We are working on developing a social media strategy to actually reach pediatricians online. We are selling baby food and are completely open to using any social/community platforms (i.e. twitter, facebook, linkedin, G+ etc) to connect with our target audience. (1) Which platforms are suitable to generate leads? (2) What are the required steps to develop and implement a successful social media strategy for this target audience? Thank you!
I work extensively in the healthcare market. In particular I have quite a bit of experience marketing to MDs and other healthcare providers. And in my experience - that audience is not likely to be reached via social media.
Medical professionals (particularly MDs) are mainly offline. Online business related activity is generally limited to reading journals and correspondence with other medical professionals.
In fact - they have such a huge "target" painted on their back that they are very challenging to market TO at all.
This is not to say that you can't be successful in working with them. Only that if you "target" them you're likely to get stonewalled.
I'm curious why you are intent on reaching them in this manner (i.e. social media)?
One of the main tenets I teach my coaching students is to find out where your market is... Not to choose a form of media (i.e. twitter, FB, etc) and hope to reach them there.
You may have greater success (and waste less time/money) re-thinking your business model. I can certainly help with this if you decide to go in that direction.
In any case - Best of luck!
1. Use unbounce app or something similar to design your landing page. I've seen too many clients spend piles of money on Twitter and Facebook ads only to watch it vanish with shitty landing pages.
2. Hire a professional to design your ads, manage campaigns and remarket (if using Facebook) using emails and website data.
3. Create value for them to want your product. Free giveaway, Ebooks download or study on baby food. Be human about how it benefits them. Be helpful, if your only trying to make money, people know.
4. Create a video campaign and blogs outlining the benefits of the food. The story, how it was made and why it's better than anything else.
5. Test it with local paediatricians. Let them in on the pre release and get their feedback. Use offline relationships to build online amplification.
Hope that helps. I'm sure others will have some other great thoughts too
I really do understand your concern and in these Covid-19 times it has become more important to reach physicians. Here are few marketing strategies that will help you:
1. Optimize your practice website for patient experience: Today more than ever, potential patients are searching on the web for local physicians and healthcare services. Patients are taking their health into their own hands and by doing so care more and more about establishing a know, like and trust relationship with a potential practice before walking through the doors or book an appointment. Improving your patient’s experience on your website will significantly increase patient leads and retention. Your website design should have customized features, fast page speed, be mobile-friendly, and interactive. Most searches are done via mobile or tablet devices, so having a fully responsive medical website design is crucial. Make sure your website design includes flexible images and website structures. The practice website should be built for all platforms, so you capture the maximum number of website visitors and not just limited to desktop searches. Slow website page speed will irritate your online users and deter them from staying on your website. Websites that are difficult to navigate with slow page speed will give potential patients a negative experience. A negative experience makes users more likely to leave your website to go to a competitor’s. It is critical to evaluate and put a plan together to improve website page speed to lower bounce rates and increase lead conversion. Layout practice treatments and services on the practice homepage. When patients are visiting your practice website, they should find all your services and treatments quickly if your medical practice offers a wide variety of services down select to the main procedures and services that you want to feature. When deciding on what treatments to promote, think of your ideal audience, key differentiators, and high revenue procedures. Use lead forms to make it easy for patients to request appointments and to create a call to action for high revenue services. Lead forms a big for driving leads in your medical marketing strategy. When designing lead forms on the website, make sure they are accessible and straightforward. Patients do not want to fill out long and unnecessary forms to schedule an appointment. Your practice website needs to be built with proper medical SEO and keywords. To stay competitive and show up in search results, your website design needs to have all the essential keywords and proper SEO structure. A top-performing website will have a solid SEO and keywords at the foundation of the website design. Search engine optimization will be built page by page for all aspects of the website through image optimization, accurate meta descriptions, H tags, page structures, and more. A medical SEO expert will spend their time building out each page of your practice website and do competitive keyword research to make sure your site is on top of local search results.
