New customers are the lifeblood of every healthy business—and good marketing keeps them flowing. In the healthcare industry, a steady stream of patients is crucial to the long-term health of your business. To help you stay on top of your marketing game, here are six digital marketing methods that will work wonders.
1. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Your company may have a stunning website, but it’s of no use if no one can find it. SEO is the key to getting your website found by the people who want to buy your products and become future patients.
The strategic inclusion of SEO keywords makes your site show up in search results—ideally near the top. Blogs are a great way to include more SEO keywords on your website. After all, the more keywords you use in your content, the more likely they are to match up with the ones that your potential patients type into a search engine. WordPress and other web building platforms make it easy to optimize your site’s performance—so there’s really no reason for modern businesses to not have a great website.
2. Pay-Per-Click (PPC)
PPC is another way to help generate traffic to your amazing website. In this model, you are essentially purchasing clicks on the internet. Google Adwords and Facebook ads are popular examples of PPC advertising. When you pay for a Facebook ad, you create a great ad and pay money to have it show up in the news feeds of a pre-selected audience. Your ad gets more exposure than it would organically, you get more clicks on your website, and you attract more people to your services.
3. Content Marketing
Compelling videos, blogs, and social media posts are essential for keeping your current customer base engaged. For example, you might share a blog post, news article, or video from another website to your business’s social media accounts that is relevant to your field and informative for your customers.
This is a great way to offer value to your customer community without asking for anything in return. A great rule of thumb is to offer three things of value for free for every one thing that you ask for, promotional information on your services.
4. Email
Email is a great way to keep in touch with your current clientele, and it has the added benefit of being easy for your customers to forward on to friends and family. New blog posts, special sales, and added service offerings are all excellent reasons to send an email to your list and keep your customers engaged.
Your business likely has some degree of competition and sending emails is a great way to say, “remember us? We’re still here and we’re doing really cool things.” It’s important to keep in mind that your patients get a lot of emails, just like you probably do. Make sure you’re not emailing so often than it becomes annoying, or people will start to unsubscribe from your list. Choose a frequency that feels like just enough and make sure that you’re always sending an email that offers value.
5. Reviews
Online reviews are a powerful tool for attracting new customers. Time and money are valuable resources that none of us wants to waste, and positive reviews are like flag posts that say, “this company is a good bet.” Unless a customer is blown away by a great—or terrible—experience, it will most likely occur to them to leave a review online. Therefore, you have to ask and ask often.
A good place to begin is by posting a few positive reviews on your own website. Ask some of your loyal, satisfied customers to provide quotes about their experiences with your company, and post them as testimonials on a visible spot on your company’s website.
Then, add a section to emails that follow-up on the services you provided. Maybe add a note that says, “a good review is the best way to say thanks if you were pleased with your experience doing business with us.” Be sure to post links to your online accounts (Yelp, Google, Facebook, etc.) so that it’s nice and easy for your client to click and leave a review.
6. Request Feedback
Client feedback is an important, often untapped, source of vital information about the health of your business. How often are you following up with your clients about the merchandise or service they received? If the answer is “not often” or “never,” then you’re missing out. Requesting feedback has many benefits.
First of all, if your client had an excellent experience with your company, the process of providing feedback to you provides them an opportunity to reflect and acknowledge how much they value the service or product. And this helps them solidify in their own minds that they’d like to come back to your healthcare practice in the future. They’ll also be more likely to recommend you to a friend or neighbor.
On the other hand, if a patient had a less-than-stellar experience, then their feedback will help you implement changes so that you can do better. Email and text message surveys are an easy, inexpensive way to for your business to start collecting feedback from clients the right away.
If implemented correctly, these six strategies will soon have new customers knocking down your business’s proverbial door. None of these are one-time strategies. A commitment to using them on an ongoing basis, and getting better as you go, has the potential to create a never-ending stream of new customers for your company.
Looking for more ways to improve the health of your business? Contact us today to learn more about our management solutions for healthcare providers.
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