When you’re responsible for the marketing of a healthcare clinic, you know that your brand positioning might be what decides the specific providers or health systems that patients wind up using. If you want your healthcare marketing to be effective, you need to empower your potential patients while strengthening relationships between current healthcare providers and patients. If you think your clinic might be lacking in this area, then it’s time to consider various ideas that improve your game.

9 Ways to Better Your Healthcare Marketing

While there are often multiple treatment options for your patients, your marketing woes also have a number of potential answers:

1. Brand Consistency: If your healthcare clinic has multiple departments, then keeping consistency in your branding is crucial across the board.
2. Email Marketing: This is a powerful way to connect with not just patients but also vendors and other crucial stakeholders.
3. Google Business Profile: Google is the first stop for many patients looking for healthcare answers and providers.
4. Leverage Your Authority: If you can’t position your clinic as a content authority online, then you may never be trusted with the health and safety of patients.
5. Online Reputation: Reputation management can help you manage online reviews for prospective patients seeking social proof before making a decision on what doctor to see.
6. Referral Programs: Attracting new patients is easier when it involves the trust they have in family, friends, and other healthcare providers.
7. PPC Ads: Pay-per-click advertising can help you meet short-term goals while waiting on the longer, organic results that come from SEO.
8. SEO: Search engine optimization involves taking advantage of how patients will research symptoms online before visiting a doctor because your content can help them.
9. Social Media: Your organization should at least have a Facebook business page that helps others learn your general philosophy and approach to care for patients.

Know Where You Stand Right Now

Having a general sense that you need to better your healthcare clinic marketing tactics is one thing, but your actual efforts need to be specific. You’ve just read a list of things you might do, but how do you know which ones you should do? Starting things off with a digital marketing assessment might be the right move before you do anything else.

An assessment of your digital marketing helps you see objectively how your particular practice is positioned in terms of competing for patients online as compared to the competition in your specific niche or area of care. Given how many patients look up doctors and other healthcare providers online, it’s smart to emphasize digital marketing in particular. This will help you gain clarity about how your healthcare clinic stands up to the rest so you can create an informed game plan to put into place.

The right assessment will compare you to several different competitors at the same time. A quantitative assessment of your current online presence and marketing performance compared to them will illustrate your potential priorities and problems to emphasize in terms of tactics, budget, and strategy. Just mapping out your current terrain can often make it easy to see the roadmap to a better future.

Healthcare Clinics Face Distinct Challenges

Healthcare is estimated to account for over 15% of the national economy. While it’s very integrated into nearly everyone’s lives, it also faces some unique challenges compared to other industries, as pointed out by Forbes. For instance, privacy regulations might prevent you from targeting specific medical conditions with your search engine advertising. HIPAA compliance is always going to be a factor in anything you do, and technology often evolves or moves faster than regulations can keep up. As always, the insurance landscape is a difficult place to navigate; it’s an entirely different industry, and yet it impacts nearly every point of healthcare.

One final thought to keep in mind is that healthcare clinic marketing can be challenging, but it’s also very rewarding. There are bumps in the road and difficulties that you need to get over or around, but you can connect patients with providers. Improving your healthcare clinic’s marketing helps your patients enjoy better health while your professionals get to make money doing something they love.