How to get more patients is always a challenge for growing a medical practice in Los Angeles. You can run multiple marketing campaigns, but without careful implementation and a focus on ROI, inconsistent results and a wasted budget are almost always the result. A good medical practice marketing strategy might have a dozen different goals and metrics for success, but each one is just part of a single overarching goal: getting more patients. In this blog post, we’ll explore the most effective marketing strategies for doctors to get more patients for their medical practices.
SEO And GEO For Visibility & Patient Acquisition
Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important and effective techniques for getting more patients by driving online traffic to your website. With medical SEO, website pages and posts are tailored to appear at the top of search engine results, because those tend to get the majority of clicks. Since most people only view and click the results on the first page when they search, this is essential for growth. As a medical practice website, you can create content for your service pages to showcase what you offer, and you can demonstrate your knowledge through your blog posts by answering the most common questions people have about your specialty.
However, as most people increasingly use AI to find doctors or to get medical questions answered, generative engine optimization (GEO) has also grown in importance. GEO uses similar techniques to ensure that anyone using generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or AI overviews will also link to your website at the top of those results. In the modern world, both techniques are essential for building a consistent and predictable flow of new patient appointments for your practice.
Medical PR For Authority
Most people rarely associate public relations (PR) with medical marketing or doctors in general, but when used properly, it’s an excellent tool for generating growth for medical practices. Strategic PR can position you as a thought leader in your field or local area.
For example, if you’re a dentist and a new UCLA study about dentistry comes out, newspapers, magazines, television programs, and other forms of media will likely invite a dentist to discuss that study and what it means. Anyone looking for a dentist who sees this article will immediately consider you an expert and a thought leader, making them more likely to sign up. It also benefits you for SEO and GEO purposes, as these news stories will often link to your practice’s website, which increases your search engine rankings and improves your overall dental marketing strategy.
Online reputation management is another key factor that uses tools such as sentiment tracking to find out what people are saying about your practice and whether it’s positive or negative. If things get too negative, your medical practice marketing strategy must shift to counter that negativity and bring popular opinion back into positive territory.
High Converting Practice Website
All business websites, even in the field of medicine, are designed around a single main purpose: providing information that generates conversions (i.e., converting visitors from “potential patients” to “current patients”).
Your website will need multiple clear calls to action and multiple paths for conversion, like a telephone number, including a contact form, and a system for booking appointments directly. All website traffic can also be tracked using data analytics, which provides valuable insights about your website’s visitors and their behaviors. If you’re interested in learning how to get more patients, you can find out more about people who visit your website, which can then help you tailor your advertising to their interests.
For example, if you’re a dermatologist and 70% of your website visitors are women between the ages of 45 and 65. The actual demographics of your current patients are fairly equal across the board, but you could start targeting advertisements to women and specific issues with their skin that they’re likely to face during those ages. Understanding target demographics can help you understand how to get more patients through your doors with marketing.
Social Media Marketing For Engagement
When it comes to medical practice marketing on social media, engagement is the most important metric. It tracks how many people have viewed your page or your posts, as well as the number of likes and replies. Engagement can vary by platform as well. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, and Reddit are all great places to post about your practice. However, each website uses a different posting style because they’re often used by different demographics.
A successful Facebook post that gets thousands of likes and hundreds of replies might only get 20 views on Twitter or vice-versa. That’s why it’s important to know about the platform you’re posting on and how to best reach its particular set of users.
Social media posts can also help you learn how to get more patients by analyzing your engagement metrics. Let’s say you make five posts, each aimed at a different age group. If the one aimed at people 25 to 35 does great numbers, but the one aimed at those 65+ does poorly, you can start gearing more posts towards the younger demographic and reduce the number of posts targeting seniors.
This will drive your overall social media engagement figures, which promotes brand awareness and eventually translates into more patients visiting your practice.
RELATED: Is GEO The Future Of SEO?
Video Marketing To Build Trust
Videos should be part of any marketing strategy, as studies show that many people prefer to learn by watching videos instead of reading the same information. Videos also help to build trust between you and potential patients. Youtube by itself is a very big search engine that averages 100 million searches a day.
Common examples include testimonials, before-and-after pictures or videos, and quick explanations as to what your practice does and who can benefit from booking an appointment with you. They can be posted on social media, video-sharing apps like YouTube or TikTok, used in advertisements, and used on your website for maximum exposure and dwell time.
Our Full-Service Medical Marketing
These are just a few of the medical practice marketing services offered by X Design Solutions. Everything listed above is offered as part of a package deal, meaning we’ll handle all aspects of your medical practice marketing to help increase your overall number of new patient appointments. After all, what’s the purpose of a marketing strategy if it doesn’t generate new patients? X Design Solutions can help get patients through your door. Contact us for a free marketing evaluation.
