Let’s face it: healthcare clinics face huge challenges when it comes to marketing their services and products to patients.
Not only do dentists and doctors need to deal with the usual concerns around finding their target market and cultivating a brand and image, but they also have a duty to care for the people who come to them for help.
This means that marketing needs to be responsible and impeccably honest, as misrepresenting healthcare services can be a serious breach of ethics.
While there are a few standard tools that are in every clinic’s marketing toolkit, getting an edge over competitors means thinking outside the box and approaching marketing in a holistic way.
If you work in a healthcare business like a doctor’s office or a dental clinic, here are three reasons why you should adopt a smarter approach to marketing that will bring in new patients while helping you keep the patients you have.
1. Healthcare Has Changed: So Should Your Marketing
There was a time, not so long ago, when most patients found their dentist, doctor, and optician through local advertisements or on the advice of relatives and friends who could recommend particular providers.
This time has passed, and the routes patients take to find healthcare providers now rely as much on reviews from sites like Yelp as they do on word-of-mouth from friends and family. This means that if you want to reach new patients, you have to have a detailed strategy for how you will market your clinic online.
From redesigning your website to making sure you have a search engine optimization strategy, being competitive in today’s healthcare market requires new skills and new technologies. For this reason, if you run, for example, a dental clinic, you may want to outsource these upgrades to a dental marketing company that can manage your campaign for you.
2. Marketing Is About More Than Just Advertising
One of the most common mistakes clinic owners make is conflating marketing with advertising. While advertising is a vital component of most marketing campaigns, it is increasingly just one facet of a larger strategy.
For example, many dental clinics are now using alternative marketing tools like patient newsletters and social media to reach new patients, or they are investing in creative dental marketing ideas that can help them target demographics that might not otherwise look up their services.
If you want to learn more about strategic dental marketing, you can click here to learn more about the role that a dental marketing expert can play in increasing your patient numbers.
3. A More Comprehensive Marketing Approach Saves You Time
The biggest obstacle most clinics face in tackling the problems of modern marketing is simply inertia. Developing a new marketing strategy is a lot of work, and most clinics are already struggling to find time for all the tasks that need to be completed.
But one of the benefits of a comprehensive approach to marketing is that once it is up and running, it can involve relatively little in the way of day-to-day involvement to keep it going, especially if you bring on a dental marketing manager to run it.
Tools like patient newsletters and social media have changed how dental marketing works and opened up new opportunities for reaching patients, so if you want to grow your clinic in 2019, developing a fresh approach to marketing, and finding new demographics to tap into, is essential. And with plenty of healthcare marketing options available, it’s never been easier.
