Digital Marketing for Doctors: Why Is It Important?

See on Scoop.it - Medical-IT

As a doctor, you have enough stress on your hands just trying to give your patients the best care possible. What doctor has time after caring for their patients to think about things like patient acquisition and search engine optimization? If you are like many, digital marketing for doctors can seem overwhelming, daunting and difficult to adapt to your business. With the world constantly changing, however, it’s important to keep your business relevant and accessible. Here at Crystal Clear Digital Marketing, we understand how intimidating it can be to initiate digital marketing strategies, but we’re also here to tell you why doing so is integral to the success of your business both now and in the future.

One of the most important reasons to get into digital marketing for doctors is because it gets your name out there. Name recognition and presence are invaluable in today’s market. Doctors just can’t reach potential patients through traditional print or TV ads the way that they used to be able to. Today, when a person decides they need to see a new doctor or specialist, they either go online and search for one or they ask their friends. If you use digital marketing properly, you will be able to increase the number of potential patients who find you regardless of which way they look.

Your Potential Patients Are Looking for You Online

Logically, having a stronger digital presence will better connect you with patients who are digitally searching for healthcare, but we can help you reach these potential patients in a more meaningful way. Imagine creating a TV ad that not only broadcasts a message about your services but also targets individuals with specific conditions and provides different information to every person who sees the ad. With medical digital marketing, you can use search marketing to directly target specific consumers with information that will benefit them. Whether this is in the form of SEO (search engine optimization) or SEM (search engine marketing), you can design your digital content so that it reaches exactly the people who would benefit from reading it. The ability to target your marketing is invaluable in decreasing cost per patient acquisition (CPA).

In the same way that you can target your medical digital marketing strategy to reach the right audience, we can help you improve your SEO so that it’s easier for patients to find you. SEO involves infusing keywords into your digital content to make it more likely to appear on search engines. Potential patients are not likely to browse past the first or second page of their search results, so you can design your content to appear high enough on the list that they can find you.

In the growing digital marketplace, SEO is no longer a luxury; it is a necessity. We can help you understand how SEO can improve your business and how to use it as economically as possible. Perhaps the best thing about digital marketing for doctors is that it is incredibly easy to track, meaning you will know what is reaching patients and what isn’t, and what strategies are worth investing in and which strategies need to be dropped. In the era of TV and print ads, the only real way you could track their success was through general trends in your business. With medical digital marketing, however, we can help you look at the digital footprints left by your potential patients to see which content is reaching them (and ultimately leading them to visit your practice) so that you can design future marketing tactics to capitalize on your successes. In the past, valid marketing data collection was extremely difficult, but digital technology affords us a much more accurate view of trends without any inconvenience to your potential patients.

For those potential patients who rely on their friends to recommend doctors for them, medical digital marketing can impact how you reach them, too.

Patients Will Remember a More User-Friendly Experience

The easier you make it for your current patients to navigate the ins and outs of your practice, the more likely they are to have a good experience. Regardless of how much patients enjoy and value your care, they may start looking elsewhere if it’s difficult for them to find information, make appointments or understand your services. When patients can easily go online and look at your website to answer the questions they have, it reduces the amount of work you both have to do. These patients can bombard your office with phone calls about these simple questions, or they can simply find it on their own online. Adding this ease and convenience to the great care that you offer will not only benefit you in patient-retention, but it will also help you in patient-acquisition.

In regards to potential patients who reach out to their friends for doctor referrals, your patients are going to be more likely to recommend you if your practice is digitally accessible. Imagine a potential patient posting on Facebook writing, “My back has been really hurting lately. Does anyone know a good back specialist I should see in Durham, North Carolina?”

Will your current patients take the time to reply to someone like this and offer your name? They will if your practice is convenient and easy to use, especially if they can quickly send a link to your beautiful website that allows this new patient to make an appointment easily. Anything that you can do to make it easier for a patient to walk through your door will improve your patient’s experience with you.

Saving on Costs Means You Can Provide More for Your Patients

We understand how overwhelming digital marketing for doctors can be, which is why we’re here to show you how easy it can be and how incredible the return on your investment will be. In addition to reaching more people, medical digital marketing can significantly decrease your practice’s cost per patient acquisition. The hardest part of acquiring new patients is reaching out to them and showing them what you have to offer. Digital marketing allows you to do that in a very specific, focused, and specialized way. The effort of learning how to effectively use digital marketing is worth it considering the increase it will bring to your business and the decrease it will bring to your costs.

This increase in business and decrease of costs will help you grow your business and improve the care that you can offer your patients. The money you save can be used towards new tools and advanced machines that will directly benefit your patients and help you expand your business. Your job as a doctor is to provide your patients with the best care possible; imagine the kind of care you can provide when you have the best tools and equipment at your disposal. The money we help you save finding new patients and keeping your current patients will help you improve the already excellent care you provide.

Join the Digital Age with Crystal Clear Digital Marketing

Digital marketing for doctors is invaluable. We can provide you with everything you need to keep up with and reach today’s potential patients. Today’s patient wants to be able to find your practice easily, understand what services you offer quickly and make an appointment painlessly.

Adapting your business to cater to today’s patient is a vital part of ensuring that your practice will endure. More people turn to the Internet to search for their doctors, research their health concerns, and seek out information about their health every day. That number is only going to increase every year, and medical digital marketing is the way to make sure you reach those potential patients. Daunting as digital marketing for doctors may seem, more daunting should be the thought that you are not reaching as many patients as you potentially could.

Medical digital marketing is not only a strategy you can use to reach potential patients and give your current patients a better experience, but it is also the innovation you need to compete in the future.

Tomorrow’s patient is going to realize that they need to see a doctor and go to their phone or computer to find out where to go. Will your name come up? We will help you make sure that your digital impression is a great one and that everything a patient sees only further convinces them to give your practice a call. We are here to help you increase your digital visibility while making your practice better-equipped for the changing future.

from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2FVGtxH
via IFTTT