7 Reasons Your Healthcare Practice Needs to Invest in a Digital Marketing Agency in 2023
By Amber Turner On Oct 31, 2022 . 0 Comments
Do you know that 77% of patientswill perform a medical search for services in their area before they make an appointment?
This is the digital age. And thus, the only way to grasp the attention of the audience is through mastering the art of digital marketing.
Eventually, businesses have had to adjust to the realities of the digital age, as it is the new way to grow. The old ways of reaching out through prints and physical media have changed.
Marketing enables you to connect with your target audience, and digital marketing ensures you’re able to do so online with measurable, data-driven, results-focused online marketing.
With our increased dependency on technology and screen time, digital marketing for doctors can be far more effective than offline alternatives.
Hospitals, doctors, clinics, and other healthcare organizations (including your competition) are making the maximum use of digital marketing, which is helping them yield plentiful benefits.
Imagine if your marketing company was even better than your competitors.
By now, if you’re not completely convinced now is the time to invest in digital marketing, keep reading. We’ll make sure by the end of this blog you’re ready to take those next steps in reaping all the advantages that come with the right digital marketing strategy for your healthcare practice.
Several privileges come with the digital approach to marketing by a healthcare professional. However, we will focus on seven critical reasons why digital marketing is important in this field.
Your Cost Per Patient Acquisition is Too High
If you are also one of those healthcare sector organizations that are struggling with the high cost of acquiring patients, which is common in most of these organizations, digital marketing is the best medium.
The money spent to reach out to one patient when calculated often runs into hundreds of dollars, which can be cut by at least 50% if digital methods are put into use.
A survey held at U.S. vein practices reports that most common media channels used were print (68%) and TV (30%) which cost about $314 and $348 per patient. This is a huge cost considering the minimum impact it has on the audience.
When investing in digital marketing, it reduces the cost to as low as 50%. The figure comes down to around $149 as an industry average.
But that’s not all, investing in effective digital marketing strategies also has an impact on your return on investment, increasing it by a considerable amount.
Looking at the industry as a whole, healthcare practices get new patients through Google Ads for $77 on average.
This is likely profitable for almost all medical practices and we generally hit this mark in the very first month.
Furthermore, there’s a TON of value in decreasing this over time. We did a study from the beginning of November 2020 to January 2021 and our clients are spending $17-$35 per patient.
Koda Digital client study from November 2020 to January 2021
The ability to reach out to more people and improve communication channels will improve your business awareness and ease access to your business, which will have a positive effect on your medical practice.
More patients, more money, more growth!
You Need the Ability to Target Your Ideal Patient Utilizing Paid Advertising in 2023
Unlike traditional broadcast and print media, a healthcare digital marketing agency helps you to be specific with your target through the ability to streamline them through certain features.
Digital marketing enables physicians to target patients by a specific condition, age, gender, demographic, or even zip code.
The ability of digital marketing to target consumers through the use of certain keywords increases the chance to reach the patients you want. Also, this ability to target certain conditions can be done in real-time, and this is a cost-saving move that can’t be gotten via traditional advertising methods.
PPC advertising allows you to pay for targeted ads across a specific demographic and/or geographic location. For example, an orthopedic practice could invest in Google Ads to target a specific location – for instance, “Orthopedic specialist in Dallas, TX” – to help push prospective clients to visit their website or call their practice.
Moreover, those targeting conditions can be optimized in real-time, a cost-saving luxury that traditional methods simply don’t afford.
You’re Not Using Data to Make Decisions
One drawback of traditional marketing techniques is that they’re hard to track. It’s difficult to tell which channel brought in the highest conversion ratio.
One of the luxuries afforded by the digital marketing method is the ability to track data accurately.
Effective digital marketing campaigns are built on data.
Data helps in making an adequate marketing budget and target specific markets that need health care practices.
Digital techniques allow physicians to make efficient, data-led marketing decisions; first, try several different low-cost ad spends to determine which channels are the most effective, then scale for maximum visibility and impact.
The privilege of having access to data helps you invest in low-cost methods that give optimal results, and it helps to track the most effective marketing channels.
Data can help you look outside your current campaigns for indications of new opportunities.
Is there a surprising new source of traffic with high conversions? A new market may be revealing itself in your analytics data.
After combining marketing and sales data, is there an ad campaign that produces high product return rates? You need to drill down on the advertising messages that resonate best with your customers.
Including data analysis as part of every marketing decision ensures the process becomes a habit. Data-driven decisions can produce better, faster results compared to trial-and-error methods, and provide a mathematical basis for marketing campaign effectiveness.
Digital methods help healthcare professionals make the best, data-driven marketing decisions. If you do not have data for your business, you cannot make the best decisions.
Your Website is Not Optimized For Search Engines Like Google
There are over 70,000 Google searches each second. That’s almost 227 million an hour and about 5.4 billion Google searches per day.
Getting your medical practice on page one, however, takes some marketing finesse. A well-crafted search engine optimization (SEO) strategy and paid advertising campaigns are your best bet for snagging those top positions and the maximum number of clicks.
Out of many marketing strategies medical practices can use, optimizing the content on your site for search engines should be a priority due to the importance of Google for finding information by consumers.
