How to focus marketing for doctors on building trust

Marketing for doctors is a bit different from traditional healthcare marketing. The marketing of your medical practice will focus on the accomplishments, qualifications, and expertise of the physicians at your practice. The goal? To strengthen awareness and trust between the physician and current and prospective patients. It should create long-lasting relationships and promote value-based care that strengthens the patient experience.

Although marketing can be expensive, there are ways to keep costs down. To do this, leverage online advertising, email marketing, and other digital strategies.

A strategic digital marketing strategy will increase the visibility of your physicians and improve brand recognition for your practice. It will position your providers and your practice as leaders in your local medical community.

These are only a handful of the ways in which strong marketing can aid your medical practice. You want to be top-of-mind when potential patients are making medical decisions. Strengthening your brand and keeping people interested should be your top priority. Read on to learn more.

Medical practitioners are using many strategies and tools to market their healthcare services. Here are 6 effective measures to try. Each one offers you and your patients and potential patients something different.

Social media is a prime place to engage patients and to increase your practice’s reach. Unfortunately, many practices don’t take advantage of it. Tebra’s 2023 Patient Perspectives survey found that only 18% of respondents said they follow their doctor’s office on social media. However, 45% of respondents reported that they would, if their doctor posted regularly.

Certainly, you can pay for social media marketing. But simply posting regularly on your current social media locations can help your profile stand out and gain traction. Need ideas for content?

You also can use your social media page to hold contests or note that you've donated medical services to charity. These tactics showcase both physician engagement and patient engagement, and they can work in your favor.

Does your practice have a blog? A blog is a strong method for sharing content that might be of interest to potential patients. Regularly posting high-quality content on your site’s blog gives you a showcase for your professional services. You can offer patient education — a way for patients to be more engaged in their own healthcare journey.

Medical marketing strategies work in other ways, too. Practices can share any original research that their physicians have completed. This can demonstrate mastery and establish physicians as thought leaders in their field. Being considered a thought leader can result in guest posting opportunities on other health-related sites. It can even open doors to speaking engagements. Each of these opportunities can help your practice attract new patients and reassure current patients that they’re with the best of the best.

When creating content, it’s important to think like a marketer: keep your audience in mind. Consider the demographics of your patients and turn to social media to see what they’re talking about.

You could check out Quora, a popular social media network that focuses on Q&As. Or look at similar physicians' Instagram profiles to see what they’re posting about and how their followers respond. Taking this approach can inform your medical content marketing strategy by helping you understand what to post. It can also provide insight into where your patients spend their time online. You can increase patient satisfaction by gearing your posts directly toward their patient journey.

When your doctors and providers are established as thought leaders or experts in their specialty, guest posting opportunities will become easier to land. Guest posting is a strong way for physician marketers to reach new audiences. It can also help them enroll new patients.What’s more, guest posting can help your site strengthen its domain authority. This, in turn, can make it more likely that your website content will appear at the top of search engines. This translates to more traffic, and it increases your chances of landing new patients.

In a Salescycle study, 59% of respondents said that marketing emails influenced their purchases. While calling or texting are common, emails allow for longer communications that are personalized, affordable, and easy to automate.

Medical practices can leverage email marketing to support patients and convert prospects. Don’t think just of promotions. Email is also a valuable tool for:

Medical professionals may be acquainted with HIPAA and how it regulates the use of patient information. Some of HIPAA's directives apply to marketing. Depending on your state, you may be subject to additional guidelines as well. This article on email marketing goes into detail on these regulations. Knowing the rules ahead of time makes email campaigns much easier.

Content on your site can only do so much; your site must also be optimized for search engines. Search engine optimization is the key. Make sure that your medical site is SEO-friendly. Follow the SEO best practices shared by sites like The Moz blog, SEMRush, and SearchEngineJournal. 

You must also ensure your website is mobile-friendly. Statista found that 46% of visitors are likely to abandon a web page if it takes longer than 4 seconds to load. 

For many years, physicians have avoided responding to online reviews for fear of causing inadvertent HIPAA violations. The idea seemed to be that it was better to say nothing than to worsen the situation.Today, it’s considered essential to respond to online feedback and reviews in order to effectively manage your practice’s reputation. Physician marketing centers on bolstering relationships between providers and patients. It’s also a core component of any good physician marketing strategy. 

Responding to positive reviews online needn’t be complicated or time-consuming. Simply thank commenters for their feedback and wish them a great day. And should you receive a negative review, it’s best to move the conversation offline. Ask the commenter to reach out to the practice directly. For in-depth guidance on this, check out the Tebra post on how to handle negative online reviews with ease. 

Savvy practices recognize the necessity for physicians to engage in marketing. But many lack the resources, either fiscal or physical, to create and implement effective marketing strategies. If that’s the case for your practice, outsource your marketing needs to expert consultants and medical writers. Consider a company that offers a tailored physician marketing strategy for providers.