How to Start Marketing a Medical Practice?
Start with a “Why” to market your medical practice
Your "Why" should be very clear to you. If you aren't clear about why you need marketing, it will be hard to make convincing content. Think why customers should follow you, what is your unique angle?
Perhaps you have a funny side, or maybe you have unique insights from research. Don't be afraid to be authentic and connect with your future clients. They will feel more comfortable coming to your clinic if they can connect to you.
Not sure what sets you apart? Ask your patients! They chose you for a reason. Don't be afraid to ask them what keeps them coming.
Setting a Budget for Marketing
Paid marketing works if you take care of a few things from the get-go. Budget is a key factor. You need to have a sufficient budget for your campaign. If you're planning to market specialty, e.g., a specialty like spine surgery, you need higher budgets as the relevant keywords are more expensive.
You need to take into consideration the number of physicians and geographic locations. Your budget will vary depending on whether you want to target one location or multiple locations.
As a common practice, your budget should be in accordance with your revenue per patient.
Build an Ideal Patient Persona
When starting, you should build an ideal patient persona. An ideal patient persona will help you understand your target audience, which is patients. You need to create multiple patient personas. This will define your ideal audience.
When you skip this step, chances are that you will just be trying to hit the nail without knowing where or how the nail looks like. Marketing is strategic. You can't just do anything, hoping it will work out.
Your ideal persona is a patient who wants you as his/her doctor. You understand their problems and concerns. You know what they are looking for and why you are a good option for them. If your marketing efforts aren't working out, and you're not getting any visibility or clients, then it's time to take a step back and evaluate.
How to Market a Medical Practice on Social Media?
It is very important to choose the right platform. People usually start by making an account on every platform and eventually struggle to keep up with those accounts. If you don't have a marketing team and are going to make content yourself, then it is 100 times more important for you to choose the right platform.
You can't just try to do something on every platform because it will result in you not being on any platform. You need to focus your efforts on your chosen platform. Every social media platform is different, and so is the content.
What works on Instagram might not work on LinkedIn. Instagram might work for a food business, but it isn't the right platform for a B2B business looking to get sales.
This is why choosing the right platform is crucial to your success. Many medical practitioners have done exceptionally well with TikTok. TikTok is one platform where it's easy to get visibility when starting. If you go on TikTok, you will see many medical practitioners actively posting and making content. Your content is your choice, and there are types of content.
Instagram is another platform that is being leveraged by the medical community. It won't be wrong to say that many medical practitioners have become influencers on their own Instagram space. They are using the platform to get visibility, familiarity, and trust. These are the things that help you grow on social media platforms. These main factors help you get clients and work from marketing.
Types of Content On Different Platforms
Every platform works well with certain types of content. Video content performs better on Instagram, while long-form content performs better on YouTube. Text-based content performs well on LinkedIn, but it doesn't work on TikTok.
Every platform works better with certain types of content; you can choose what type of content you want to make. Some people are more comfortable with video content, while some are good at writing. Playing to your strengths is always the right approach, at least initially. Once you're a little settled on the platform, you can start experimenting to see your range.
Organic (Non-Paid) Marketing
If you're just starting your practice, chances are you won't have the budget to start with paid marketing. Paid marketing helps you gain visibility fast, but organic (non-paid) marketing has benefits, and the biggest is that it is free.
You don't have to spend anything to market your services through organic marketing. You must choose a platform with your targeted audience and start publishing content. You might get confused with the options and which platform to choose. Take the time to research which platforms are ideal for your speciality and clientele.
Marketing Practices for You to Grow Professionally on Social Media Platforms
Get a Business Website
A business website helps you establish credibility. A website is important for your marketing efforts to compound and get results.
Where are you directing your audience if you don't have a business website? You need to direct your audiences to a platform with all the information about your business and where they can contact you to get appointments and consultations.
An easy and user-friendly website helps your clients. If your website is filled with glitches and frustrates clients, they will not use it. When making or getting a website, your top priority should be to keep it simple and user-centric.
Your website should perform the following functions:
- User-friendly and easy to figure out
- Responsive and mobile friendly
- It has an appointment scheduling system
- Support
Invest in SEO practices
Search Engine Optimisation improves your chances of getting seen when searched online. If someone searches for medical practitioners in a certain location and your content is optimized against these keywords, you will appear in their search.
It helps when you're starting to get visibility in online searches. People can find your account and more about you there. If you have one, posting SEO-optimized content on your social media platforms is a good practice.
You should have a business page on all online directories with your business name, location, and contact information. This will include Google, your business website, healthcare online platforms, and every other platform you're on.
Start with a blog
Blogs are still very much relevant. They work when they are done the right way. Blogs help you establish yourself as an authority in the medical field. People will like to read about your expertise, experiences, and what differentiates you from other practitioners.
You can discuss your medical experiences, knowledge, new research, and learnings in your blog. Your blog shouldn't just be about your services because people will easily get bored of selling them, but it should be about you as their potential doctor.
I remember once looking for a therapist. I was looking online for therapists in my area, and there were many, but I instantly closed the websites that appeared to be filled with anything and everything. No one wants to read tons of vague content.
It should be well researched content. Don't just write blogs for the sake of writing blogs and filling up your website with them. No one is going to read those.
Write as if you're the reader. Put yourself in the shoes of your readers. Write content that you would like to read.
Blogs are a great way to answer your patient's questions and concerns.
- What are your patient's biggest pain points?
- What are your patients searching for on the internet?
- What services do you offer, and how can they help them?
Publish intelligent and relevant content that solves something for your audience.
Become a Thought Leader
Thought leadership is about establishing yourself as a figure who knows what he's doing and wins trust and credibility with his expertise. This is the best way to define thought leadership and what it can do for you.
