Last updated on August 6th, 2024 at 03:55 am
When you’re passionate about what you do and the practice you’re building, you don’t want to risk not being found by the people you can help.
Instead, you want to make sure your practice shows up and that you’re building trust with potential patients so they see you as a highly credible and reputable provider.
In this guide, we’re going to break down 5 healthcare marketing strategies that will help grow your practice, build trust, establish credibility, and retain your payments long-term.
And with the major goal being to increase the revenue in your practice, that all starts with the first strategy:
Create a Value Ladder
A value ladder, if you’ve never heard of the term before, is a strategy you can implement in your practice that takes clients and patients on a journey from a low-priced, entry-level offer or service to a higher-priced premium offer or service.
The goal with your value ladder is to create a series of offers and/or services that are progressively more valuable, with each previous one building onto the next.
To give you an example, take a look at this illustration for a dental practice:
You can see that the ladder starts with a basic service, like teeth cleaning.
Many practices offer this service free, coupled with x-rays or an initial examination.
Then, the next rung on the ladder is whitening. Which leads to retainers.
Or cosmetic procedures.
In between each of those services is regular 6-month checkups.
When implemented, this keeps your patients coming back for routine procedures while giving you an opportunity to take care of them for more advanced, higher-priced procedures.
Now, when it comes to creating this value ladder, there are a few steps you’ll want to take.
The first is determining which low-cost or free offer you can use to get people in the door.
Then, you’ll want to think about other natural progressions or more comprehensive services you can offer while they’re a patient of your practice.
When given the opportunity, introduce these higher-value services to your patients.
And at the top of the value ladder will be your most personalized and premium services.
In the case of our dentist, that could be veneers or dental implants.
Depending on the type of practice you run, yours may be similar.
Once you have your value ladder defined, you can begin advertising those services to new patients.
For each different service or procedure you offer, you will want to have a dedicated landing page.
You can create these using a service like ClickFunnels. (Click here to start your free trial now.)
When you’ve finished signing up for your free trial, you can begin creating your landing pages using one of our dozens of professionally designed, high-converting templates.
You can customize these templates using our intuitive drag-and-drop visual editor to ensure that each template matches your company’s branding.
Then, you can use ClickFunnels to create upsells and downsells, placing each step into the funnel using our built-in funnel mapping editor.
To get started creating your first funnel, there are a few steps you want to take.
Step #1: Pick Your Sales Funnel
First, choose the type and style of a funnel that has been pre-designed to sell YOUR specific service.
To find these funnel templates, go to: https://goto.clickfunnels.com/100-free-templates
Then, once you’ve chosen a funnel style, you will be able to choose the steps inside that funnel:
Step #2: Pick The Page Design
When you’re promoting your business using funnels, you want them to match your company’s branding.
The next step will be to choose the style of page design that you like best.
And, remember, in this step, it doesn’t have to be perfect. You can use the drag-and-drop editor to change elements to make the template and design match closer to your brand’s design.
Step #3: Set Up Your Followup Funnels
After creating your funnel, you’ll want to make sure you are following up with people who land on your pages and choose to receive more information.
You can learn more about creating high-converting follow-up funnels by clicking here.
Spend a bit of time thinking about the flow in your value ladder, then create funnels and pages to match that flow so you’re able to attract more new people to your practice.
Organic Social Media
After putting your funnel in place, the next strategy you want to use revolves around promoting your business using free social media platforms, like YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and others.
Many people, especially professionals, believe that social media is simply used for fun, or for consumer brands, or travel posts, or food posts.
But it can be an amazing tool for doctors and healthcare companies, too, when you’re using it the right way.
Since people spend so much time on social media if they come across your profile and want to (or need to) see a doctor down the road, they’re more likely to remember you and visit your clinic.
Having a social media presence can help humanize you and your practice, build trust, establish credibility, and make healthcare more accessible.
On top of that, establishing a strong personal brand can help open up other opportunities, like speaking engagements, collaborations, and further career advancement.
