Digital marketing is cost-effective, efficient, and potentially game-changing for small businesses and individual practitioners such as doctors and dentists. Almost all doctors practice both in a hospital and from their own independent clinics, never begrudge a doctor’s salary: they have worked harder than people could ever imagine. The Indian medical industry has made exponential gains over the last decade with word-class health infrastructure available in almost every state; both for residents and medical tourists.
All this has coincided with the rise and rise of social media and digital marketing; once upon a time, individuals could only dream of paying huge sums of money for advertising in newspapers, national or otherwise. Today even a tiny budget of say, 7000-8000 rupees a month, a functioning website and social media campaigning; is more than enough to propel independent doctors and clinics towards greater market share and presence.
Today, with the growing coronavirus pandemic, lesser people are going to hospitals for general visits and checkups per se, and surveys show a willingness to try out smaller, safer independent clinics.
Every major hospital and clinic avail digital marketing services, quite simply because it is the most powerful advertising medium today, more than print even.
Social media is the great leveler of our times. Even a simple yet effective social media post alone can help you gain patients, imagine coupling that with a proper website where you can display your achievements and services.
The platform that serves as the first point of contact between you and a potential patient is your website or landing page. The user experience provided by your website will lay the foundation for the first impression created on visitors. To provide the best user experience, it is important to create a website or landing page that is extremely navigable and user-friendly. Furthermore, you must ensure it contains all the adequate information patients look for while searching for medical help. Important details such as doctors' profiles, consultation timings, health departments, courses of treatment, and procedures to fix an appointment are extremely vital. Additionally, you can implement AMP-enabled pages for lightning-fast loading speed, to ensure visitors stay on your website and do not bounce off.
Use blogs, people do medical (related) searches 3.5 million times, every day!
You’ll need to keep up to date with trending topics that are being constantly searched first on the Internet. From information on topics like symptoms or treatment options and FAQs to home remedies, you can use your blog as a platform to give advice to your patients or even people who just visit your webpage. Is there a better place than blogs to feature the success stories of your patients? Only word of mouth and customer testimonials are exactly that. Readers can turn into customers if they feel the testimonials are convincing and moving.
Videos are another tremendous way of generating business and potential leads.
Capturing deeply emotional experience and sharing the same with people is by far the most effective means of advertising. For doctors it’s professional but for people it’s personal; go on and show them how you can make their lives better. YouTube videos or videos, in general, outperform images or content-based by close to 1300%, the only downside is they cost more. But then again, greater the investments, higher the rewards.
Imagine you have a great website, blogs, retailers, and videos. But your patients can’t find you on Google. The best way to solve this problem is to adopt effective methods of search engine optimization. SEO is important when in digital marketing for doctors since it helps in developing a content strategy based on specific keywords used by your patients for their searches.
40-45 percent of people choose their doctors from google searches, that’s a lot of people. Make yourself visible, stay tuned, and check this space for more marketing-related pointers.