At a Glance
- Start learning about healthcare marketing by creating an ideal customer profile (ICP) and understanding your target audience.
- Dive deep into leveraging digital platforms to market a healthcare practice. Learn to build a strong web presence, boost SEO, and build a content marketing strategy. Learn to use online reviews and to post appropriately on social media.
- Use data analytics to measure the success of your marketing efforts and make necessary adjustments.
This is an exciting time to build your medical practice. Crafting a healthcare marketing strategy is increasingly affordable, and there are many options to choose from. It’s easier than ever to build a healthcare digital marketing campaign that makes sense for you and your practice's budget.
But where should you start, when there are so many options? Should you even spend your limited time and resources on marketing, in addition to focusing on your patients?
The good news is that quality patient care and effective practice growth aren’t mutually exclusive. Today’s healthcare marketers don’t need TV spots, newspaper ads, or splashy billboards to reach prospects. Digital marketing provides a way to attract new patients while you serve your current ones.
In fact, raising your online profile can also help you to meet patients’ needs. According to Tebra’s 4th annual Patient Perspectives report:
- 77% of patients look online for a doctor or healthcare services.
- 46% select a healthcare organization or provider based on their online reviews.
- 30% want to do more with their healthcare provider online.
In other words, current and prospective patients expect to be able to reach your practice online. And if they can’t, it could cost you in the highly competitive healthcare sector.
This guide will review everything you need to know to effectively market your healthcare practice, including:
- How to determine your target patient
- What you need on your website, including healthcare search engine optimization (SEO) tips
- What you need to know about social media
- How to develop a plan, including tips for your budget
- How to improve your strategy over time
What is healthcare marketing?
Many physicians and office managers wonder “What is healthcare marketing?” and “Is healthcare marketing different from regular marketing?”
Marketing for a medical practice shares similarities with marketing in other industries, but it also has important differences. One of the biggest considerations in the healthcare industry is compliance. Healthcare providers must adhere to the HIPAA Privacy Rule, the Stark Law, the Anti-Kickback Statute, and many other regulations.
“Healthcare providers must adhere to the HIPAA Privacy Rule, the Stark Law, the Anti-Kickback Statute, and many other regulations.”
It’s also vital to make sure your practice's website is compliant. You can market your practice in any number of ways, but always be sure that you comply with the legal requirements regarding patient data.
Before you get started with marketing your practice, you’ll need to answer a few questions:
- Do you plan to market in person or online?
- What is your budget?
- How will you reach patients?
- What amount of marketing is sustainable for your practice?
- How will you leverage content marketing and social media?
- What are your metrics for success?
- How comfortable are you with updating your strategy over time?
Digital marketing for healthcare providers often gives a bigger bang for your buck than other types of marketing. But you have to do it correctly. Digital marketing is popular because it’s fairly budget-friendly and it's easier to grow and manage than in-person activities.
Understand your target audience
But before you do anything else with a healthcare marketing plan, it’s essential to define your target audience. For your practice, you'll want to create an ideal customer profile (ICP).
What is an ICP?
An ICP gives you a way to think about your perfect patient. If you’ve read a few marketing articles, you may think this is the same thing as a “buyer persona.” There's a big difference, however. A buyer persona targets a specific individual, while an ICP targets a desirable demographic for your business. It's more useful for healthcare organizations to develop an ICP.
How to create an ICP
Building an ICP doesn’t necessarily take a long time. It does, however, require thoughtful reflection about your customer base and your business services. It takes roughly 5 steps:
- Review your existing patients’ qualities.
- List your ideal patient’s demographics.
- Reflect on your ideal patient’s pain points, goals, and values.
- Evaluate what you can offer.
- Summarize all of this data in a few sentences for easy reference.
Determine your patients' pain points
Pain points are factors that irritate or stress your patients. Many medical practices might assume that the answer is obvious — your patients have an illness or injury, right?
But it’s not that simple. Consider individuals with chronic shoulder dislocations. They need a physical therapist, but they likely have pain points besides their injury. Besides receiving quality healthcare, they want to:
- See a provider who is covered by their insurance.
- Receive reminders, perhaps because they have ADHD and that makes remembering appointments challenging.
- Fill out new patient forms before coming in.
- Book flexible appointment times, since they have a hectic schedule.
- Not only to heal their injury, but also to learn about how to improve their overall strength.
Knowing the pain points can make your communications with patients more effective. You can explore ways to supplement current services or improve care delivery to solve them. When you do, you’ll likely have happier patients, leading to better reviews and referrals.