To help you see this in action, take a look at this example from Doctor Dana:
By sharing engaging content on TikTok, Doctor Dana increases her visibility — not just to potential patients but also to other healthcare providers and industry professionals.
This can help lead to more patient referrals and collaborative opportunities.
In some of her videos, Doctor Dana uses calls-to-action or provides contact information so her interested viewers can reach out to her directly, visiting her practice for consultations or becoming patients.
Then there’s Doctor Mike.
He’s one of the most popular and recognized medical experts on social media because of the approach he has taken with his content.
By consistently providing valuable content, Doctor Mike has built his brand as a trustworthy source of medical information.
This credibility has translated into a stronger reputation and potentially more patient trust and loyalty for his practice and any future ventures he may be involved in.
With YouTube’s huge user base, Doctor Mike has been able to reach a global audience.
This broad reach has helped enhance his professional opportunities beyond traditional practice, such as book deals, media appearances, and speaking engagements.
To help get your creative wheels spinning, here are some content ideas for healthcare professionals:
- National Health Observances – You can share content related to national health days and months, providing useful information and tips on related health issues.
- Wellness Tips – Offer daily or weekly tips on maintaining a healthy lifestyle, including diet, exercise, and mental health.
- Patient Success Stories – With proper consent, post stories of patients who have overcome health challenges using your services.
- Myth vs Fact – Create posts or videos that debunk common health myths and provide factual information.
- Behind The Scenes – Show the human side of your practice with images or videos of the staff, office, and day-to-day operations.
- Ask The Expert – Hold Q&A sessions where your followers can submit questions to be answered by healthcare professionals.
- Healthy Recipes – Share easy and nutritious recipes that promote good health.
- Exercise Routines – Post quick video tutorials on exercises that can be done at home or in the office.
Then, after each video or post, make sure you’re asking people to go where you want them to go.
In Doctor Mike’s case, it’s to a landing page that lets his audience sign up for his email newsletter so they can receive the latest updates.
He includes a link in his YouTube bio and video descriptions, making it easy for people to sign up.
This leads us to our next strategy…
Build An Email List & Send Campaigns
Building an email list is one of the easiest ways to stay in touch with the audience that you’re working so hard to build.
When you build the list, you own the traffic and audience instead of consistently relying on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, or others to deliver traffic to you.
You can send content in whatever format you like and create an extension of your brand.
One of the most effective strategies you can use to start building your list is creating a lead magnet.
If you’ve never heard of the term before, it’s a marketing term for any free item, gift, or service that is given away for the purpose of enticing people to subscribe to your email list.
These can be anything from samples to trial subscriptions, whitepapers, eBooks, free consultations, newsletters, or any other idea you think your audience may benefit from in exchange for providing you with their contact information so you can follow up with them.
The goal for your lead magnet should be based on converting subscribers to new patients.
To help get your creative wheels spinning, here are a few lead magnet ideas:
- Dentist – A comprehensive guide on the stages of child dental care, including teething brushing techniques, and cavity prevention. This could be offered as an interactive digital guide that includes checklists for parents to follow as their child grows.
- Orthopedic Surgeon – An eBook or video series on exercises that help people maintain their joint health, with a focus on preventing injuries in athletes or improving mobility in arthritis patients. The guide could be tailored to different age groups or activity levels.
- Cardiologist – A heart-healthy recipe book that offers delicious, easy-to-make recipes and dishes that are designed to lower blood pressure and cholesterol. This could be coupled with a food diary template that patients can use to track their meals.
- Dermatologist – A visual guide to skin care through the ages, covering everything from acne for teenagers to anti-aging routines for older adults. This could include tips for sun protection, hydration, and identifying signs of skin cancer.
Once you have your lead magnet created, you can start creating and sending emails using ClickFunnels’ built-in email marketing. (Click here to start your free trial now.)
The first step is choosing a template for your email.
