Avoid These Common Healthcare Marketing Mistakes with the Help of an Agency
Whether your healthcare practice is new to the scene or continuing efforts to improve your marketing strategy, it is important to keep an eye out for any mistakes in your campaign. Just like how you work to avoid misdiagnosis in your patients, you want to avoid any misleading tactics in your marketing. Luckily, marketing strategies offer a bit of trial and error room, or learning experiences as we like to look at it. As a healthcare marketing agency, we broke down a few common mistakes we see from those in the industry and why the can be so harmful to your practice.
Lackluster Promotional Efforts
You’ve gone through the trouble of creating content for your practice, but why stop there? Promotional efforts are just as important as the creation and in today’s highly competitive digital market, you cannot afford to only go halfway. If clients don’t know your blogs or Facebook page exist, how will they read it? If they don’t read it; how will your services grab their attention? Using appropriate social media platforms can help bring attention to content both old and new while bringing users to your website.
Lack of promotion poorly benefits your website as well. Without proper SEO tactics incorporated into your healthcare marketing strategy, your practice will fail to rank highly on internet search engines. This includes local search results which are typically important, especially for small practices.
Ignoring Your Target Audience
As with any industry, finding and reaching your target audience is key to a successful marketing campaign. Fortunately, many doctors may have the advantage over other industry leading professionals in knowing their target demographic. This is a great foundation; however, the person you are treating is not always the one making the healthcare decisions. For example, if you commonly treat elderly patients, you may want to focus your marketing efforts on their middle-aged children who often have to make the major medical decisions for them.
Make sure your tone and voice match your brand when reaching out to your target audience. Do you best to keep the tone consistent as it garners a sense of trust and familiarity with potential and existing patients.
Ignoring Your Competition
Understanding your competitors is just as important as understanding your target audience. It is important to focus on local practices that could potentially take patients away from you. Even if they are a different type of practice, you have to consider the many ambiguous health ailments that could be treated by a variety of doctors. You need your practice to stand out from the competition and show patients why your doctors are more capable.
Forgetting the Power of Reviews
We cannot stress the importance of reviews enough for any business, especially those in the healthcare industry. Almost 75% of today’s patients use online reviews to find their doctor which speaks volumes towards this marketing effort. However, getting a review, negative or positive, is only half the battle. You also need to take the time to respond to reviews, especially the negative ones, or you risk looking like a business that is uninterested in client satisfaction. In the healthcare industry, you want to form positive and trusting relationships with patients, so take the time to thank them for leaving a review and show you care. Use the poor reviews as a learning experience on how you can better your practice.
Reviews are also a great way to help your business appear higher in Google’s local search results. In fact, Google plans to eventually start penalizing those who consistently receive poor reviews.
Failure to Produce Quality Keywords
Keyword research is essential to a successful SEO campaign. By properly incorporating applicable keywords into your usual website content, you continually improve your chances of ranking higher on Google’s search engine results. In a competitive industry like healthcare, you need to be sure you are using keywords specific to your practice, yet search friendly for the everyday user.
If your healthcare practice is in need of a marketing strategy that makes a difference, contact the Dermatology Marketing Agency today. As a healthcare marketing agency, we are trained in properly executing campaigns in SEO, PPC, social media, web design, and more.
