It’s more important than ever to have a strong foothold in the digital marketing space as healthcare providers fight for the #1 spot on search results. Luckily, it gets easier every day to reach potential clients, and the organic content they generate can change the game. Here are 3 hot tips to grow your business through your presence online.
Update Your Online Listings
Your office likely has listings on multiple websites, but are these listings up to date? Do they accurately list your current service offerings, hours and the dates that you’re open? You could be losing patients from incorrect information. Go through every website you can find your office listed on, checking them for accuracy yourself. Each website will have its own method for reporting inaccurate information, from Google’s “suggest an edit” to a basic email contact form. It’s also a good idea to check all of the provider-listing websites that service your area to make sure your office is listed in the first place.
Get Familiar with Facebook Ads
You can reach thousands of people a day for pennies. Facebook ads are a great way to complement your direct mail marketing efforts. Because medical decisions are rarely made impulsively, it’s important to advertise consistently and stay in the conversation. You want potential clients to think of your office first when they start searching for a provider. Those pennies will pay off later.
Facebook ads allow you to target specific demographics, so start thinking about who you want your ads to reach. You can target by age, gender, even hobbies, so you can advertise directly to the people most likely to need the services your office specializes in. Think creatively, because you can get extremely detailed. New parents, people about to go on vacation, people who do hot yoga- you can create custom ads for all of them.
You can also target people on Facebook through their connections. You can advertise only to people who haven’t liked your page yet, people who briefly visited your page but didn’t commit, people who are connected to your office through an event, people who are similar to your current clients, or even people who like your competitors.
Facebook will also give you insights into how well your ads are performing with which groups. It offers incredibly powerful marketing tools that are virtually crucial in 2019. Keep in mind that every ad you post will be public, so anyone can see it if they go looking.
Update Your SEO
This is how people find you. Make sure that you’re using search-friendly words on your website. Find out what the most relevant keywords are for your services, and use those keywords in your title tags when you create or update a page. A title tag is what the link will be titled as in a Google search result, so every page on your website needs one! Make it descriptive, but keep it down to around 50 or 60 characters so that your entire tag fits in the search results. An awesome title tag is one of the most useful ways to stand out in search results.
Keep it readable! Voice searches are becoming increasingly common, and search engine algorithms are becoming more invested in easily readable content. The proportion of the elderly population (the biggest users of voice searches) is only growing, so having content that people can understand while their phone reads it out for them is extremely important. Use plain language, keep it simple enough for humans and bots to understand, and keep your sentences short.
Staying Relevant with the Right Marketing
These tips should get your office a running start online. You want to be your online presence to be interesting, accurate and targeted to your customer base. However you go about it, it’s important to remember that as a healthcare provider, you should always strive to represent your office as safe, reliable, and trustworthy.