Then you can write your email, design it inside of our drag-and-drop editor, and send it once you believe it’s ready to go.
Or you can create your emails from scratch, designing them exactly how you want them to appear.
After you’ve sent them, you can track metrics from your email marketing campaign to determine which emails perform better — and then replicate your success with them on future campaigns.
Over time, you’ll see which emails perform the best and can create automated sequences around those emails to increase the chances that new people in your audience become long-term visitors and potentially even patients in your practice.
Create ‘Google My Business’ Listing
When someone is looking for a service or practice like yours, one of the first things they’re going to do is jump on Google and start searching in their local area.
If you’ve ever searched for a local service, you’ve probably already seen Google My Business listings.
They’re a free tool provided by Google that allows business owners to manage how their business information appears across Google, including Google Search and Maps.
By verifying and editing your business information, you can help customers find you and showcase reviews from past clients or patients.
This is the easiest, cheapest form of marketing that you should start with when you’re thinking about how to get your business more visible online.
Setting up your Google My Business profile is easy to do, too.
To get started, go to https://google.com/business.
Then, once you’ve claimed your free profile, there’s certain information you want to add.
Specifically, you want to include your business name, your location, pictures of yourself, your staff, and your offices, your phone number, hours of operation, and insurance information (if applicable).
Including this information helps your business appear more credible.
Reviews from past patients or clients, your address, photos, etc. all help to increase your credibility and build trust with people who may be looking for a service like yours.
The information you provide will appear in search results.
The next step is making sure your listing actually stands out against the competition.
To accomplish this, you’ll want to have past (and future) clients leave reviews about their experience with your practice.
Since people typically filter their search results by the ratings received, having more (and better) reviews will help your listing appear higher on the results pages.
Then, when you get reviews, make sure you’re taking time to respond to them, especially if they’re negative reviews.
Keep the information on your listing up to date and include links to your Google My Business listing across your marketing campaigns to ensure the page gets extra traction.
Invest In Content Marketing
Finally, when you’re looking to promote your business, you want to invest in content marketing.
Content marketing is a strategy that revolves around using content (like social media posts) to raise awareness of your business and the problems you solve.
To give you an example, take a look at what I found while searching for “dental care for kids blog”.
When searching for that keyword, I found some really good doctors to refer to in the future:
Then, when visiting the blogs, I found multiple calls to action on the pages, making it easy for me to get in touch with the dentist when the time is right.
In these examples, calls to action were included at the top of the page so anyone who is ready to contact them right now is able to.
When the content is compelling enough and users trust the information provided, they may decide to choose that healthcare provider for their needs.
The presence of contact information, easy navigation to service pages, and the ability to book appointments online (as seen in the screenshots above) make it easier for users to convert from visitors into new patients in the practice.
Now, when you’re looking for ideas to use on your blog, here are a few ways to help get you started:
- Compile frequently asked questions from patients during their appointments, on phone calls, and in emails you receive. This direct feedback can highlight topics that are of current interest or concern to patients.
- Utilize tools like Google Trends, Keyword Planner, or other SEO tools to identify what people are searching for online in relation to healthcare. This can help in creating content that is likely to be found when people are looking for those keywords.
- Create content around seasonal health concerns, like flu season, allergy season, or other specific health observances throughout the year.
- Conduct polls and surveys, either in-person or online, to gather information about the topics that patients are interested in learning more about.
- Consider the typical patient’s journey through their healthcare lifecycle, from prevention to treatment and recovery, then create content that addresses each stage.
The key to each of these strategies is to use them all in conjunction with each other to raise awareness, begin building an audience, and convert that audience into new patients in your practice.
With a tool like ClickFunnels, you can implement each of the strategies that we’ve broken down for you to make capitalizing on the attention you’re generating even easier.
If you haven’t already, click here to start your free 14-day trial now and start building the foundation for growing your email list — then claim your Google My Business profile, get active on social media platforms, and create content for your blog that your potential clients may be interested in.