Why Branding Works!
Making Your Medical Practice Stand Out Online: Building a Cohesive Marketing Strategy
Practitioners running and investing in the growth of their own medical practice often have a clear sense of the patients who will benefit most from the quality and specialization of the care they offer. Knowing who should be walking through the door and ensuring that those patients know about your practice are two entirely different things, however. Unfortunately, in a world where technology is changing more rapidly than ever, doctors can be left floundering as they try to connect with the right audience online.
If you feel that marketing to high-value patients is a moving target, you’re not alone—and you’re not wrong. Even back when online marketing could be primarily focused on Google rankings, ongoing changes to search algorithms meant constant adjustments to ensure that you remained visible in search results. Now, the fragmentation caused by the introduction of artificial intelligence and generative search, not to mention the changing ways people interact with the growing number of platforms available, means that it isn’t as clear where your efforts should be focused. You know you need to refine your strategy, but instead it’s as if you’re throwing everything at the wall and nothing is sticking.
The Importance of Branding
An effective online presence means first ensuring that your practice is visible where your prospective patients are engaging and interacting. This means not just having an informative, mobile-friendly website optimized for search and AI (although that is a foundational step for effective online marketing). You also need to work on your social media. The average person uses over 6 social media platforms per month—and the younger they are, the more likely they are to engage with a higher number of platforms. Failing to regularly post social media content is a huge missed opportunity.
However, the more different marketing tactics a practice uses, the more important branding becomes. A strong, well-defined brand is a throughline that builds trust and ensures that your practice creates a memorable impression no matter where your potential patients encounter it. And it’s this approach that can help prevent different types of efforts from feeling like a chaotic, scattershot mess. When messaging has an authentic, relatable brand at its heart, it forms a cohesive whole that works together toward the same goals.
1. To bring in the right types of patients
2. To ensure there is an understanding of the value in the types of pain or health problem you treat
3. You attract what you are perceived to be – perception becomes reality
What Makes Social Media Engaging and Effective?
Perhaps you have previously tried to ensure that you’re consistently posting on at least one social media platform, and you just didn’t see engagement numbers that made you think it was worth it. It’s important to note that which social media platform(s) you use should be aligned with the age of the audience you’re trying to reach—Baby Boomers and Gen X are more likely to use older platforms like Facebook, while Millennials and Gen Z are more likely to use Instagram or TikTok. But it doesn’t matter where you’re posting if what you’re posting isn’t high quality.
The answer is YES. Every generation that has disposable income to visit private doctors search for solutions on ALL platforms. This is particularly true with Search Everywhere Optimization.
The answer is it depends. Ask yourself these questions:
1. What would you talk about?
2. Are you confident in front of a camera?
3. Where will you post these videos?
4. Will your videos grab attention within 3 seconds?
What do we mean by that? First, content has to be designed to grab the audience’s attention within 3 to 5 seconds. That’s the most you’ll have to catch someone’s eye before they scroll on by, so your headlines have to be compelling and right to the point. The content you post also has to be unique and directly relevant to your ideal patient’s concerns. Copying what other providers do or recycling generic messaging isn’t going to tell potential patients what makes your practice different or how the care you provide will address their problems.
Focusing Your Marketing to Effectively Grow Your Practice
Most medical providers don’t have unlimited time or an unlimited budget to market their practice. At Iffel International, we make sure that no effort is wasted by first aligning your marketing strategy with your ideal sales strategy—rather than making assumptions, we dig into the numbers to see where your greatest potential for profit and growth lies. Then we build your brand and your content around what makes your practice the solution for the patients you need to attract and retain.
If you’ve been struggling to fit marketing into your already overloaded schedule, or you’ve been burned by marketers who promised results but whose work didn’t budge your bottom line, Iffel International can help. As a HIPAA-compliant marketing agency, we understand the unique challenges and constraints of marketing a medical practice. We can turn your online presence into an engine for growth so you can focus on what you do best—caring for the patients who need you. To schedule a consultation, contact us here today.
*My Healthcare Marketing is a division of Iffel International Inc., home of SEO2SalesTM
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