Of course, very medical clinic manager wants to set up a reliable system for the customer acquision and tries to find the channels that really work. In this article we’ll try to find the most effective ways of attracting patients to your clinic.
Selling website
The fact that your clinic needs a website is clearly out of the question. Legally, citizens have the right to receive information about a medical organisation, including via the internet. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to create a website. You can make it simple and elegant.
Here are the main points your website must comply with:
- Do not violate the law;
- Be adapted to all devices;
- Provide complete information about the clinic and doctors;
- Include a accurate price list;
- Include a booking form for each doctor
First of all, you don’t need to fill your site with informative articles in the hope that they will bring you traffic and a stream of calls. You should concentrate on accessible descriptions of complex services where the client needs a lot of data to make a decision. Expert articles about implants, for example, can significantly increase website conversion rates.
Converting website visitors into the patients using a survey
A survey is an effective internet marketing tool. The main principle here is gamification of interaction with the audience. You ask your potential patient to answer a series of questions in a game format. Then, to find out the result, they need to leave a contact to get in touch.
This is a great way of dealing with “cold” users and those who are in search of a solution to an existing problem. With such clients it is important to start a dialogue and offer help. Survey on the clinic’s website helps to navigate through the services and prices. Besides, it works with the user’s fears and increasing the conversion rate of the appointment. With this tool attracting patients to your clinic may become way more successful.
Contextual advertising
In some cases there is a spontaneous demand for many medical clinic services. It happens mostly when a service is needed here and now. These clients come from search engines. In a situation where all the top search results are taken over by aggregators, you can get such clients through contextual advertising.
Do not advertise using the names of established competitors. Users will click on the ads, but most likely they will not sign up, because they were looking for a different clinic. It’s the same story with names of doctors. If they are searching by name, they want to see a particular doctor, so don’t waste your budget.
First, to create really effective ads, choose your unique offer. The advertisement should be filled in as much as possible: price in the ad, image, quick links etc. In this way the ad will be as clickable as possible. Show ads by the location of your clinic because usually people are looking for the nearest clinics. In addition, when you plan your paln of attracting patients to your clinic, stick to a strategy of maximising conversions.
Search engine optimisation
Despite the dominance of aggregators in search engine tops, it makes sense to optimise and promote your website for a specific pool of queries. Choose the ones that your potencial patients would most likely type to find your clinic. The payback period for SEO is approximately 1-2 years.
Also, it is possible to smoothly raise the site in search within months. After achieving the desired result, the site will be at the top positions for about 1 year. As a result, at least 5-10 targeted users a day will come to your website from search and 1-2 of them will make an appointment. SEO optimization is an ongoing process! Remember that in the absence of action, the site will begin to sink and all efforts may come to nothing again.
Don’t forget about the social media
It is most effective to run the groups on behalf of the clinic experts, natively promoting the specialists. Visual content will have to prepare yourself and editing the text and design of posts is better left to the expert. It is better to entrust a specialist with attracting subscribers and increasing the reach of the posts, as this is very time-consuming. In addition to expert content, you can post case studies, before and after treatment photos, and testimonials from your patients.
Content marketing
Do you specialise in complex services? If you do, show your expertise on a regular basis and increase your credibility to increase conversions. Analyse what your potential clients are interested in, what information they are looking for, what is important for them to know when choosing a treatment method. Describe cases from your practice, publish photos of your work. If the subscriber receives comprehensive information from you, they are more likely to contact you. Publish content where it can be found by potential clients: on the website, social media, aggregators etc.
Reputation management
If there are no reviews about your clinic or the last one was left more than six months ago, you lose calls and applications. Almost all clients look for clinic reviews before (and sometimes immediately after) making an appointment. Encourage your patients to write reviews on aggregators and social media. If you have a lot of uncovered negative reviews, it will reduce the number of referrals to the clinic. Negative feedback should always be dealt with and responded to politely and reasonably. But it is worth bearing in mind that if there is not a single negative review for every 100 positive ones, you may be suspicious that you are simply deleting uncomfortable reviews.
Make business cards for your doctors with website addresses where your doctor will be pleased to read the review. For the receptionist, make a review form and ask customers to fill it out.
SMS reminders
In practice management system, if you have one, you have the option of setting up automatic texting immediately after the appointment to ask for feedback, or you can set up texting at regular intervals. Remind them, for example, that it’s time for another cleaning or whitening. But don’t send promotional SMS to your customer base – that could reduce their loyalty. Former patients are better brought back through contextual advertising or social media.
Conclusion
There is no universal recipe of attracting patients to your clinic. It’s not easy to find the answer to the question “which channel will bring you more customers at the lowest cost?” Much depends on the size of your city, the location of your clinic, your specialisation, the scope of your services, the size of your clinic, etc.
In order to properly determine which channels to invest in, you need a well thought-out promotion strategy. In addition, you will need end-to-end analytics that show the user’s journey from the moment they hear about you to the moment they become your client.