5 easy tips for physician practice marketing

5 easy tips for physician practice marketing

Medical practice marketing can seem like a daunting task at first but it doesn’t have to be. Here are 5 tips to get you started on the right foot.

1. Verify, claim and optimize Google My Business: 

If there is one thing on this list that is a must, it is working on Google My Business (GMB). To claim your listing, search Google for your Practice name and select own the business?

It will help you show up in the Google Maps and local SEO, it helps show and respond to patient reviews. There is a lot within GMB that you can optimize.

  • Make sure your Name, Address and Phone Number is correct and the same that is listed on your website.
  • Make sure the correct office hours are listed.
  • Make sure that the categories within your listing are correct and add as many as are relevant to your practice and specialty.
  • Make sure the map is showing the correct location.
  • Make sure you have some photos posted.
  • Make your description relevant and add keywords to the services you provide.

*TIP: Sometimes Google will automatically create separate listings for each physician in the practice. We suggest claiming, verifying and optimizing those as well.

2. Physician Reviews: 

This is another must do. Since you can not stop patients from leaving bad reviews and at some point every doctor is going to get one for one reason or another even if it is not justified, it means that you need to stay ahead and get the patients that have had a good experience with your practice to leave a review. All they need is a little reminder and in no time your practice will have hundreds of reviews. Be proactive about your online presence and reputation.

The inconsistent way to gather reviews is to get a link to your Google review page (this explains how) and email patients either all at once or randomly. We’ve had a few practices try this and you’ll end up with a few reviews here and there but inconsistent and ineffective overall. 

We offer a service that makes review generation easy. We get a patient schedule from you weekly, upload it to our system and let the automation kick into a request and send links to reviews. This also allows you to send links for Facebook reviews or medical directory sites like Healthgrades.com and Vitals.com.

Look at the success of our Physician Reviews generates.

3. Consistent posting to social media: 

Listen, you don’t need to post to social media 3x a day for there to be a benefit. The best way to start in social media is to pick one platform and start slow. Whether it’s Facebook, Instagram, Twitter or YouTube, just start to post things now. Don’t worry about being overly fancy or perfect, the biggest thing is to show the personality of your medical practice. That’s what patients want to see. Ideas include:

  • Patient photos (get patients consent)
  • Staff photos (birthdays, work anniversaries and just day to day photos all work well. Just be sure not to mistakenly include any patient PHI to stay HIPAA friendly.
  • Blog article links from your site
  • Blog article links from other industry-leading sites
  • Holiday Postings

There are also a lot of free tools to make it easier. Schedule posts with buffer or get free design software with Canva or Adobe Spark.

4. Patient Recalls: 

Make sure you are staying up to date with patient recalls. If your EMR or practice management software doesn’t have a fancy feature that does this automatically, the go old school and us note cards. Make a folder for each month, add patients recall card to the month they require a recall and then just circulate through the folder for the month you need to recall patients for. If a patient doesn’t want to schedule, just put them back in the recall folders a month or two away so you remember to reach back out.

5. Ask patients for referrals: It seems simple enough, right? Well for most practices, this isn’t happening and it really should be. Patients come to you for a reason, or it could be a lot of reasons, but I bet the majority of your patients come to your practice because they love you and your staff. Capitalize on those patients by asking them to refer friends and family. Weave it into the conversation you have with each patient and after a while, it will become second nature and you won’t even need to think about it.

Contact Telos Digital Marketing for more information on PPC or SEO for medical practices

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Devin McHatten, MBA

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Devin McHatten, MBA

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