How to use your ideal customer profile (ICP)
The point of collecting customer data and building an ICP is to help you better position your practice to attract the right customers. This may highlight growth opportunities or patient needs, but it can also make the marketing process less stressful. A clear, concise ICP makes it easier and faster to decide on the content and graphics that will work for your organization and your audience.
“The point of collecting customer data and building an ICP is to help you better position your practice and attract customers that make sense for you.”
As you attract more new patients and grow your healthcare practice, you may expand your team. Your draft at the start will make communication easier as you delegate your marketing efforts to other practitioners or to administration.
Developing a successful healthcare marketing strategy
Once you have determined your ICP, it’s time to determine your goals and budget.
When it comes to objectives, how will you know you’re successful? Success might look like a specific number of referrals, website views, new patient bookings, positive patient reviews, or patients who select a supplemental service. Establish where you are now so you can track any changes over time.
Then, set time constraints around your goals — for example, 3 months. Adding a time component makes it easier to track your progress and manage your bandwidth. And it gives your plan time to pay off.
Now we get to a big question: what about budgeting?
Budget-friendly practice marketing ideas
- Seasonal or limited-use online advertising campaigns
- An SEO-friendly website
- Consistent social media posts and engagement
Digital marketing is often more affordable than ads in print newspapers or on local TV. In addition, assets like your website and your evergreen blog posts require minimal upkeep, and they can attract patients for years.
“Digital marketing is often more affordable compared to ads in print newspapers or on local TV.”
On average, most businesses alloted 13.6% of their total budget to marketing in 2023. But whatever you can afford to spend, it’s important that you prioritize your marketing efforts.
In general, it helps to set up or optimize your long-term, patient-focused digital assets first. For example, you may want to:
- Create or update your website
- Offer online appointment scheduling
- Invest in branding and style guides for easier content creation
- Establish or update social media profiles
- Begin to add blog posts to your website
- Create an email list
There are many other marketing tactics you can use as you grow. You can attend networking meetings, seek guest spots on podcasts, or write articles for a local publication or medical blog.
How can I improve my healthcare marketing?
There are an unlimited number of ways to get creative with marketing your healthcare practice. But some tactics are more than short-term strategies — they become long-term assets.
Here are 5 proven marketing methods that can help you grow your practice:
- Establish a strong web presence.
- Ensure that your website is SEO-friendly.
- Engage on social media.
- Create unique and useful marketing content and healthcare information.
- Leverage reviews.
Build a strong web presence
Many patients report that a sound website is very important to them when selecting a healthcare provider. When you think about this, it makes sense. Your website is your digital front door. It’s your first impression in the marketplace. And it’s the cornerstone of any digital marketing campaign.
A high-quality website makes it easy for both new and existing patients to find the information they need. As users become increasingly accustomed to interacting with more and more services online, it also becomes a central component of your patient experience. It puts you among the healthcare innovators.
“A high-quality website makes it easy for both existing and new patients to find the information they need.”
One goal in customer acquisition is to drive as much relevant traffic — traffic from users who match your patient profile — to your website as possible. You expect that individuals who see your page will book an appointment, but be careful. Posting content on your website that doesn’t relate to your services can attract people who are not your target audience.
Use your knowledge of healthcare technology and healthcare spending to your advantage. Build a high-conversion website with your end users in mind. This often means creating several informational pages.
Patients tend to find these medical website pages most important:
- What services your practice offers and your specialty
- Appointment availability, including any flexible appointment offerings
- Provider background information
- Patient testimonials
- Health and care advice
In addition, if you offer several services, you may want to offer separate pages for each one. This gives you an opportunity to go into detail, making your services clearer, both for patients and for search engines.
Outside of this framework, it’s also important to ensure that your website is easy to use. To start:
- Use a website builder to streamline the process.
- Select a responsive, mobile-friendly design.
- Publish high-quality written and visual content created just for you, not stock photography and AI-generated text.
- Support your content with quality relevant images and videos.
- Make sure your site is accessible to those with disabilities. Your website builder might automatically offer some of this functionality, but don’t forget about alt text for images and transcripts for videos or infographics.
- Use larger font sizes in high-contrast colors, especially if your patients are older.
Boost SEO to increase visibility and drive web traffic
Search engine optimization (SEO) makes it more likely that patients will find your website when they search on Google, Bing, or another search engine. For example, if you are a speech therapist for children based in Los Angeles, good SEO makes it more likely that you’ll appear in a search for “children speech therapist LA.”
