India has one doctor for every 1,457 citizens according to Business Standard. Though the human body has a brilliant mechanism to heal itself where trillions of body cells are always on work for us but sometimes we need a repair when it breaks down. If we talk in terms of economic terminologies then there is huge demand and supply is less. In this scenario, it is important to reach the right person and provide help. Marketing for doctors will enable them to be able to help more and more needy patients.These are the strategies you can start with –
Online marketing campaigns for doctors is like marketing for other products or services. In the process of doing medical marketing for doctors, one should always focus on what marketing message you are passing to your audience. All the marketing campaigns should reciprocate the feeling of trust. If you are able to build trust for your brand then you have one half the battle. In the series Made in China on Netflix in which Raghu (an aspiring entrepreneur) is trying to sell a medical product but was unable to sell it. Then he collaborated with Dr Tribhuvan Vardhi who was a trusted doctor and marketed everything around Mr Vardhi and his sales broke the roof.
You have to think not about selling a service but about building a brand. After running many marketing campaigns for doctors I have listed down 11 medical marketing strategies that worked for doctors and will definitely work in 2021:
11 Digital Marketing Tips for Medical and Health Industry.
We have listed 11 digital marketing tips medical and health industry or doctors should follow to grow their reach online and reach more people and help them with their services:
Website Creation.
Manufacturers tend to sell their products through commission per cent, quantity selling. Email marketing can help in playing a massive role in getting a competitive edge by sending the different commission offers; sale offers to the new and existing customer base. This technique can be useful for 3,2 or no tier manufacturers.
Search Engine Optimization.
Work of marketing a doctor doesn’t end here just by making a website. It doesn’t make sense if we create a beautiful website, invest time and efforts and it doesn’t rank on Google or is not visible to the target audience. Hence we should optimize the website for the search engines so that if someone is searching for services that you offer then your website should rank at least on the first page of the search engine result page (SERP) to get traffic on the website and hence make them book a consultation.
Local SEO.
85% of the doctors get patients from the same city or the nearby places. It is very important for them to rank for the city they are located in so that footfall to their centre/clinic is maximum. Local SEO is about how to optimize your website and your business to rank better for a local audience. A website can give you the opportunity to target the entire (online) world. But if the target audience for your business is actually located in or near the city you have your clinic, you’ll need to optimize business for local SEO as well. You need to optimize for your city name, optimize your address details. In short: you need to optimize so people know where you are located and are able to find you offline so that footfall at your clinic increases. Few of the activities one should perform to optimize business for local SEO are:
-Optimize website: Make sure you mention in the content that your website is targeting what all areas to get better reach
-Get links from the local listings and directories which will indicate the search engine that your business operated in which locality
-Get local reviews, because it builds trust and authority
-Be active in social media
Video Marketing.
According to Merchdope 300 hours of local content is uploaded on YouTube per minute, and it’s crazy. Video marketing is the present and future. It is much easier to consume video content than reading a long blog. Videos can be interactive and give a personal touch to the audience. Doctor’s know what problems their patients usually phase and try to make videos on those topics. Because of this first-hand information coming directly from their trusted doctor people would want to consume this information and would also share the useful information with near and dear ones. Leverage Youtube and other online video hosting platforms to create videos and spread awareness. This can be a creative marketing idea for doctors.
Social Media.
Having a social presence is always a good idea. You can mention offers and add valuable content like tips and tricks, precautions etc for the speciality you deal in. Add the videos uploaded on Youtube and other video marketing platforms to all your social channels to get more reach, and to provide valuable and shareable content to the audience. When people will share the content created it will develop trust in the audience and slowly and gradually build a brand for yourself.
Going Live.
This is a very good strategy to engage with your audience and build trust. Doctors or specialists can go live on their social platforms like Facebook and Instagram or even LinkedIn and answer users and patients’ questions there and then so that more and more people would want to engage with you on social media and your reach on social media can skyrocket. This marketing strategy for doctors in 2020 has really worked for them and helped them book more consultation appointments than before.
Online Directories.
Register yourself or clinic on online directories like Justdial, Yelp etc so that if someone searches for consultation and if these platforms rank then you can be present in these directors as well and make people book consultations from these platforms as well.
Newsletter and Email marketing.
Time and again spread relevant information for your audience via emails. Information can be as simple as sending blogs or sending them the videos which you release. Information about offers and other important stuff can also be circulated via emails. Email ensures regular touchpoints with your audience
Collaboration.
Create a digital strategy to collaborate with other doctors and hospitals. They can be your affiliates and you can give them a percentage of your consultation. Word out mouth still works well. So why not use it. In the end, sit back and relax. See what strategies worked for you and what strategy did not. Invest more on strategies that worked and try to find loopholes in strategies that didn’t work and optimize them. To know more about how to plan the execution of these strategies, contact our team of experts who have booked thousands of consultations for our doctor client’s
Mobile SEO and marketing.
70% of web traffic comes from mobile and on an average, a person spends 5 hours and Consumers now spend more than five hours a day on their smartphones, and a recent AdWeek survey found 88% growth year over year in time spent watching videos on a smartphone. We need to optimize our doctor’s marketing strategy around mobile to leverage 70% of the users else we will loose on lot of potential customers.
