As a medical professional you have enough to handle with providing medical care, dealing with insurance companies, and handling the administrative duties on a day-to-day basis. Like most doctors, marketing your practice might not get all the attention it needs to keep a steady flow of new patients coming to your office.
As a medical professional you have enough to handle with providing medical care, dealing with insurance companies, and handling the administrative duties on a day-to-day basis. Like most doctors, marketing your practice might not get all the attention it needs to keep a steady flow of new patients coming to your office. At one point you might actually have found the time to get a website designed and put online, but you really haven’t thought about it since then.
A typical website might contain something like a welcome to the practice, an “about us” page, a presentation of treatments provided, and a few photos of the office and staff. Maybe you even went the extra mile and included your website in advertising, business cards and office stationery. But you’re not really sure if it’s working, and have no idea how many leads it generates or how many patients have actually been referred to your practice from it.
Your situation is not unique. Unless a prospective patient has been referred directly to you and is using the internet to look for background information on your practice, an ineffective or incoherent website could actually be keeping patients away from you. The problem is that many website designers do not understand online medical marketing and do not know how to build a website responding to the four phases of the patient search process. If your marketing doesn’t respond to this process, your website will never appear near the top of their search results and you will not be able to convert prospects into patients.
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When people were not feeling well in the old days they would simply make an appointment with a medical professional. Now they engage in online self-diagnosis before choosing a medical provider. They type in their symptoms, look for possible diagnoses, read about potential therapies, and then search for resources. Medical paid search can make sure your office is involved at each step of the process.
Paid search marketing (medical PPC) involves designing sophisticated online medical marketing campaigns that maximize visits from these potential patients. You already know they are looking for a specific type of service and that your practice can provide a treatment that will be of benefit to them.
A common misconception when managing an online medical marketing campaign is that having a Google Adwords account is sufficient. What most inexperienced healthcare marketing professionals fail to realize is that a proper Medical SEM (Search Engine Marketing) program also consists of other channels outside of Google such as: Yahoo, MSN, Bing, Facebook, Display Ads, Re-Targeting campaigns and Content Networks.
Medical SEM is one of the most effective and cost-efficient forms of online medical marketing available today. According to BIA/Kelsey, online advertising is projected to double by 2015. If your online marketing strategy isn’t optimized to take advantage of this opportunity, your prospective patients will be directed to practices with websites that are.