2. Invest in Social Media Marketing for Doctors: Social media marketing is an essential part of great medical marketing strategies and will help you share content and reach your ideal patient base. Social media marketing for doctors is a massive contributor to driving traffic to your medical or dental practice website and search engine rankings. Social media will help medical marketing strategies reach a broad audience and can be used as a critical lead generation tool. Utilize the available analytics tools that social media platforms provide to track your efforts and modify the social media marketing campaigns for your dental practice. That is a BIG advantage for optimizing exactly when to post to ensure the highest level of visibility. Not all social media platforms are alike, and not all social media is a good fit for your medical practice. Each social media marketing platform is different and created for a specific audience. Take the time to evaluate the social media profiles that are the best fit for the medical marketing of the practice based on the target audience and the makeup of the audience that each platform targets. You do not want to waste precious time and energy on profiles that do not reach your audience. Instagram tends to be a great fit for marketing a plastic surgery practice, aesthetics, or dermatology marketing; however, Instagram may not be an excellent fit for urology practice marketing.
To be successful for medical marketing for doctors on social media, you need to be:
1. Consistent and organized
2. Optimized properly
3. Interactive
4. Regular Posting
5. Contain unique images and content for your practice
6. Create consistent brand continuity
7. Share content that drives patients to your website
3. Develop a local search engine optimization strategy: Medical marketing for doctors has gone local. That means that you need to invest time and energy into ranking your website in the 15-20-mile radius around each location for your practice. A big thing is if you want to rank for it locally. YOU NEED A PAGE FOR IT. That is a very dumb down version as to say you need well-structured and optimized pages for each of our core treatment and services pages. Make sure you include the following items on the page:
1. Google My Business map
2. The city name in the title tag and on the page several times
3. NAP – name, address, phone number, hours of that specific location
4. Providers that see patients at that location
5. A short write up about that location.
4. Correct your provider profile listings: Business listings have a significant impact on medical marketing and SEO for doctors. Your business listings are the business contact information that displays when patients search for you online. It is vital to claim, verify, and optimize your business listings across all platforms. Uniform business listings across all platforms inform Google that the information displayed about your medical practice is accurate. The more directories and reviews sites that contain the same business information give Google additional confidence to return your data over a competitor’s practice.
5. Have an active content marketing strategy: Medical marketing for doctors relies on a solid content marketing strategy. Content marketing increases your overall website traffic, grows organic search, improves brand awareness, and positions you as a thought leader in your specialty. A well-structured, well-performing blog can and should generate up to 50% of a websites organic traffic.
Leverage data at the centre of your content marketing strategies.You can use free tools like Ubersuggest to punch in keywords for topics you want to write about.
It will tell you things like:
1. Keyword volume
2. Backlinks
3. Top pages ranking for that keyword.
You can use this information to ensure you are writing about topics people are searching for and look at that is already ranking well and make sure you write a more detailed post.
6. Email is still a viable medical marketing strategy: Stay in front of your patients and website visitors with email marketing! Email as part of your medical marketing strategy is a great way to retarget patients or reach new patients that have expressed interest in a particular procedure or treatment. Utilize email marketing to create touchpoints with your practice website visitors and share new promotions, specials, blog posts, and the latest practice news. Grow your practice patient email list by encouraging website visitors to sign up for a newsletter. A newsletter will help you share monthly content about your medical practice and keep your practice in front of mind for patients. Another powerful way to leverage email as part of your medical marketing strategy is by creating nurture sequences for your lead generation campaigns.
7. Generate new patient reviews: Studies have shown that 68% of potential patients form an opinion about your medical practice, and its physicians with as little as five reviews. When choosing between two providers, a patient is 91% more likely to select the provider with higher reviews! That is a huge deal. 9/10 patients will pick your competitor if your reputation is bad online. What does this mean? Patient reviews are an essential way to convert potential patients and a huge reflection of your medical practice reputation. When it comes to medical marketing strategies generating positive patient reviews needs to be at the top of the list! We recommend leveraging technology to makes sure you succeed with generating reviews.
