Physician Marketing: Three Marketing Solutions to Boost Your Practice

Your practice has a mobile-friendly, updated website, with professional photos of providers and staff. You’re posting to social media and have even experimented with paid marketing campaigns. But you can see there’s more potential for growth, and you’re feeling pressure to keep up with your competition. What now?

These game-changing solutions to common physician marketing problems will bring you more patient and physician referrals this year.

Problem: You are trying to be all things to all people.

Solution: Get targeted with personas.

Digital marketers create personas to describe the typical customers that their clients cater to or want to attract. Personas aren’t just demographic buckets – they capture the attitudes, values, and key factors driving behavior. For physicians, the customers can be patients or fellow doctors who send referrals. Consider the characteristics of your existing patients – age ranges, life circumstances, what they are looking for in a provider. (For physician referral marketing, you can do the same with patients sent to you for referrals. You can also develop personas around referring physicians, including specialties or conditions treated.)

Ultimately, you’ll likely end up with 3-5 personas that describe your patients. Now you know who you want your digital marketing to target: people who have similar characteristics. Personalized and persuasive appeals can reach each persona and motivate them to take action. Marketers usually rely on surveys, interviews, and other qualitative sources when creating personas. But a recent academic study makes the case that the growth of big data and data analytics mean that more objective quantitative approaches are possible – it even offers a step-by-step process to make it work.

Problem: Prospective patients visit your site, but they don’t convert.

Solution: Invest in self-booking tools.

Marketers know that convenience is a powerful nudge to action. Physician practices are adding functionality to their websites that allows patients to choose their own appointment times. Call it self-booking or online appointment scheduling.

The benefit for your practice? The next time prospective patients visit your site, they can instantly book their appointment at a time that works for them. Because they don’t have to wait until business hours to make a call, that means you have a higher chance of getting them on your calendar – and in the door.

As modern lifestyles grow increasingly demanding, online scheduling should be non-negotiable. Self-booking also frees up administrative time for your staff that they can spend on other critical functions in the practice. According to recent research, more than 40% of appointments are made after hours, and 67% of patients prefer online booking. The same study found that businesses who add online bookings see a 27% revenue increase.

Problem: The reviews aren’t in.

Solution: Put reputation management software to work.

Patients today are looking at more than just your website before they book. They are skimming the reviews, too. According to the American Medical Association, 94% of patients evaluate providers with online reviews, and those reviews play an outsized role in their impressions of a practice.

It’s beneficial to ask patients if they would be willing to write a review, because surveys show that having only a few reviews, and old reviews, is a major red flag for prospective patients. Unfortunately, one patient with an unpleasant experience who is eager to share can significantly affect your online ratings.

Physician practices have discovered that they can use some of the same strategies that large companies use to maintain their reputations and increase their market share, online. Reputation management platforms built specifically for physicians are now widely available. These tools can track feedback about you and your practice across review sites, including Healthgrades, WebMD, Google, and so on.

Use of these tools is growing, especially among specialists. In a 2022 study, surgeons at the University of Texas at Austin looked at reviews for orthopedic surgeons and family medicine physicians in the biggest U.S. cities. Orthopedic surgeons were more likely to have a large number of reviews than family practices. These same orthopedic practices were found to be using reputation management tools.

Among the key benefits of reputation management software is that you can flag negative reviews quickly and respond to them as well. These platforms also come with sentiment analysis tools to categorize reviews and pull together common concerns (and kudos). This is a fantastic way to get actionable feedback about how to improve. Some platforms also let you compare your ratings against selected competitors. The positive elements that patients mention about your competitors can spark ideas about changes you can adopt in your own practice.

WAX Can Take You to the Next Level

Want more help to level up your practice? At WAX, we combine the latest digital marketing strategies and tools with powerful creative execution to attract the patients – and physician referrals – you need to grow your practice to its full potential. Get in touch at info@waxcom.com to see how we can get you where you want to be.