6 Reasons Investing in Digital Healthcare Marketing is the Best Bet for Doctors

The use of digital marketing in healthcare is no longer an option. It’s a necessity. Why?
Because 87 percent of potential new patients start their search for a new healthcare provider online. Eighty-seven percent! That’s a huge market opportunity that you may be missing and it’s the biggest reason why every provider should consider healthcare digital marketing.

Why digital marketing for doctors? There are a multitude of potential benefits of digital marketing for doctors. According to Realtime Report, doctors can expect the following benefits from digital healthcare marketing:

• 81% increase in patient engagement
• 73% improvement in patient experience
• 59% increase in conversion rates
• 52% increase in patient retention
• 50% decrease in cost of patient acquisition
• 46% increase in patient loyalty

Here the six main reasons why doctors should invest in digital marketing:

1. Digital Healthcare Marketing Helps Build Lasting Relationships with Patients

A significant percentage of medical practitioners in the US say that their third biggest challenge in 2021 is retaining and re-engaging patients. With so many new health practices being launched every month, losing patients to competitors is a lot easier today than it was 10 or 15 years ago. However, if you know your target audience well, digital healthcare marketing is a proven tool that will keep your patients coming back.

Unlike traditional healthcare marketing, digital healthcare marketing doesn’t stop at attracting patients. It helps ensure that your patients ultimately become your loyal fans and practice ambassadors. With digital healthcare marketing, you can use online testimonials or reviews from happy patients instead of the old “word of mouth” from traditional marketing. You can post reviews on your website and promote them in social media campaigns. You can even automate appointment scheduling and new service announcements. Best of all, you can reach much larger audiences in less time for a lot less money.

2. Healthcare Digital Marketing Boosts Your Online Presence on SERP

The statistics are mind-boggling. There are currently over 70,000 Google searches per second, 227 million per hour and about 5.4 billion searches per day. Getting your medical practice on Page One, however, takes a well-crafted search engine optimization (SEO) strategy that helps you reach top-ranking positions and results in the maximum number of clicks to your website. Optimizing your content for search engines is critical due to the important role that Google plays when consumers search for information online.

Your SEO goal should be a high search engine results page (SERP) ranking on Google. The better your SERP, the easier it is for patients to find your practice. There are two major factors in SEO that can greatly affect the SERP of a webpage and how much traffic a site receives: keywords and backlinks. Keywords are Google search query terms, for example, “best vascular surgeon.” That type of search term is highly competitive and shows how keyword SEO comes into play. By focusing on keywords that are relevant to your practice and have high search traffic but low competition, you can greatly increase your exposure to patients who may be searching for topics relevant to your practice.

Backlinks are also important to search engine algorithms for ranking your SERP. Backlinks reveal how often your web pages are linked to other parties (i.e., related sites) on the Internet. They help Google determine how trustworthy and useful your webpage is to others.

3. Digital Healthcare Marketing Helps Boost Your Conversion Rate

Your potential patients could be anywhere online: Social media platforms, review sites such as Yelp and Vitals.com, watching YouTube videos, reading Google ads, and so on. There are many digital marketing platforms that can help you reach your target audience. Each of these platforms requires a different approach for boosting your conversion rates.

Once you develop a strategy and messaging, it’s easy to adjust your messages to different audiences and boost conversions by up to 60 percent. Over time, you’ll learn that some potential patients are more receptive to personalized email messages, while others prefer a combination of social media outreach and blogs in order to feel sufficiently engaged to schedule an appointment with you. Thanks to digital marketing’s multichannel approach, you can find and engage potential patients wherever they are using whichever platform they prefer.

4. Make Better Healthcare Marketing Decisions Based on Data, Not Guesswork

One drawback of traditional marketing is that it’s hard to track results. It’s difficult to tell which marketing strategy resulted in the highest conversion rates. One of the greatest advantages of digital marketing for doctors, meanwhile, is having real data and the ability to track data accurately. In fact, the most effective digital marketing campaigns today are built entirely on data.

Data help you create an effective marketing budget and target specific markets that need healthcare services. Data also help you make better decisions. Having access to data helps you invest in the lowest-cost marketing methods that deliver optimal results and enables you to track the most effective marketing channels. Data also help you look outside your current campaign for new opportunities or surprising new sources of traffic, including new markets with high conversions.

5. Digital Healthcare Marketing Is Cost-Effective

Most small medical practices cannot afford TV, radio, newspaper, or billboard ads. Conversely, practices of almost any size can afford digital healthcare marketing to reach out and engage their various target audiences. How affordable are digital marketing methods compared to traditional healthcare marketing ones?

Consider the cost of claiming and optimizing a Google My Business profile. This digital marketing strategy will boost your local search visibility and increase local traffic to your website. In addition, positive online reviews will help improve your online reputation. The cost of this super-effective digital healthcare marketing strategy: free!

6. Digital Marketing Helps You Measure ROI

Unlike traditional healthcare marketing, digital marketing is considerably more targeted and offers data to measure what’s working and what’s not. This means you can invest a small amount in digital marketing and see results before you go all-out and invest more.

To give your investment the best chance of a good ROI, take these basic steps:

• Set up a landing page to capture your campaign’s inbound traffic.
• Monitor how many visitors are landing on the page. You can also see how many bounced, how many engaged with the content, and how many scheduled appointments. You can track these metrics using Google Analytics.
• Perform A/B testing to identify the most successful digital marketing techniques.

Consider email marketing. The typical ROI for email marketing is 4400%. This means you get $44 for every dollar you spend on your email marketing campaign. Compare that with the high cost of TV, radio, and print advertising, as well as attending tradeshows, sponsoring special events, and other traditional marketing strategies.

Conclusion

Traditional marketing methods simply cannot give you the reach your practice needs to stay ahead of competitors. If you do not have a medical marketing strategy in place, now is the time to create one with the help of a digital marketing agency for doctors. Schedule a free consultation with us today and see what top digital marketing services for doctors can do for your medical practice.