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In previous blogs, we addressed how digital marketing can help build realtors’ businesses and also how law offices can benefit from digital marketing.  I like to continue the series and focus this blog on the benefits of digital advertising for medical offices.  Running a medical office is expensive and you need a steady amount of new leads that lead to patients to keep the lights on and build revenue.

Your medical office’s website is your storefront and must be user friendly and absolutely optimized for conversions. The more conversion tracking your website has, the more the Google algorithms, i.e. the Google Ads A.I., can optimize your Paid Search campaign for conversions. Your website needs to a) include universal site tagging to get insightful data on the Google Analytics platform and b) forms and engagements (e.g. a button clicks, etc.) need to be tracked on the website and this can be accomplished with Google Tag Manager for example. We are able to implement this with Google Tag Manager and track all your conversions.  

You need to communicate with your digital marketing agency how much on average each new patient is worth. This will determine your PPC’s (Pay-Per-Click) CPA (Cost-Per-Acquisition) bid and optimization. A critical aspect of how successful your medical practice can be is the implementation of a solid reputation management strategy. Who wants to have too many negative reviews? Too many negative reviews can be the “kiss-of-death” for medical practices. Google receives an astonishing amount of health-related searches. According to Google’s Health Vice President David Feinberg, MD, each minute amounts up to 70,000 health-related searches. Patients use online searches to evaluate providers thus your reputation management is paramount. Lastly, a strong reputation management strategy will boost your local organic SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and help drive organic traffic to your site. Organic is the opposite of paid traffic, i.e. it is free but it requires work and consistency to reap the benefits. 

Moreover, our research shows that a large majority of potential patients convert by dialing your practice. Since calling a doctor’s office is often emotionally laden, personal, and private it’s important to have your Paid Search optimized for phone calls. One strategy to optimize for phone calls is to implement a smart phone call campaign. Here, “smart” means a campaign optimized by Google’s machine learning. This kind of campaign is fine-tuned by Google’s algorithms to show on mobile devices. Needless to say, there’s huge revenue potential to optimize your campaigns for phone calls. 

I am a strong proponent of video ads since they can engage on a whole different level. They can speak directly to your target audience and YouTube has a wide spectrum of audience targeting and remarketing possibilities. For example, you can create a custom intent audience on the Google YouTube platform targeting keywords that are highly relevant for your medical practice. Video ads can leave a stronger imprint than display ads for example and engage your audience. Once you have good video assets they can be repurposed for a fruitful social media strategy. 

With so many users searching about symptoms, looking up illnesses, thinking about their course of action, and reading online reviews of medical practices, your practice cannot ignore a sound digital marketing anymore in the 21st Century. If the competition has embraced it, you cannot be left behind. If you’d like to get more information on how a digital marketing strategy can help build your medical practice’s business contact us. For now, please stay safe out there and practice common sense and social distancing until we can beat this horrific virus that has torn through the fabrics of our society.