If you’re a healthcare marketer, it’s always important to focus on what I call the “top of the funnel” – specifically driving new patients through improving awareness and acquisition. Let’s start with a rundown of your options, and the strengths and weaknesses of each.
The Pros and Cons of Online Marketing Channels
- Search Engine Optimization: SEO is one of the best sources of traffic because (a) your growth compounds over time and (b) the traffic you’re getting shows intent, meaning that the visitors you’re attracting are actively looking for what you’re offering (ie they have a condition they want to treat). The bad news? A good SEO plan can be technically difficult to execute, and you might need to pull in outside help. Even with a great plan, it can take a long time to start seeing some results (often, six to twelve months).
- Referrals: From small promotional efforts or editorial mentions with links back to your site, referrals from other websites can provide quick results. When the other sites are trusted or familiar, they can also build credibility. But they can be limited and time-consuming to pursue.
- Social Media: Building your brand on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and their ilk is all the rage, and it’s easy to see why. It’s relatively easy to get started, and the wide reach and personal feel can help connect you with patients quickly. The downside? Because your followers aren’t necessarily searching for services, that traffic doesn’t always convert to actual appointments. Further, I find that over time, most people struggle to scale their social media marketing (a topic for another day).
- Partnerships: Partnerships can take a long time to develop, and the payoff can be uncertain initially. But the good ones are also extremely effective, and provide one of the best opportunities for consistent, reliable growth.
- Advertising: For immediate results, advertising is excellent. You can generate as much awareness and demand as your budget allows. Yet this can also be problematic; you’re locked in a fixed ratio of spending to generate revenue, and it can take some advanced knowledge and skill to keep reaping rewards.
In an ideal world, you could pursue all of these things equally. However, most of us outside of the Fortune 500 have a limited supply of time, money, and energy.
So how do you decide where to invest?
It comes down to your resources, timeline and budget.
Scenario #1. You Have Time, But No Budget
If you have time (including staff or volunteers) and can invest in long-term growth, then start with inbound marketing.
This typically includes content creation, SEO, social media, and email marketing. The goal is to build up your community and “marketing assets” to a point when they’ll eventually snowball and produce compounding growth. The thinking is that even though this approach takes longer to ramp up, it will provide a better long-term ROI.
Another big part of inbound marketing is managing your reputation. Try googling your name or practice right now, and you’ll probably be surprised. People are already talking about you on Yelp, Google reviews, and more. So start by incentivizing good reviews from current patients, and cultivating new relationships to keep these reviews pristine.
Finally, you can provide a lot more educational information that shows and teaches new prospects why your unique skills, credentials and approach is better than other alternatives. Because healthcare is becoming “consumerized,” patients don’t have to shop around anymore. Educating people and nurturing them before, during, and after they become patients can help you maximize loyalty among individuals who are willing and able to pay for quality and who can recommend you to their peers.
Scenario #2. You Have A Budget, But Not a Lot of Time
If you don’t have a lot of time, but you do have a sizeable budget, you can start pursuing more “direct” forms of promotion, namely advertising.
The goal here is to identify a Cost Per Lead (CPL), so you know how much acquiring a new patient is going to cost. You then need to compare that to how much you’re going to make over the life of the patient, often called the Lifetime Value of a Customer.
Once you set up a basic system, the process can be relatively simple. One example might be creating a “New Users” page (where potential patients can sign up to receive additional information and personalized follow-up) and a “Thank You” page (where submissions will land on and receive next step information).
That done, you would set-up a goal in Google Analytics to track how many people signed up and landed on those new pages as well as where they came from online.
Once you’d familiarized yourself with that system, you could begin experimenting with different forms of online advertising including Google AdWords, Facebook Advertising, and more. With all of these, you would want to run tests to see which key phrases and ads result in the lowest Cost Per Click (CPC) or Cost Per Lead (CPL).
Throughout the process, you’d also want to keep testing different variations of your “New Appointments” page to see which elements, messaging, and images work best, and result in the lowest acquisition price.
Taking action
Now that you have a good sense of what it means to be effective at “top of the funnel” marketing, you can implement these insights into your own business. From inbound marketing to direct advertising, there are many directions you can go in, depending on your time and budget. By understanding effective ways to get new patients you’ll be able to level up your marketing strategy and maintain a thriving business.
Brad Smith is a digital marketing consultant and the editor of The Doctor’s Journal, an online publication that chronicles how healthcare is changing and evolving. His advice has been featured in well known online media properties like the New York Times, Business Insider, and more. This is one of a series of posts on The Doctor Blog about marketing for physicians.