This is why marketing professionals will tell you: independent practices can no longer afford to ignore SEO. While patients use Google to investigate their symptoms, they also use it to find practitioners. And the best way to get seen is to invest in local SEO in order to improve your rankings.
- Claim your Google Business Profile. This gives you a Google listing that features your website, address, reviews, images, and other information.
- Use location-based keywords, such as “speech therapist in Memphis.”
- Interact professionally with other local businesses and organizations on social media.
You can also:
- Disperse target keywords through your content naturally
- Use headings to create a clear information hierarchy
- Keep content easy to read
- Use lists
- Use title tags
- Use meta descriptions
- Add alt text to images
- Use a fast website hosting service
Most medical website builders focus on these items when filling out information about a page or image. No coding required. Just remember: medical SEO is an ongoing project that gains traction over time.
Leverage social media
Social media is a way to find your patients and publicize your website. How you decide to use social media largely depends on your ideal client and how you want to present yourself. Different practices use different approaches. Consider these questions, for example:
- How old are your patients?
- Do you have an existing skill set for creating written, audio, or visual content?
- Do you want to focus on promoting your team members, or on informing patients and prospects about topics in your niche?
Building a social media presence also takes time. Be sure to post on a variety of platforms and engage with as broad a portion of your potential patients as possible. Posting is important, but engaging is a way to become part of the larger conversation.
Currently, 1 out of 4 millennials follow their doctor on social media. And while many patients don’t follow their healthcare provider, they say that they would if the provider created content regularly.
Today, there are a few different social platforms from which to choose:
- Facebook. Facebook pages typically pair well with a Google Business Profile. Users can leave reviews, interact with your updates, or share your page with family members and friends.
- X. This networking site (formerly Twitter) is ideal if you enjoy engaging in conversations with other medical professionals or answering common questions.
- YouTube. Many patients like watching in-depth videos about their condition or injury. This platform may be perfect for specific specialties, such as physical or speech therapy, since you can demonstrate exercises and activities patients can use at home.
- TikTok. The fastest-growing platform on this list is video-based TikTok. The good news is that you don’t need professional production quality to make an engaging video. You don’t even need to dance. This is an effective way to reach younger patients.
- Instagram. Instagram is perfect for those who make images or short videos.
Once you decide which platforms to use, it’s time to start to draft content. You don’t necessarily need to post something every day, but what you do post should be interesting and relevant for your patients.
To create engaging social media content for your medical practice:
- Keep it real and be authentic.
- Use unique videos and photos.
- Post testimonials and reviews.
- Have fun — try creating trivia questions or polls.
Just remember: Never post about specific patients. Data privacy is critical. Sharing anonymous cases or anecdotes may seem like an easy source of content inspiration, but it will erode your patients’ trust. It may even violate HIPAA. Instead, look for trends among multiple patients — their questions, concerns, and goals — and discuss those topics more broadly. Patients will feel a sense of your personalized care, even though your content is written more broadly.
Invest in content marketing
Once you have your website and social media up and running, decide whether to invest in content marketing.
Content marketing focuses on creating blog posts, videos, infographics, and other related items to attract and gain patients. You can publish this content on your website and use snippets of it on social media. You can offer more personalized medical information, help your readers on their patient journey, and offer patient education.
There are 2 main content marketing goals for medical practices:
- Get found by patients
- Get patients to book an appointment
One of the most common methods for medical marketing is to publish a blog on your website. For example, if you’re a psychiatrist, your posts might discuss:
- Common disorders and their treatments
- How an evaluation works for the conditions you treat
- New treatments and healthcare innovations being tested
- Coping skills for living with a mental illness
- Coping skills for family members
The sky's the limit. But for content marketing to work, you need to have a strategy, which involves researching and tying your content to SEO keywords and phrases. Doing this thoroughly and carefully will attract more traffic to your website. Often, patients find your content from either social media or Google.
“Patients can scan through articles and see your expertise, so they are more likely to view your practice as an authority — especially if other practices in your area aren’t providing the same experience.”
It also builds trust and patient satisfaction. Patients can scan through articles and see your expertise, so they are more likely to view your practice as an authority — especially if other practices in your area aren’t providing the same experience.
Create a content budget
Before diving into the numbers, remember that content is a long-term asset. When you create content — whether you make it or pay someone else to do so — it contributes to your ever-growing archive for months or even years. It’s a long-term investment. Consistent marketing will snowball your efforts.
