If you are a private medical practice owner or private clinician, you’re probably keen to market your services more effectively to existing and prospective patients. But, like most, you may find that there is a time-deficit in your week that doesn’t allow you to dedicate as many hours as is needed to be able to build your profile and let patients know how you can help.
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This collaborative article with specialist medical digital marketing company, Med Square, highlights a handful of marketing tips for your consideration in 2024 and an alternative – low cost and time efficient – way to market your services this year.
Traditional marketing
Traditionally, to grow their business most medical practices will appoint a marketing agency to take care of their promotion. The agency may carry out projects and tasks such as building a website, writing blogs, posting on social media, sending promotional emails and PR. Larger practices or groups, may recruit an in-house marketing manager to take care of this.
Both of these options tend to represent a pretty hefty financial investment, which is why many smaller practice owners or sole practitioners will try to do a little marketing on their own. And this can work.
There are some clinicians who have been successful in growing their online profile, but the downside is, they’ve needed to invest the hours to do so. It’s common to see marketing channels being set up but then the momentum is not retained. The result? Irregular frequency of blogs, long gaps in social media posts and out-of-date websites.
Does this sound familiar?
Medical marketing strategy tips for 2024
Given that we know medical professionals to be time-poor, here are a few tips for your marketing strategy this year.
- Commit to a marketing schedule that you can fulfil. Consistency is better than volume. If you can commit to one blog per month and one social media post per week, then run with that until you can commit to more.
- Invest in a website, even if it is a small brochure site, as you can start to build some history on Google for a later date when you have more resources. It is also a place that you can at least direct patients to, where they can learn a little more about you and obtain your contact details. Most of your competitors will have one so if you don’t it can be a real disadvantage.
- Ensure your website has a friendly up-to-date profile image. Patients want to see who they will be dealing with. They are less interested in your CV and full professional background.
- Collect Patient Reviews / Testimonials. There are professional and reputable review platforms such as Doctify, I Want Great Care, Trust Pilot, Google and Feefo that act as a central place where you can collate reviews. At the very least though, collect the reviews from patients and add them to your website. Patients want to see the experiences of other patients.
- Update your online biographies with consistent information. Many hospital bios are out-dated and photo-less, so a patient searching for your name after a referral, may not be able to find very much info.
Med Square membership
Med Square offers a different kind of marketing for your private practice.
You can benefit from a full page biography in our directory, collect patient reviews and also be part of our marketing drive to reach out to the public (launching in Spring 2024). You can post articles, videos and events in our Patient Information Hub and be invited to verify content that our team of medical copywriters and marketing experts produce – this is highly time-efficient for you and can benefit your own website Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
We are also working on launching a patient podcast which our members will be invited to participate in.
The icing on the cake is that our members get to piggy-back our marketing campaign (to both the public and other healthcare professionals to build referral connections). This will include activity on social media, email and our website – saving you a lot of time and effort.
Med Square is a new initiative from a team that has been providing marketing support to medical practices for over 10 years. We believe this is one of the most cost-effective ways to help you reach more patients and grow your practice. In return for a low-cost monthly investment and minimal time on your part, you will benefit from our specialist support and expertise. For more information, please do not hesitate to get in touch.