9 Ways to Market Your Medical Practice More Effectively

If you are starting a new medical practice, hiring new doctors, adding new services, or opening new office locations, you’ll want to market yourself. Here are nine ways to do it.

1. Earn Referrals and Recommendations

When people need a doctor, they ask their current doctors for recommendations. So taking the time to develop relationships with physicians in specialties complementary to yours is a good idea.

Friends also ask friends they trust for recommendations. How do you earn recommendations from your patients? Engage with them as people and provide outstanding care.

2. Build a Website for Your Practice

Today’s patients want to research you on the internet before they make an appointment – even when you’ve been recommended to them. The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 35% of American adults look on the internet for information about doctors. 1

A website can also help patients find you without a recommendation. Every month across the United States, people perform 100,000s of searches for physicians and health-care providers.

3. Optimize Your Site for Search Engines

Building a website for your practice doesn’t help you if people don’t find it. So when you are creating your site, use search engine optimization principles such as having useful content search engines can read. Videos and words in pictures are hard to index.

4. Sign Up for the Local Search Services

Many health-care practices – particularly those in the primary-care specialties – get most of their patients from their local communities. So showing up in major local search engines is important. Local listings are a good idea even if you are a regionally or nationally recognized specialist.

5. Create Profiles on Review Sites

Some websites on which patients post reviews of their doctors are specifically devoted to health-care. Other sites feature reviews of many kinds of businesses including health practices.

By Peter McEllhenney 215-906-3518

www.5ghealthmarketing.com peter@5ghealthmarketing.com

The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that 15% of American adults read reviews of doctors posted online.2 The influence and visibility of these sites is growing rapidly, however, so make sure the information about you on review sites is correct.

6. Buy Pay-Per-Click Web Advertising

Web advertising programs like Google AdWords can help you build your practice quickly. It can take months to raise the visibility of your practice in search engine results. Google AdWords can put you on the first page in less than a day.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertising offers the best results in primary-care specialties such as pediatrics or dentistry. If you are the first person people call when they have a health problem, advertising programs like AdWords probably make sense for you.

7. Print Brochures for Your Practice

Having practice brochures on your front desk is a good way to encourage patient-to-patient referrals and raise awareness of your services. The more people see your brochure, the more likely you are to earn a new patient.

8. Send Out Direct Mail

Direct mail can help you market your practice successfully. However, you typically need to send several 1,000 pieces of direct mail to find 100 people who might be interested in your services. Direct mail also has high fixed costs from printing and postage.

As a result, direct mail makes the most financial sense for large group practices and physicians whose care is expensive – although it can work for every health-care provider.

9. Buy Newspaper & Magazine Ads

Print advertising is a bit like direct mail. You need 1,000s of people to see your ad to find 100 people who will read it. Print advertising can also be expensive, since ads need to run several times to make an impact.

Both direct mail and space advertising can be good choices for reaching people who are not internet users. The Pew Internet study found that people 65 years and older are significantly less likely to look on the web for information about doctors.3 The same study also found that households with incomes below $30,000 are significantly less likely to look for health professionals online. 4

1. Susannah Fox, “The Social Life of Health Information” (Pew Internet and American Life Project, June 2009, page 46). See: http://www.pewinternet.org/Reports/2009/8-The-Social-Life-of-Health-Information.aspx

2. Susannah Fox, “The Social Life of Health Information,” page 3.

3. Susannah Fox, “The Social Life of Health Information,” page 9.

4. Susannah Fox, “The Social Life of Health Information,” page 9.