Important Services in Medical Marketing

No matter how great of a doctor you are, you won’t be able to make much of a difference and find lots of new patients unless people can find you easily. This is where medical marketing comes in. Medical marketing involves building your brand, coming up with a strategic plan, and standing out from the crowd. Here are several important services that you may want to consider when planning your medical marketing campaign.

Branding
The key to success in marketing your medical practice is through establishing and building a brand. In order to develop your own brand as a doctor, you must deliver a healthcare experience that is unique. It can be helpful to consult a company that specializes in medical marketing in order to identify what your brand image will consist of. From there, you have to implement strategies that allow you to communicate and manage your brand’s message to prospects.
After you have established and defined your brand, you must position it. Positioning involves getting the right message out to your target market at the appropriate time. You must ensure that the message of your brand is properly communicated to patients and prospects.

Strategic Planning
Identify your goals and plot your path to success. You must craft measurable objectives and combine them with creative strategies in order to achieve your goals. It is ideal to create a marketing plan that is easy to update and reference. It is essential to use practical tools to measure your progress so you can avoid having to go through stacks of papers that will probably just sit on your shelf most of the time anyway.

Media and Community Relations
Whether you are offering a new service/product/procedure or you have some other interesting news to share, using media outlets is a great way to get your name out there and garner some attention. You can target local and national media outlets in your medical marketing campaign in order to maximize your exposure and position yourself as an authority in your medical field.

Thanks to mass media, it is also possible to make a name for yourself in the local community. Community relations are incredibly important to medical practices because they position you as an authority in your field as well as a friend of the community, where most of your patients will be coming from. Getting involved in community relations can be a very cost-effective marketing strategy that enables you to build a very positive reputation for your practice.

Creative Advertising Campaigns
In order to attract attention and stand out from the crowd, it is essential to hire a professional marketing team to help you build an advertising campaign. Whether you want to reach your audience via print media, television, internet, or radio, it is essential to devise creative, enticing ads that maximize your advertising dollar. Powerful messages and compelling visuals are important. Hire a professional team that can help you craft an advertising campaign that increases your bottom line.

Addressing Your Patients’ Needs
Healthcare today revolves more and more around patient satisfaction. It is vital to provide your patients with the most pleasant experience possible in your practice. The four A’s of customer service in medicine are accommodation, access, availability, and accountability. Address these four areas and you are sure to provide a positive patient experience. You can use marketing audits, patient surveys, and organizational assessments to evaluate your progress and ensure that you are addressing your patients’ needs.

Communications
Some important aspects of building a well-connected and communicative practice are having an online presence, staying in touch with patients and prospects via mail, providing patients with brochures and education materials, and establishing a referral network. A referral network consists of other doctors who refer their patients to you for the procedures and expertise you provide. Have a medical marketing specialist assist you in building your referral network.

Stay connected to your patients and referral sources by sending out newsletters. Newsletters give you an opportunity to keep everyone in your network informed about what’s new at your practice. You can also send out direct mail letters and post cards to prospects or current patients to advertise new procedures or increase awareness about the services you already provide.

A medical practice without a website in this day and age is a lot less likely to be found by new patients. Most of your patients are probably tech-savvy so you have to build an attractive website that features cutting-edge design and compelling copy in order to increase clientele. Whether you need to revamp your old website or build a new one from scratch, hire a marketing company with experience designing and writing websites for medical practices to assist you.

Creating brochures and patient education materials is a good idea because it strengthens the relationship between you and your patients. Ensure that any brochures and education materials you create reflect your brand image and communicate your message. Most importantly, make sure that any materials you create meet your patients’ needs and provide them with ultimate value.