successful online marketing plan for your medical practice, what you want to do is put out what patients will be attracted to. Under an ideal situation, what you want to have is a lot of favorable word-of-mouth about your practice. What you want is patients who have been to your practice to say genuine first-person experiences about how great your practice was in terms of being available, about the staff and the physicians being easy to talk to, and about how the overall medical care and surgical care was outstanding at the practice.
This is the same, timeless system of word-of-mouth that has worked all along, only by using the Internet you can now publish this feedback in the form of an online review rather than wait for your patients to bump into someone and spread the word in conversation. The Internet has the ability to reach thousands in the time it would take that conversation to take place, which makes it the ultimate marketing tool for your medical practice.
Some very important questions are raised when you pursue an Internet marketing strategy for your medical practice that involves online reviews. One very important issue is how you can control your reputation online if you encourage your patients to write reviews. Your concern clearly is that you will have a disgruntled patient who will write an unfavorable review. It’s for this reason that you do not want to encourage your patients to go to third-party web sites, such as Citysearch or Yelp or another such site to write reviews about your practice. If you do that, eventually you’ll have some negative reviews that develop on these sites, especially if you’re encouraging the process of reviews being written about the medical practice. And unfortunately, you have no control in terms of eliminating or deleting those reviews.
Ideally, what you want to have is your practice’s own web site, where you can have your patients go to a site that has your own brand, your own logo, and write a review about the practice. Under ideal circumstances, you would have complete authority in deciding which review is favorable about the practice and should be shown to other prospective patients or anybody searching online for the medical services that your practice treats.
The fact that 60 to 80 percent of people who search for services on the Internet starting with a search engine like MSN or Yahoo!, begs the question of how new patients in your community will be able to find your review website. The best way to make sure your practice shows up in a search is to make sure that it ranks very high on search engine results. It’s a fact that the practices who have had online reviews written about their services pop up first in any city when they are searched using Google.
People who are seeking a new physician trust the reviews they read online. The first hand reviews written by a physician’s current patients are the driving force for a successful online marketing plan for your practice because good feedback is what a prospective patient will want to see when considering making an appointment with your practice.
When your review site is indexed by search engines, it happens the same way any other site is indexed. The advantage a review site will have; however, is that it will be packed full of great reviews about the services you offer which, as we’ve established using Google, means your review site will pop up easily on the Internet, making your information some of the first viewed by those searching for medical services in your community. Your review site will be full of positive feedback that will grow to a huge proportion over time as you continue to add the latest reviews written by your patients. Keeping the content current in this matter will help your review site be selected over other sites that contain old material. Your site will rank high in searches because of the dynamic content you supply, and that will easily translate into new patients coming to your practice for their medical needs.