In other words, if you optimize your site and content, you will progressively get more and more website traffic and, eventually, more patients.
What should your budget be for marketing, and specifically for content marketing and website design? That depends on the size of your practice and on your needs. It is possible to fit content marketing into just about every budget. If you’re running a new practice and only have a handful of patients or clients, you will likely create most of the content yourself.
“It is possible to fit content marketing into just about every budget.”
Keep in mind that as you gain patients, it is likely more cost effective to hire a medical marketing expert or company to take on these content tasks so you can focus more on patient operations and patient care.
Deploy your medial content effectively
Repurposing and reposting content, particularly on social media, can be a way to drive traffic and engagement and to appear to be creating more than you actually are.
How to repurpose longform medical content
For example, say you paid an expert $2,000 for a 3,000-word blog post about gallbladder diseases. The next time you want to talk about gallbladder diseases, you can break the topic down into smaller chunks for social media posts, email, and a short video. You can repost all these smaller chunks across your marketing channels, highlighting different pieces of information.
This makes it easier to keep up with your digital marketing, since you can reuse the same long piece of content multiple times.
How to repurpose short-form medical content
Let’s say you have a really popular TikTok video about anxiety coping skills. You can write a blog post about that topic, post it on your website, and include the original TikTok video. You may even be able to use parts of the new article as the basis for a second or third video.
Ask for patient reviews
Patient reviews can be a prime factor when prospective patients are deciding on visiting a doctor. However, asking for reviews can feel uncomfortable. After all, your job is to help people. And if you do your job, patients will post reviews on their own, right?
The problem is that patients are often busy. They might not realize that they can share a positive experience with others. Or they might forget to do it. However, when people have a bad experience, they often feel motivated to let everyone know.
“When you ask for patient reviews proactively, you highlight your investment in a positive customer experience and potentially get ahead of any negative reviews.”
When you ask for patient reviews proactively, you highlight your investment in a positive customer experience and you potentially get ahead of any negative reviews.
To help you in making that ask, here are some best practices for encouraging reputation-boosting reviews:
- Include reviews and testimonials on your website.
- Ask patients to write a review after they give you a positive comment in person.
- Provide instructions for leaving a review with a physical printout and as a post-appointment email.
- Keep the review process simple.
- Write down a script for what to say when you ask for reviews, and then practice using it so that it becomes easier to ask.
- Offer incentives, such as discounts, coupons, or gift cards.
It’s also important to respond promptly to any negative feedback. In fact, Tebra’s 4th annual Patient Perspectives report found that 64% of patients said they would return to a practice if it addressed their negative review.
How to streamline the review process
The biggest obstacle to getting more reviews is the ability to follow up with patients. Many physicians and healthcare providers simply don’t have the time to check in with patients and ask for reviews.
Automating the patient feedback process and adding the request to your workflow can make it manageable. For example, you can add a review link to your patient emails and text messages. This link should open to a page where they can leave their review.
You may even decide to set up an automated email sequence for follow-ups, just in case a patient forgets.
Once you have reviews, you must manage them and respond to eventual negative comments. A platform that consolidates your online reputation management makes this easier because you can do everything in one place.
Maximize your marketing budget
Once you’ve laid the groundwork for your marketing strategy, you can improve it over time following these 5 tips:
1. Focus on your patient needs and communication channels
You’ll often discover the best marketing topics by communicating with your patients. Keep track of patient questions and needs and build a record of responding quickly. Provide a good user experience and you'll receive good reviews. You can also apply what you learn through these communication channels to create content.
In particular, you can add automated or online features to your operations that improve your marketing, patient experience and overall efficiency. These can include:
- Online appointment systems
- Chatbots or SMS messages
- An online portal for health record access
- Online payments
- Telehealth
All of these can reduce your workload while also complementing your marketing efforts.
2. Run digital healthcare marketing campaigns
Digital marketing — including paid social media advertising — isn’t just cost-effective. You can customize your campaign to make sense with your practice and schedule. At the same time, you can turn digital marketing on and off as you see fit. And the best part is this: you can get clear data from your campaigns.
3. Make decisions with data
Whether you focus on social media, content, or both, you can set up analytics to evaluate your efforts. For example, you can track how many people visit your site, how long they stay, and whether they book an appointment. Depending on the platform, you can also track how many people see your social posts and which topics perform better.
You can use data to improve your decisions around marketing, reduce costs, and improve customer acquisition.
“You can use data to improve your decisions around marketing, reduce costs, and improve customer acquisition.”
