Obviously, people no longer need to visit doctors or clinics anymore to get answers to medical questions. All they do now is type the question into a search engine and look for answers on the search results page. Now, this has become an effective avenue to market oneself as a medical practitioner. When you make yourself available to answer the questions and solve the issues of your audience, their trust and confidence in you is thus built, and when they develop any health condition, you likely would be the doctor on their radar. This you can achieve through local marketing.
What is local marketing?
Local marketing is a strategic approach aimed at building long-term relationships with prospective customers within a radius of your geographical location. As the name suggests, local marketing is targeted at the population in the same locality as your business because these are the ones who are likely to quickly patronize you due to the proximity. By building a relationship with the locals through local marketing, doctors can reach a greater number of patients, gain their trust, and get regular patronage from them, thus boosting revenue inflow. Local marketing for doctors can also be referred to as healthcare marketing.
Local marketing techniques to market your healthcare
There are techniques with which doctors can market their brand and sustain an ever-increasing demand in their services. But an important key to note is that a strategy and budget must be put structured in place to ensure that whatever actions you take in your marketing campaign is in line with your strategy, budget, and goals. As doctors are rarely skilled in marketing, it may be necessary to hire an external marketing body to map out a comprehensive local marketing campaign for your brand. However, there are some key healthcare techniques specific to local marketing for doctors.
- Contribute to the well-being of your locality
A key aspect of local marketing is contributing to the lives of those within your geographical location. By carrying out periodical community service such as immunization, free drugs or free checkups, you are putting your name on the lips of your prospective patients. When they are in need of treatment, they are more likely to patronize you.
- Include content marketing and local SEO in your strategy
An important aspect of every marketing campaign is content marketing and local SEO. Find out the common health problems that affect the people within your geographical location. What health related questions are they asking about? What do they need? Then all you need do is tailor and publish contents that give answers to these questions. Your content should be optimized for your audience using relevant keywords so that when they conduct a search, they easily find your content and website link on the SERP. By keeping up with and answering to their health care issues, a long-term relationship is being built.
- Build a website that spells out the uniqueness of your brand
It is worthy of note that there are clinics at almost every corner. To build your brand is to make it stand out from the rest. What is that unique thing peculiar to your brand? Is it its patient-care or friendliness? Is it the relaxing environment? Spell all these out neatly in your website to attract prospective clients. Also, ensure that they can see the upsides within seconds of landing on your page. This is because first impression matters.
- Include automated reviews on your website
Reviews go a long way in improving how many customers would be walking through your front door daily. When users make local searches for products and service providers, one thing they look out for are the reviews and rating. Positive reviews and an average high rating means competence and customer satisfaction, and this are what customers want. This is why it is recommended that doctors include automated reviews on their website and place a computer at the office with which patients can leave reviews before leaving the clinic. Google will be notified of such reviews and would display them alongside your business profile on the search results.
- Give feedback on customers’ reviews
It is expected that just as some patients would leave you positive reviews, others would leave negative ones. All of these would be displayed by Google. The best thing you can do about negative reviews is to follow-up on such reviews by stating that you are working on the problem to ensure that such below-average performance is improved quickly. When patients realize that you care about them and are working to improve your services, they are motivated to update their reviews and even return to your clinic for their next treatment.