You should use a platform like LinkedIn to establish yourself as an expert and publish content about your services, experiences, knowledge, and opinions on the industry and practices.
People like and appreciate when someone is being themselves on social media platforms. People would like to know about your bad and good experiences. People would like to read what you know about your field and what you don't.
People will be interested in reading about your highs and lows. People will read about how you approach dealing with patients. What's your take on medical practices? We often forget that people are more inclined toward people they can relate to, which also goes for the medical field.
If your potential patients can see you for the person you are and can read up on your passion for the field and why you chose this field, then they have established an emotional familiarity with you. They will choose you over other practitioners who they know nothing about.
LinkedIn is a great place to start from. You can post either written or video content. You can talk on different topics and gradually figure out what your audience likes more. This will help you carve out a content niche for you. You can then divert your audience to other channels and even a newsletter which we will discuss below.
A newsletter can boost your revenue
Social media algorithms change very often. It's the most talked about topic on LinkedIn and Instagram. Your reach can drop in a day because of a change in the algorithm, so you would always want to divert your audiences to something more reliable - A Newsletter.
An email newsletter is a great way for your audience to subscribe to your content and services. It's another way to establish yourself as an expert. You can send out a weekly newsletter with your high-performing content and services. You can offer discounts in it to make your offer more tempting.
Once you have enough subscribers, you can promote products related to your field in your newsletter. This is another way you can earn.
"Consumers believe email is more likely to be around in 10 years than Facebook, Twitter, and cable television" - Litmus
Email is 40x more effective at acquiring customers compared with Facebook and Twitter. It's also a great way to stay in touch with your patients. They anticipate getting your newsletter in their inbox when they subscribe to it. You're building a community that is an asset in marketing.
Worried that you won't be able to keep up? Email marketing systems such as MailChimp can help you automate your email marketing process. You can use tools like Canva for design and BIGVU for video creation and editing.
Post patient's testimonials on social media
You should post patients' feedback on your social media. Testimonials and feedback posts are a great way to show what your patients/clients have to say about you and your services to your future patients. It works as social proof and further adds to your credibility.
You can further ask your colleagues to give feedback on your knowledge and expertise. It will make for good marketing content to establish authority and expertise.
Engage on social media
We have discussed the importance of being present on social media platforms and types of content. Once you have a website in place and the marketing collateral, it's time that you start active engagement on social media.
You can do live Q&A to answer any questions and queries your targeted current or future patients might have. Q&A sessions are a great way to boost your following and answer all the relevant questions to keep them on your profile for later. You can keep that Q&A session on your Instagram story highlights for people to watch.
Market and repurpose your content
Marketing is all about the compounding effect. You're making marketing collateral from the first blog to a post on thought leadership. Once you have enough collateral, you should start repurposing. You shouldn't try to invent the wheel every time.
How can you repurpose content?
- You can use your blogs and LinkedIn posts for your newsletter content
- You can use your blog posts to create shot video content for TikTok and Instagram
- You can use your testimonials to write LinkedIn posts
- You can save up your Q&A sessions and make separate posts on those questions or answer those in TikTok videos
When making content, you should consider ways to use whatever collateral you have. You shouldn't try creating content from scratch every time because that will demand more effort and time.
Video content creation for medical professionals
Video content is everywhere on social media these days. Video content is trending and isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It's a no-brainer then that you should leverage video content as much as possible. If you haven't ever made video content and want to spend less time and effort on it, you will probably look for tools to help you.
AI tools can help you write scripts. You don't have to write a video script from scratch; AI will write it for you, and you can make a few edits you need. For the video shoot, editing, and captions part, some tools can help you, but what if I tell you that you can do all this with just one tool?
One tool with which you can write scripts, shoot, edit, add captions, and even schedule content for different social media platforms? Isn't it mind-blowing? Well, all of this is possible with the BIGVU teleprompter.
Dr. Viola Pierce: BIGVU's results were insane
Dr. Viola Pierce is founder and CEO of VP Nursing. Her goal is to empower other nurses and medical professionals in creating profitable side businesses.
Dr. Pierce discovered BIGVU when she was looking for a tool with which she could start making content to market her medical coaching services. She's a nurse by profession whose passion led her to start her coaching services. She teaches nurses to make money online using their computers. Many nurses focus on the "doing" part of their profession- less on the "talking". Most of the work is diagnosing and treating the patients, but it doesn't involve talking that much.
So, the challenge she faced when she thought of marketing her coaching services was creating clear and cohesive marketing videos. She struggled with scripts and what to say when she live on socials. As she said:
I wanted to solve the problem, and someone suggested buying a teleprompter, but when I went to look for one, it was super expensive. I wasn't sure if I should get something as expensive as this, so I started looking for alternatives online.
I saw BIGVU appear in my search results. I was initially skeptical about it, but I was impressed when I first used it. I couldn't believe I had found something that solved all my video content-related problems in such a reasonable price bracket.
"I have been loving every bit of BIGVU. It has transformed my life."
I can do the scripts using the AI Magic Writer, and I have my pointers while speaking with me, so I don't miss anything. One thing that I like is the caption feature. It's so easy to add captions to your videos. People usually read the captions while watching videos, which made it easy for me.
I'm a fast talker, so the feature to slow it down or speed it up, as per your preference, helped me. I can slow it down so my viewers understand what I am discussing.
The results were insane. After I started using BIGVU, I learned about video marketing and implemented different things in my videos which helped me increase my reach, engagement, and visibility.
I always recommend BIGVU to my clients, colleagues, and friends. At the I also recommend it in my coaching classes because it made content creation easy for me. The coaching programs involve a lot of videos because videos get you visibility and it has a 300% conversion rate. I want others to benefit from it as I did.