Choosing the right healthcare marketing agency in Los Angeles can be challenging because apples-to-apples comparisons are not as straightforward for medical practices. Factors such as your medical specialty, clinic location, number of offices, and even the services offered all play a big role in the type and experience of marketing agency you should hire. Most doctors and practice owners are struggling with healthcare marketing because they try to wear too many hats or don’t do their due diligence before hiring a marketing agency.
Not every healthcare marketing agency understands the nuances of balancing effective, attention-grabbing advertising while stewarding professional identity and the legalities that come with it. There are a couple of things you should know before choosing a healthcare marketing agency in Los Angeles if you want your medical practice to book more patient appointments, build patient trust, and establish industry authority.
HIPAA And ADA Compliant Healthcare Marketing
General marketing and advertising agencies typically work with commercial clients that don’t operate under the same strict legal and board-mandated requirements as physicians and healthcare workers. While they’ll take on healthcare clients, this isn’t their niche. That means that the channels they use for communication and hosting may not be HIPAA and ADA compliant. This could expose you to violations that hurt your professional reputation.
Your marketing efforts count as conduct when you’re a licensed medical professional. As a medical marketing agency catering to healthcare clients, agencies such as X Design Solutions understand the importance of remaining compliant with all legal, ethical, and character requirements spanning everything from client privacy to the need for patient authorization before using Protected Health Information (PHI), especially for specialties such as Gynecology and cosmetic surgery. Your reputation should be a priority before any campaigns are implemented.
Healthcare Marketing Experience
Healthcare marketing requires a great degree of responsibility and awareness. While the goal is to spotlight your services and expertise, this niche is very different from commercial marketing and should be handled with extra care and sensitivity. That’s why choosing a healthcare marketing agency with experience in your niche is essential.
One of the first questions to ask any potential marketing agency is if they have any healthcare marketing experience by working with healthcare clients, and to show you any successful campaigns they’ve implemented. Ask to see marketing collateral and metrics from previous campaigns.
Full Healthcare Marketing Services
As a physician or owner of a busy practice, the last thing you want to be doing is juggling tons of different vendors managing different aspects of your website, video campaigns, and ads. That’s why a full-service healthcare marketing agency in Los Angeles is the perfect fit for a growing practice. Many agencies offer specialty services for things like SEO, website design, and maintenance, PR, and social media. This leaves you with a fragmented marketing effort that not only requires you to learn and manage a roster of different platforms but also to be the one who aligns all these services. It also makes it harder to make sense of the full-picture metrics. As you grow your practice’s outreach and take on new and fun campaigns, having a single agency to handle everything is so much easier and saves you time.
A full-service marketing company designs a broad, comprehensive marketing plan for your practice. It should include things like SEO, website design and optimization, video production, and marketing, website maintenance, paid search, organic search, social media, and traditional marketing such as print. Content types such as blogs, service pages, landing pages, social media posts, and print ads should all align with a consistent message and branding.
There’s also a missing piece that most marketing firms without healthcare marketing experience tend to miss. A healthcare marketing plan for clinics isn’t complete unless an agency can also provide PR and reputation management services. By staying ahead of what’s being written or said about your practice in online spaces, you’re able to take control of the all-important social-proof factor that drives most referrals and bookings among patients today.
RELATED: How To Get More Patients in Los Angeles
Healthcare Marketing Analytics & Performance Tracking
A sign of a good healthcare marketing agency in Los Angeles is a prioritization of marketing metrics. This means that a team knows that they can deliver what’s promised because they’ve done it over and over. From the start, there should be a conversation about metrics.
Some ways that campaign success can be measured include page visits, visitor bounce rates, email signups, social media follows, social media views, increased traffic from SEO, higher search engine ranking, and conversions. However, there’s one metric that tells the bigger story. Does all of that engagement add up to more appointments and consultations being booked? This is proof that an agency knows how to do more than just get more eyeballs on your name. It shows that they are creating engaging, conversion-driven content through the right channels. If an agency has experience with healthcare marketing, it will use specialized healthcare software and tools for its analytics and tracking.
Do they Require Long-Term Healthcare Marketing Contracts?
Some healthcare marketing firms put a pen in your hand from the moment you first meet with them. The goal is to get you to lock into a long-term marketing contract. These firms will tell you that they are protecting their time by having you commit to a minimum contract period. However, it can also be a red flag. If a healthcare marketing agency is confident in its work and results, it shouldn’t compel clients to get locked into long-term contracts. Agencies such as X Design Solutions will never require their clients to sign up for long-term contractors. In fact, they should be flexible to help new or scaling practices based on their needs and budget. This ensures you’re getting the services and growth drivers you want for your goals today without feeling like you need to pay for a bigger package than you actually need. Marketing contracts are simply there to define the scope of work and to ensure you fully understand what you’re signing on for when you choose an experienced and capable team to help grow your professional medical practice.
Will They Support Your Sales Process?
You should take time to assess if a marketing agency’s services align with your sales process. A good marketing agency should make sure that its marketing efforts align with your current sales process for booking appointments and managing inquiries. You should ask them what a prospect calls your practice, and there’s no one to answer the phone, when an email inquiry is sent at 11 pm, or when a prospect asks for the cost of a procedure before booking a consultation. Marketing agencies should help you upgrade and update your current sales systems for a more effective experience. This can include training for you and your staff on how to convert patient inquiries into actual appointments at higher rates with scripts and sales tactics. On top of marketing efforts that include nurturing leads to ensure that they’re at the point of booking an appointment by the time they reach out to your office, having sales processes that can be implemented using employee onboarding sales materials for all practice employees, such as customer empathy, product/service knowledge, and outcomes.
Marketing Asset Ownership
Healthcare marketing agencies shouldn’t hold ownership of your media and marketing assets. You should know who owns and will own the marketing assets before you choose an agency. As a physician or practice owner, you should retain full ownership and rights over your marketing assets the moment you decide to stop working with the agency. This includes your website, website content, domain names, login criteria, social media accounts, and marketing analytics data. Unfortunately, most healthcare marketing agencies will actually retain ownership and access to some marketing assets and materials they create without explicitly telling you. That means you’re essentially just “renting” content with your image and name on it from them, which can be a waste of money if you invested in organic marketing such as SEO or PR. These agencies will hold assets hostage once you choose to stop working with them. That can leave you in the position to start from scratch with marketing if you decide to part ways.
At X Design Solutions, our clients get full ownership of all of the marketing assets we create for them. While our team plays an active role in creating and managing all of your marketing content and accounts, we are only engaging with these assets on your behalf. If you decide to stop working with us or put a pause on marketing efforts, you get to take everything with you. Whether you’re running a medspa or a dermatology practice, X Design Solutions is an experienced healthcare marketing agency in Los Angeles that can help you achieve your goals. Contact us today for a Free marketing evaluation.