When optimizing for search engines the goal is to have a good SERPs or Search Engine Results Page (basically your position in Google results), which directly affects how easy it is to find your business.
There are two major factors in SEO that can greatly affect the SERP of a webpage and how much traffic a site receives: keywords and backlinks.
Keywords are Google search query terms, for example, “best orthopedic surgeon”. That search term in particular is highly competitive and is hard to focus on, and highlights how keyword search engine optimization comes into play.
By focusing on specific keywords that have high search traffic but low competition, you can greatly increase your exposure to Google users searching for topics relevant to your practice.
Backlinks are also very important to Google’s and other search engine algorithms for ranking your content’s SERPs. Backlinks are simply how often your site and its web pages are linked to other parts of the internet.
They are a good determinant to Google on how trustworthy and useful your webpage is to users of the internet. It is an essential part of how high your content can rank and should be done in addition to keyword optimization.
As you implement effective digital marketing and search engine optimization (SEO) techniques, you can boost your visibility on the search results.
Your Current Website is Not Fit for Mobile
You’ve heard it before by now, but we’re saying it again: your website needs to be mobile-friendly.
Mobile traffic now makes up more than half of all internet traffic. From our data, 80% of website visitors for Urgent care practices and emergency rooms are mobile.
If your website was built or updated within the last few years, the designer or website builder you used may have had the mobile experience top of mind. Before you put a lot of resources into worrying about how to make your website mobile-friendly, check to see how your website fares now.
Google provides a mobile-friendly testing tool. Drop your URL into the search box. You’ll not only get a quick answer on whether or not your website is mobile-friendly but also a screenshot of how the page looks on a smartphone screen and a list of recommendations to make the mobile experience better.
If your site is not responsive, meaning the content on your site is not built to automatically adjust to fit the size of a smaller screen, then potential patients are not having a positive experience on your site and will form a negative impression of your practice.
Additionally, Google boosts the rankings of websites that it identifies as mobile-friendly.
If your website isn’t mobile-friendly, you’re going to have to fix the one you have or get a new one. Until this is fixed, you could be losing out on half of your new patients.
You Need to Interact and Engage With Patients
Traditional marketing methods are typically one-sided, where the information is placed in media for potential customers to view, offering zero interaction.
On the other hand, online digital marketing offers plenty of interaction and engagement opportunities with potential and existing patients.
Patients’ demands are continuously evolving, and to stay at the top, you must meet these ever-changing preferences. This means you must be continually updated and aware of what your patients are looking for, what they demand, what they prefer, and what they dislike.
Through popular social media networks, like Facebook, you can interact with your patients, gain insight on their preferences, and build a stronger digital healthcare marketing plan to benefit your practice.
All of our clients have had an improvement of over a 60% increase in engaged users over the past 6 months.
Our social media managers have also seen to it that most of our client’s post-engagement increased by over 400% in just one month working with us.
In the image below, you can see that this client had a 1752% increase in post reach in the past 28 days.
So, what does this mean for your practice? It means that working with the best-fitting digital marketing agency, the more patients who like your page interact and talk about your practice via your Facebook posts, the larger your total reach is and, more importantly, how many potential new patients are seeing your practice on Facebook!
It Improves Credibility of Your Practice
There are so many new doors opened by digital marketing that were previously not possible at all.
People can see anything and everything about you before they physically come to pay a visit to you. They research everything about you which has increased the transparency and credibility of your healthcare practice.
It also increases the confidence and trust your patients have in you. In addition, you will also be able to increase traffic to your practice through word-of-mouth advertising. Thus, patient referrals also tend to increase with your digital marketing efforts.
By building professional authority, creating high-quality content, and outperforming your competitors, you can prove to be a knowledgeable and experienced medical team with serious professionals who can provide patients with top-level healthcare.
The Time Is NOW, Invest in Marketing with Koda Digital for 2023 and Beyond
Your medical practice needs to continue to attract patients and stay relevant. If it doesn’t, what will happen to your practice?
If you want to win patients, you’ll need to create social profiles, optimize your website for SEO and mobile, and run paid advertisements to attract new patients.
The best news is that marketing with Koda begins to pay for itself right away and then improves over time.
Adopting a digital marketing plan will level the playing field so your practice can reach potential patients who are searching for services also offered by larger healthcare systems. A larger practice can’t buy its way to the top – search engines treat all practices the same by looking at things like website content, relevancy, and user experience.
Traditional marketing methods cannot give you the reach your practice needs to stay ahead of competitors. To grow, you need to expand your horizon and promote your practice. If you do not have a medical marketing strategy in place, now is the time to create one.
Koda Digital places tremendous emphasis on developing custom marketing strategies for each of our clients. No two practices are the same, so they shouldn’t have the same solutions and approaches.
From reviews and social media to SEO and website, we handle the entire digital experience so you can focus on what you want to focus on.
We are also month-to-month and only month-to-month. You don’t have to sign a long-term contract, you give us a 30 days notice and can be out. We are undoubtedly excellent and skilled at what we do.
Instead of waiting for patients to come to you, let go to them. If you need a dedicated team to take your medical practice digital marketing to the next level, get in touch with our experts at Koda Digital.
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