8. Start creating videos with your providers: Video content created by your physicians is one of the most powerful and engaging ways to content with potential patients. Video medical marketing helps physicians and medical practices reach potential patients and easily market themselves. Video now receives substantially higher engagement rates than any other type of content, including images and blog posts. On top of that, YouTube is owned by Google and is the second largest search engine online. Giving you another avenue for search growth for your practice to pursue. Building a video marketing strategy will help you, as the doctor promote your practices, talk specifically about medical conditions and your treatment approach and create a know, like and trust relationship with potential patients before they ever walk through the door.
9. Create procedure-based content that relates to patients: Sharing high quality before and after pictures of actual patient results can be one of the single most important medical marketing strategies, a practice that provides aesthetics services can do. When it comes to cosmetic surgery and aesthetic marketing, before and after photos are an absolute must in your medical marketing strategy. Develop a large before and after gallery showcasing multiple examples of successful patient’s before and after for various surgical procedures and age ranges. If your medical specialty is not cosmetic based, consider working with a patient that is willing to share their treatment journey as a case study for your practice. Or even film for procedures from the operating room. Many potential patients are continually seeking the best treatments for medical conditions and improving their quality of life. Sharing successful patient stories and educating the online visitors of your experience and expertise will turn online visitors into real patients. This can be a phenomenally successful part of your medical marketing strategy if done correctly.
10. Generate leads with Google Ads and Social Ads: The digital advertising space is highly competitive but essential for driving leads and generating new patients for high revenue procedures. Digital advertising has various platforms, but the most popular being, Google Ads and Facebook ads.
These platforms are the heavy hitters when it comes to digital advertising for medical practices. Both Search Ads and Facebook Ads Manager have their advantages for targeting potential patients. Search based ads allow you to target specific keywords in search and present ads to those people in a particular geographical area if you outbid competitors. Digital advertising can be interactive and allows potential patients to engage with advertisements making it easier to capture contact information and convert leads. Not only can you use digital advertising to drive in new leads and conversions, but you can also use it to boost your organic reach. Google Ads and Facebook advertising are considerable drivers in converting new patients, growing high revenue procedures, and increasing overall practice revenue.
11. Grow new patient referrals through physician outreach: Physician referrals can be the lifeline of a medical practice, so developing a physician liaison marketing program is essential for sustaining strong doctor referral relationships. Successful medical marketing for doctors will include efforts to expand your healthcare network and increasing patient growth. Physician liaison marketing is hiring a representative for your practice to meet with local referring doctors and medical practices to increase patient referrals for the practice. As the physician relations representative, they extend the bridge of communication between referring doctors and their medical practice. Referral outreach can result in a significant increase in patient referrals and overall practice growth. Physician liaison marketing is especially an excellent fit for hospitals, surgeons, and specialty medical practices because their patient base is majority referrals from general practitioners. Other medical practices can significantly benefit from having a physician relations manager to help grow their healthcare network and meet with local physicians.
Benefits of a Physician Liaison Marketing Program:
1. Skilled physician liaison representative to promote the practice
2. Connects medical practice and doctors with referring physicians
3. Helps introduce new physicians to the healthcare community
4. It provides a way to streamline referrals for primary care providers easily.
5. Accessible point of contact for referring doctors for questions, concerns, or any other needs
6. Marketing director for practice
7. Increases patient referrals
8. Increases high revenue procedures
9. Increases overall practice revenue
10. Track visits and builds the physician’s network
11. Provides physician referral analytics
12. Evaluates practice growth and creates a marketing strategy
13. Easy to track success and ROI
12. Depend on marketing analytics to make decisions: Understanding the medical marketing efforts that are most effective for your medical practice requires proper tracking and data and analytics reports. Tracking and analytics will give you a fully comprehensive report on the progress of the medical marketing for your practice. With tracking and analytics, you can target and re-invest in the marketing efforts that have proven successful. Dashboards are a fantastic way to see the executive-level health of your medical marketing program quickly.
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath
