Digital Marketing Basics For Doctors | Why Your Practice Should Care About Your Digital Footprint
We hear a lot when we talk to doctors. Most seem to understand that they should have a solid presence online for their practice, but they often don’t understand why it really matters. Then, we come across many who still today, in 2016, say that their online presence isn’t important to them.
Regardless of what stage of the game you are in, you need have an understanding of why you should care about your online presence. Which camp do you fall in?
The next step for you is launch. You may be in a clear and focused growth stage for your practice. If this is the case, you absolutely have to make sure that you are building these foundations for you practice. As you focus these efforts, you will see that they will pay off for you years and years down the road! As a bonus, it’s easier to get started now and then just add slowly to these efforts over the years!
The next step for you may be growth. If you don’t make room for newer patients, you never have an opportunity to build up longterm loyalty with more patients. Eventually, your original loyal patient base has passed on, and you are stuck with a practice that is not relevant to the current population, and has very few new faces coming in the door. By the time you realize you’re at this phase, you have probably missed the window of opportunity and you will have to make costly and intensive efforts to catch up to your competition.
The next step may be retirement. You may be perfectly happy with the current stream of patients you have coming in the door that have been coming to you for twenty years. These patients will still be coming to your office once you’ve retired, so why should you care about being relevant to newer patients? Well, if you’re considering bringing in an associate or having someone buy your practice from you, you should care! Who wants to buy a stagnant practice? Your practice’s digital footprint is part of what adds value to your practice, especially if it’s a big digital footprint!
The fact of the matter is that your practice’s online presence matters a lot, and as you look to be relevant to younger audiences (and by younger, we’re even talking baby boomers at this point!) you need to consider how your practice looks online. Recent research shows that search engines drive nearly three times as many visitors to hospital sites compared with non-search visitors, and 44 percent of patients who research on a mobile device schedule an appointment. These stats alone are reason enough to improve your online presence.
So, where do you start?
Website – If you can’t remember the last time you updated something (anything!) on your website, then it’s been too long! Your website should have accurate information on address, hours, and staffing. Your website should be clean, fresh, and easy to navigate. And the mack daddy of them all, your website should be mobile friendly! Remember that stat we just read… 44 percent of those searching on a mobile device made an appointment! If your website is not mobile friendly, you are missing out on that 44 percent of patients!
Social Media – More and more, you need to have a social media presence, especially when people are out there searching for you. Social media doesn’t just mean Facebook only anymore. There’s so much more to it, from LinkedIn profiles to Twitter, to Pinterest and more. Based on your goals, you can decide where to focus your social media efforts and a social media strategist can help you do that. Ultimately, this is where your patients will want to engage with you ongoing. They may only see you once or twice a year, but they can see you every day in their news feeds!
Reputation Management – 88% of online users incorporate reviews into their purchase decision. 44% say a review must be written within one month to be relevant. This highlights the importance of recency in reviews! When something as personal as a doctor choice is to a patient, you can KNOW that any online reviews you have out there online are gold to you. That’s why you should have a strategic plan for gathering reviews on Google, Facebook, and even Yelp. Yes, practice softwares that gather reviews are great for internal use, but getting these patients to put reviews for you on a well-known, public site like Google or Facebook is much more worth your effort.
While there are countless other tools and strategies online, you need to make sure you have the basic foundations in place. By having these basics in place, the general public can easily find out the information they need to know about you to make a decision on if your practice is the right place for them!