healthcare lead generation

The hidden ingredient for successful medical marketing campaigns

How do you drive more patients to your private practice? As a hospital, how do you drive results? Let’s go over the key element of successful healthcare lead generation: content.

The hidden ingredient for successful medical marketing campaigns

A method that makes marketing for doctors straightforward and manageable

lead generation for doctors

Generating leads as a doctor is often a taboo topic and it doesn’t have to be like that.

The typical reasons to not even look into healthcare lead generation tactics are:

I shouldn’t have to advertise. If I am good, patients will find me and general practitioners will keep referring to me.
Advertising as a doctor is tricky and risky: I could lose my license.
I can not be seen as desperate, putting myself out there. My colleagues might come to the conclusion that I must not be doing well.

Time to brush off the awkwardness when we discuss healthcare lead generation for your practice.

To keep your practice running, you need referrals from GPs and patients who find you and choose you. Watch the video for a quick What/Why/How/Where to Start introduction to lead generation for the private practice. Spoiler alert: our conclusion will always be linked to the importance of content as you build an online presence that generates leads.

If you need help with lead generation for your private practice, Digital Practice comes with a proven track record, having created turnover increases of up to +200% for our leading customers in the past five years. Find out more about the health marketing services we offer.

How content can turbocharge your hospital’s business results

business development for hospitals

Hospitals generally have corporate structures supporting business development. If your role boils down to driving patients to your hospital, then lead generation is only one term you could use, just like business development, marketing, or GP liaison.

No matter what you call it, content is often the one driver that is forgotten in the process. We network, we organise events, we set up talks and we organise opportunities for specialists to get in front of general practitioners. But what happens when the patient is in the process of getting educated? Choosing a specialist and reading up on a health concern have merged into one big process now.

If your hospital wants to really boost patient acquisition results, the hospital’s marketing budget will often not cover the individual campaigns and websites that specialists rely on, to get their names out in the local community. Some hospitals even discourage doctors from running their own websites. In most situations, private practice owners are free to generate leads and since it benefits the hospital, synergies between hospitals, surgeons and specialists and a dedicated medical marketing agency such as Digital Practice, create the ideal foundation.

As a starting point for this type of synergies, we have been offering workshop sessions for specialist doctors and their practice managers since 2016, to help doctors understand content marketing in general and key lead generation tactics they can apply straight away.

In brief, the workshops help doctors understand the mechanics of the patient journey before they see a specialist. With questions like:

How visible is the practice for a specific subspecialty? For a commodity search such as ‘gynaecologist+location’ and for the individual gynaecological topics that patients search for in this catchment area?
How easy-to-navigate is the website? How responsive is it?
Is the contact information consistent with Google Business and is it clearly visible on every page?
Does the website have optimal technical health and is it in line with the latest guidelines and best practices? Does it load fast?
Does the website have individual content pages beyond a general services overview page to cater for specific online searches?

If you are a hospital executive, I look forward to discussing the implementation of these online workshops for your doctors and practice management teams so you can be the co-creator of turnover increases of up to 3x for individual doctors or private clinics linked to your hospital.

Pharma or medical devices marketing with undefeated online visibility

marketing for medical devices

Healthcare lead generation is equally important if you are selling to doctors. Pharmaceutical products or medical devices are often marketed in a hybrid way: partly with typical marketing campaigns to establish brand credibility and to get the attention, and partly through education (research pitched by an expert).

The triangle that we apply to any healthcare lead generation process remains the same:

Content: We publish relevant content so it ranks organically based on essential keyword research.
Conversation: We position the content so it invites the target audience to start a conversation.
Conversion: We add clear call-to-action messages so the conversation is guided toward a clear next step: a demo, a strategic meeting, or a business proposal.

Content marketing in the healthcare industry has matured in the last decade because it has become clear how web content, social media posts, blogs, and online video content, are now always working together in any successful marketing mix.

At Digital Practice, we have been producing international health content for doctors, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies and medical colleges, since 2005. It has sharpened our awareness of the mechanics involved in healthcare lead generation. And we know how patients google, how doctors operate their practice and how consumers react to online content. So if you need help marketing a medical device or a pharmaceutical solution, let’s book an obligation-free strategy session via Zoom.

The little known success element: content marketing architecture

medical content marketing

Working with our customers, we introduced the concept of content marketing architecture. It’s a strategic framework that is often missing when doctors or other healthcare players invest in marketing. It moves your campaign from the realm of scattered tactics toward an integrated strategy. Let’s look at what this architecture does.

Old-school agencies have a tendency to just sell products and outsource the work overseas. Google Ads. SEO. Backlinks. Facebook Ads. Numerous doctors told me they had said yes to a marketing package but then forgot what it was for. Let alone did they notice any results in terms of business growth or patient numbers.

The Digital Practice method starts and ends with metrics and data: What do patients google for? How visible are you? What do we do to make you more visible? That is always the set of guiding questions when we start developing your online profile.

Your Content Marketing Architecture is the remedy against scattered tactics. It has three essential legs to stand on:

Market Research: Detailed data can be generated about what your target audience is googling for, within the space of your service or product. Surgery types, medical education, questions about the use of specific devices or products, all depending on what you bring to the market.
Optimised Content: Content should always be optimised for the audience and for the search engine (SEO or Search Engine Optimisation) from the moment you start thinking about your medical website. Not after it has been launched.
Monitoring and Measuring: Healthcare lead generation and medical marketing are 24/7 processes. They never stop. Your architecture needs a system that measures the performance of every piece of content you have put in place, and regular sessions with your medical marketing agency to adjust or improve your content so you keep growing your competitive visibility.

Looking at the situation hospitals, private clinics or industry partners are in before they come on board as a Digital Practice customer, we often see that none of these pillars is in place.

There is a focus on “getting a cheap website done” and then someone wrote copy without really understanding how Google looks at the pages.

The alternative to these scattered tactics is a lead generation engine. A tap you turn on so it allows you to grow a successful private practice.

If you want to save tens of thousands of dollars of marketing budgets in the years to come, book your free strategy session now so we can discuss this type of healthcare lead generation system in more detail.

Beware of the looming pitfall in healthcare marketing

marketing strategies for healthcare

The main pitfall with healthcare lead generation is the one that could be described as getting cold feet.

This is the pitfall scenario that occasionally comes between a doctor, a hospital executive or a medical marketing director…and a perfect opportunity to create results.

Exploration:
As you look into a solution to generate more leads, you explore what strategic options are available. You learn about keyword research, the power of content marketing, the impact of LinkedIn marketing, and amazing results that can be achieved with video marketing.

Scoping:
As the time comes to select the tactics that go into your strategy, you now see that much more is involved and that a content marketing architecture is the only failproof way to reach the KPIs that you had in mind.

Cold feet:
As the time comes to step into a solid healthcare lead generation plan, one of the stakeholders chooses the careful way. “Let’s see what happens if we do one-tenth of everything we have just seen in action”.

Do you want to produce one-tenth of the ideal outcome you have in mind? Or are you a 100% person who wants to generate leads, grow your business and position yourself as a leader? Let’s talk and let’s avoid the cold feet syndrome, shall we?

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Ready to start generating leads?

lead generation strategy session

If you are ready to create your own journey, we would be delighted to help you generate the leads you have in mind. It is not only a numbers game: It’s about knowing and understanding you and your target audience. Let’s get started with an obligation-free strategy session via Zoom so we can set the stage for a futureproof lead generation plan for your business.