marketing ideas for clinics

What other doctors are doing to grow their clinic

If you have been looking for fresh, easy-to-grasp marketing techniques for your clinic or private practice, check out our top marketing ideas for clinics, specialist doctors and surgeons.

What other doctors are doing to grow their clinic

Idea #1: Think of your clinic as a brand

brand positioning for clinics

The first concept I want to introduce is one that often creates resistance when I first work with a surgeon or a specialist doctor: Brand. Your personal profile, your reputation, your rooms, your online presence, your team…all of that is part of the brand experience of your patients.

You can resist this idea or embrace it. I have seen miracles unfold once smart, experienced doctors changed their mindset about this concept and started looking at their practice as a brand. Not just the reception experience, the letterhead, the logo, the style of the emails or their dress code. The whole experience. From being found online all the way through to follow-up calls or emails after a patient has been released from the hospital.

When designing the brand experience for your patients, the high-impact topics to work on with your team are:

Second conversation: staff and team members showing contempt or frustration while patients are in the waiting room. Patients feel this energy and it does not help.
Tone: Short, nervous emails without compassion create a cold, impersonal image. Warm, carefully crafted messages with a human touch build rapport.
Photos: Forced portraits with a focus on haircuts, suits or jewellery don’t radiate warmth. Spontaneous photos with a good energy flow create strong first impressions on your website.
Authenticity: True authentic connection with patients is a life skill. You can train it, inspect it, recharge it and refine it…or patients can feel frustrated about your team’s lack of authenticity and you would never know why they don’t recommend you.

Thinking about your clinic as a brand is about so much more than a logo. Check out the video below to dig deeper in the intuitive aspects of the patient/doctor relationship.

Idea #2: Treat your patient well before they see you

patient lead generation for clinics

But I am always treating my patients well! Hey, we didn’t mean to critique your consultation or bedside manners. This is about treating patients well online. Before they are sitting in front of you, they have actually been sitting in front of a screen, checking you out among some of your colleagues in your local area.

What does it mean to treat a patient well before they have even decided to book a consultation? In our Grow section we cover content marketing in all its glory in many of our freely available articles. The bottom line is that patients search for information as they go through the process of choosing a specialist. Even to the point where they become the driver of the referral by the family physician or general practitioner.

What you can do in this phase is bring value. As a patient, reliable information is pivotal and you have more authority than the next social media forum or group. But if you are invisible when patients do an online search, the social media content wins.

To treat patients well from day one, when they are googling symptoms, consider putting in place a powerful system based on content marketing. Book an online meeting to find out more and to grow your online visibility in the most ethical way possible: by helping patients understand your specialty.

Idea #3: Start a new hobby and crunch those numbers

SEO for doctors and Google Analytics

I know many doctors who have embraced the innovative domain of Patient Search Behaviour analysis. What do patients google for? Where do they click? How much time do they spend on articles about ACL reconstruction, benign prostate enlargement or fibroids? What is the impact of a 60-second video on a web page about knee replacement?

The data are relevant before you build your new website and after it has gone live. Prior to building pages, you would want to make sure that you are covering the topics that patients search for. After your website went live, you would want to have regular updates on how your content is working for you. What patients are doing with it. And how it brings in more patients of the particular type that you focused on when you made your business and marketing plan.

Doctors who have taken on this new hobby not only like it. They also reap the benefits, with turnover increases of up to +250%. Let us know if you have time for a new hobby and we will help you on your way!

Idea #4: Stop hiding, procrastinating and postponing

growth and personal development for doctors

The intuitive side of marketing for specialists is a fascinating universe. Why does your competitor seem to have a stronger profile? Why are they everywhere? Why does everyone always talk about them?

The data, the rational structure of your online presence is key to build a strong clinic or private practice. The personal touch you add to it can make a difference in your conversion rate.

Many doctors underestimate the power of personalised marketing content when they look at how their practice is performing. It’s not about finding the cheapest provider of commodity services such as web design or google ads. This is about starting a journey that plans your online presence like a media outlet.

The process to build a really strong profile involves:

Defining what you want the patient to know and to feel after they find you online and check you out.
Creating a timeline to publish content so you create momentum on your website, on LinkedIn, on YouTube and on social media channels relevant to your niche.
Planning regular KPI meetings to look at your traffic, conversions and patient numbers.

For many doctors I know, this integrated growth plan is about more than ordering a marketing package. It becomes a personal growth and personal development journey that leaves other, less ambitious specialist doctors, behind. Wondering what the secret recipe for growth could be…

Idea #5: Have fun and put some soul in it. Really.

bedside manners & digital marketing

Marketing does not have to be a frustrating experience of back-and-forth conversations with a provider.

The whole human experience of being a doctor, working with people, and communicating with current and future patients, can be a rewarding and exciting journey. Some of our customers are livestreaming from their homes after a day in theatre. Others are setting up events to educate patients, peers and referrers about their specialties.

Whatever adds excitement to the core of your clinical work, give it a chance.

At Digital Practice, we are here to help you turn that process into an effective and fun journey.

If your practice has been waiting for more ‘you’, then start the journey to take it to the next level and let’s work together.

Let's meet

Start growing your clinic today

marketing ideas for clinics

Don’t let your competitors conquer your local market first! Book that free strategy session so we can create a powerful growth plan for your private practice. I look forward to hearing from you so we can start the journey together.