You can use data to improve your decisions around marketing, reduce costs, and improve customer acquisition.
When you ask for patient reviews proactively, you highlight your investment in a positive customer experience and you potentially get ahead of any negative reviews.
To help you in making that ask, here are some best practices for encouraging reputation-boosting reviews:
- Include reviews and testimonials on your website.
- Ask patients to write a review after they give you a positive comment in person.
- Provide instructions for leaving a review with a physical printout and as a post-appointment email.
- Keep the review process simple.
- Write down a script for what to say when you ask for reviews, and then practice using it so that it becomes easier to ask.
- Offer incentives, such as discounts, coupons, or gift cards.
It’s also important to respond promptly to any negative feedback. In fact, Tebra’s 4th annual Patient Perspectives report found that 64% of patients said they would return to a practice if it addressed their negative review.
How to streamline the review process
The biggest obstacle to getting more reviews is the ability to follow up with patients. Many physicians and healthcare providers simply don’t have the time to check in with patients and ask for reviews.
Automating the patient feedback process and adding the request to your workflow can make it manageable. For example, you can add a review link to your patient emails and text messages. This link should open to a page where they can leave their review.
You may even decide to set up an automated email sequence for follow-ups, just in case a patient forgets.
Once you have reviews, you must manage them and respond to eventual negative comments. A platform that consolidates your online reputation management makes this easier because you can do everything in one place.
Maximize your marketing budget
Once you’ve laid the groundwork for your marketing strategy, you can improve it over time following these 5 tips:
1. Focus on your patient needs and communication channels
You’ll often discover the best marketing topics by communicating with your patients. Keep track of patient questions and needs and build a record of responding quickly. Provide a good user experience and you'll receive good reviews. You can also apply what you learn through these communication channels to create content.
In particular, you can add automated or online features to your operations that improve your marketing, patient experience and overall efficiency. These can include:
- Online appointment systems
- Chatbots or SMS messages
- An online portal for health record access
- Online payments
- Telehealth
All of these can reduce your workload while also complementing your marketing efforts.
2. Run digital healthcare marketing campaigns
Digital marketing — including paid social media advertising — isn’t just cost-effective. You can customize your campaign to make sense with your practice and schedule. At the same time, you can turn digital marketing on and off as you see fit. And the best part is this: you can get clear data from your campaigns.
3. Make decisions with data
Whether you focus on social media, content, or both, you can set up analytics to evaluate your efforts. For example, you can track how many people visit your site, how long they stay, and whether they book an appointment. Depending on the platform, you can also track how many people see your social posts and which topics perform better.
You can use data to improve your decisions around marketing, reduce costs, and improve customer acquisition.
“The more regularly you post, and the more you engage with others on the platform, the more likely it is that you’ll reach a growing audience.”
The more regularly you post, and the more you engage with others on the platform, the more likely it is that you’ll reach a growing audience.
Refine and adjust healthcare marketing strategies
As you continue to create content and monitor the results, you may find you need to tweak your marketing strategies.
Your content might resonate more on TikTok than on LinkedIn, or you might find that posts about best practices for post-surgery do better than general posts about certain conditions.
Ways to refine and adjust your marketing strategies:
- Review patient feedback.
- Refresh and realign older content, like blog posts and website pages.
- Review your messaging. Do you need to simplify your content, shift it, or expand it?
Find new and creative ways to stretch your budget
Platforms and tools change constantly. Marketing is open to creativity. You can always find cost-effective ways to market your practice, from collaborations with local businesses and other practices to offering a Q&A session about your specialty.
And so long as you have a clear ICP, your customized marketing strategy, your SEO-optimized website, and social channels with consistent content, you have a firm foundation on which to build. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars a month to get clients — you can find a marketing strategy that works with your budget.
Healthcare marketing for growth requires a small investment over time, and it offers the potential for big results.
You might also be interested in …
- Did you know that a whopping 75% of online searchers never bother scrolling beyond the first page of results? Maintaining a solid customer response rating increases your chances of landing among the top 3 search rankings. Learn how online reviews affect SEO for doctors.
- Your medical practice website is not just another piece of marketing material. It is a crucial touchpoint for new patients. Websites have the potential to be a powerful tool for healthcare professionals who strive to grow. Learn how to transform your medical practice website into a growth machine.
- 75% of people look online to find a doctor. Patients look critically at web presence, online business profiles, and reviews when they decide to pick a health provider. Learn where your practice should be online in the 2023 Patient Perspective Report.
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