Attracting new business in health care with non-traditional marketing practices.
How do you feel about the idea of promoting yourself or your practice? For a long time, such a thing was deemed inappropriate by the medical community at large. Even today with increased competition for prospective patients’ attention, there’s a great deal of hesitation among many professionals to focus any effort on marketing or advertising, beyond the standard Yellow Pages ad. However, the medical profession is just that, a profession, and as such Physicians need to be able to make their services known to the public, in what is becoming an extremely crowded marketplace.
The promotion of your medical practice doesn’t have to be limited to the standard advertising model of print ads and billboards. There are other methods for making the public aware of your services–methods that can help you build relationships, trust, and credibility even before they enter your office. Let’s look at two: online advertising and email newsletters.
Online Advertising:
You’d be tempted to think that online advertising is simply the old-fashioned model of marketing, transposed to the internet–and in some ways that’s true. You’ll find many static ads online that mimic the style used in magazines, as well as video ads that resemble television commercials in format and tone. However, online advertising offers an advantage that more traditional marketing methods don’t – targeting.
Instead of the traditional model of broadcasting to as many people as possible, online marketing allows medical professionals to target their marketing efforts to specific groups of people based on specific demographics – location, age, occupation, etc.
This precision targeting provides a far more efficient use of time and advertising dollars than older methods. When paired with platforms like Facebook, which has built-in targeting advertising functionality (not to mention a wealth of data from which to draw), it’s easy to see the value of using online marketing to build-up your medical practice.
Email Newsletters:
One of the biggest concerns medical professionals have is giving away too much “free” content. This fear is justified in certain circumstances, but becomes a moot point in this day and age if you consider how much content is already available for free across the internet. The problem with this free information is that the public is often badly misinformed by medical information websites that have no credible source.
That’s where the power of email newsletters comes in.
By creating a resource like an email newsletter, physicians can control not only how much information is provided, but also the context in which it’s presented. By attaching their names to the information provided, healthcare professionals can educate their readers, while building trust and credibility among readers who can be confident that the information they are receiving is correct. This kind of interaction with your audience can lead to new patients and even referrals from existing ones.
By embracing new technologies and new methods of promoting your medical services to those who actually need it, you can make marketing a painless process – a process that can lead to increased credibility and business growth.
If you want to learn more information on how to leverage Facebook Advertising to drive more patients to your business you can sign up for a free workshop on How To Turn Your Business Into A Magnet For New Patients…Without Sleazy Marketing.