I talk with many of my colleagues that know they need to enter the digital realm of marketing their practice with social media and SEO.
Most use a spouse or friend to help with intermittent Facebook posts and some even utilize patient surveys. Few understand how to harness multiple channels of a comprehensive marketing plan though to help drive new patients to their website. The reason is simple; doctors, dentist, chiropractors, veterinarians…etc really want to just spend their day treating patients, not looking for new ones.
How much can a healthcare provider really expect from a small investment in resources to a Facebook page? Let me review the basics between a DIY approach and help from a Marketing Pro in this article:
DIY Marketing
If you’re a healthcare professional, chances are, your time is more valuable than most. Instead of hiring a marketing professional you’ve decided to do your own marketing. However, it is important to note that for every second you’re spending on your own marketing you’re literally losing money.
Also, if you have a small, but growing healthcare practice, there is typically no marketing plan to do all of the marketing activity, so the latter tends to be haphazard and disjointed. If you have patients that love you, give them a place to find you and promote you on social media. The more time you spend with patients means the less time you have keeping up with optimization of your Google Analytics, updating the images and testimonials on your website, and responding to the online reviews that you are trying to generate. All of these are key to driving more patients to your website and doorstep.
Hiring a Marketing Pro
As there are specialist in any field of medicine, marketing professionals do this all day, every day. By hiring a marketing agency like IntellaHealth, you automatically leverage all of this cutting-edge marketing expertise for your healthcare practice.
A competent and creative marketing professional will analyze your practice and help “prescribe” the best course of action when it comes to marketing. This will ensure that you get the maximum bang for your marketing buck!
You can hire a marketing company like IntellaHealth to do the following:
- Analyze your website and SEO position then recommend necessary updates
- Come up with a timely, tailored, and tested marketing plan that fits your budget and your practice
- Set benchmark numbers at the beginning of the year to track growth
- Survey your patient and understand how they’ve found you and what they like
- Create top-quality marketing materials
The most compelling reasons to ask for professional help with your marketing:
- Expertise: When you hire a digital marketing agency, you are hiring experienced professionals who are expert at what they do. We work on similar accounts and will be able to bring that expertise to help improve the number of patients coming to your website and office each month. Also, you get an entire team of professionals versus having someone help you on the side that may not have a network of resources.
- Inbound marketing: A digital marketing agency has several different professionals on board to help you with your entire marketing effort. These professionals include a social media strategist, an SEO expert, a blog writer, graphic designers, developers, email marketing professionals and so much more!
- Cost effective: When you hire a digital marketing agency you can get an entire team for less. Different companies certainly have different costs, so compare IntellaHealth to other companies and you will see a professional can be cost-effective.
- Measurable results: Digital marketing agencies have tools that can measure Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for your practice.
- Peace of mind: You gain peace of mind knowing that your digital marketing agency is working towards boosting your visibility in search engine results or handling all things social media, so you can concentrate on your practice.
- ROI driven: As opposed to DIY marketing, agencies are more ROI driven, as they often don’t get a second chance to prove themselves to their clients. Their tactics and strategies maximize the value they bring to the table and are result oriented.
- New perspective: While you bring a definite perspective to DIY marketing, it is important to take advantage of a new perspective that a digital marketing agency can bring to your practice. Marketing pros will create a strategic plan that will make sense from a consumer’s perspective.
So while you may do DIY marketing as a patchwork of activities, you can hire an agency to do all of the digital marketing tasks for your healthcare practice systematically and strategically.
And while you may think that you can do all of the marketing tasks, you really should consider handing over your marketing activity to a pro, so that you can concentrate on what you do best…treat people for their health conditions.
For more information on how you can hire a digital marketing agency for your healthcare practice, contact Kristine Grace DDS, MS, MBA at KristineG@IntellaHealth.net.
by Kristine Grace, Apr-26-2017