Digital marketing is the future, and the future is now. In every field, digital marketing reaches more people, connects to the correct demographics, and saves you time and money. By reaching out through social media, email streams, and other methods of marketing online, you can tailor and test your marketing efforts to find out what works and what doesn't.
Billboards and print marketing have their place, but you can't measure your increased traffic with those efforts the way that digital marketing allows. Especially for doctors who are seeking to build a telehealth practice, reaching your patients online is more important than ever.
Understanding why digital marketing for physicians is important—and how to use it—can dramatically improve your business.
Understanding How Digital Marketing Works
Advertising online is about more than just replicating what you'd put in a newspaper. Digital media allows you to be dynamic, respond to patient inquiries in real time, and hone in exactly where your marketing goes. While print marketing might hit an entire area, you're only getting your message to people who use print media. Almost everyone uses email, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or some combination of these systems.
By tapping into online trends and platforms, you broaden your serviceable advertising base by potentially thousands or tens of thousands of people. When a person goes online to search "family doctor near me" or "podiatrists in my area,” Google looks for as much of that pertinent information as it can. For instance, if your office is in Chicago, and your webpage says "podiatrist servicing the Chicago area,” you will show higher up in the Google search results for relevance. This drives people to your page, and as a result, to your business.
Digital marketing also allows you to specify your direct audience. If your clientele is ideally older adults, then you can have your ads structured in a way that they target that demographic. Facebook will allow you to dial in your preferences to region, age range, and even time of day you ideal clients log on. In general, you get far more results and bang-for-your-buck with digital marketing.
What "Counts" as Digital Marketing
In the current marketing environment, just having a website isn't enough. You need to use SEO (search engine optimization) best practices to make sure you're getting the right traffic. As we spoke about in the example above, if you're a podiatrist in Chicago, you want that on your website as naturally as possible. One of the key elements of digital marketing is differentiation, or the ability to distinguish yourself among your peers and your individual clinical offerings among themselves. This helps you stand out and get more clients by drawing their attention to what makes you different and unique.
To this end, you want a great blog that provides value to your readers, and informative articles that describe conditions and treatment is a great start. You can fit in the fact that you're open to new patients and where your practice is located. This gives good value to your patients (or potential patients) and lets them know where you are. You can't do that with print marketing unless you want to spend an arm and a leg to get a huge spread in a magazine.
Social Media Marketing
Social media like Facebook is another way to tap into your target market. Like we spoke about above, you can direct your ads to the audience you want. Twitter ads are also targetable, and with the right hashtag phrases, Instagram can hit exactly the searches you're looking for.
Digital marketing can cost more or less than print advertising, but that's not a good metric of its value. If you spend $1000 on a marketing campaign on your local billboards and in your newspaper, you would need to have someone analyze your business to see if it makes a difference. Digital metrics on Facebook or Instagram ads will tell you directly and immediately if people are clicking your ads. This allows you to change your strategy, your content, and even your target audience to maximize your gains.
By getting a copywriter to create advertising that's optimized for email distribution, and using your email list to send it out, you can also gather more patients to your business. Copy for emails needs to be punchy, provide value, and entice the reader to want to click through to your site and see what you have to offer. This is easily doable if you have a quality writer, but you need to work with a marketer to figure out how to gather an email list and how best to send them out.
In the right hands, an email list can be a powerful tool to advertise your practice, especially if you implement a new offering, like telehealth.
Utilizing Digital Marketing to Grow Your Business
Digital advertising will only increase in usefulness as physician marketing and telehealth in the online space grows. Especially now when more people are learning and working remotely, the internet is more important than ever before, which means more people are flooding the online marketplace looking for what your practice has to offer. Finding a service that can make digital marketing a breeze is your best option to navigate this complex and critical space. ViTel Health has the experience and tools to make your venture into digital marketing worth the time and effort, connecting you to new clients and expanding your practice like never before.
