New patients are the bread and butter of all medical clinics. With more and more industry players improving their lead generation strategies, it’s becoming harder to gather high-quality patient leads.
The number of healthcare digital marketing agencies is growing together with the number of your competitors. Staying ahead is no longer a matter of implementing standard marketing tactics. To be on top of the game, you need to revolutionize your marketing strategy.
Whether you are promoting your own practice or working with an agency, you need to leverage top marketing channels that produce medical leads. Let’s take a closer look at what top-notch lead generation for doctors is all about.
Start With Your Target Audience
Healthcare marketing starts with understanding your patients. Before building a lead generation strategy, it’s important to define your target audience. To do that, you need to study the target market. That includes:
- Demographic data (age, education, income employment)
- Goals (what the patient hopes to achieve by choosing your practice)
- Interests (what patient enjoys doing)
- Challenges (what the patient is struggling with)
For example, for ophthalmological clinics that offer LASIK, the target group is people between 35 and 42 with an income of at least $50,000.
By keeping your target audience in mind, you can design a comprehensive and cost-effective marketing strategy. Without this information, you could waste money on useless leads.
A highly qualified lead is an ideal prospect with pain points that match your clinic’s solutions and sufficient income to take advantage of them. This lead has the highest potential of becoming your loyal patient and a brand ambassador who attracts others through word-of-mouth marketing.
Additionally, the perfect patient should be local. Only a small percentage of people are ready to drive too far to visit a specific clinic when alternatives are closer.
Patient Lead Generation Strategies
When you implement high-quality lead generation strategies, you increase the conversion rate, drive patient loyalty, and cut marketing costs. Since your competition is trying to do the same, your methods should go beyond traditional patient lead generation tactics.
1. Create a Patient Referral System
Patient referral programs are the most cost-effective way to attract qualified leads. By providing high-quality services to your existing patients and ensuring their satisfaction, you are creating brand ambassadors.
For many potential patients, word-of-mouth marketing is the only source of information they trust when choosing a doctor. A recommendation from a friend or a family member outscores even the most effective digital marketing efforts.
To encourage patient referral, you need to create a transparent referral system that offers rewards for bringing in a new patient. The type of reward depends on your practice area and budget. It can vary from access to valuable content (e-books, whitepapers) to discounts on your services in the future.
2. Convert Site Visitors with 24/7 Managed Chat
Potential patients who come to your clinic’s website are looking for solutions to their problems. While they browse available information, they may come up with additional questions. If answers are unavailable, these people are likely to leave.
By implementing a 24/7 managed chat, you are giving them a chance to get answers immediately. In addition, you gain a direct channel of communication, through which it’s much easier to convert leads into patients or exclude leads with low conversion potential.
To ensure the efficiency of such a chat, it’s important to find a company that stresses HIPAA compliance and hires trained agents with experience in supporting medical providers.
3. Offer Online, Real-Time Appointment Scheduling
According to a Healthgrades study, 80% of patients prefer doctors with online appointment scheduling to clinics that don’t have this option.
Real-time appointment scheduling isn’t just about convenience. It’s about saving time that patients rarely have and creating an image of a practice that offers the latest digital solutions.
When leads visit your website and see the online scheduling option, they are more likely to schedule an appointment. It’s always easier to make a few clicks than to pick up the phone and make a call.
4. Nurture with Marketing Automation
As marketing strategies grow more complex, it’s becoming impossible to generate leads manually. Once you gather important contact information, such as a name and an email address, you can start turning a potential lead into a qualified one with email marketing.
Email marketing is a highly successful lead nurturing tool with a 4,400% ROI. You can automate the process to take the lead through all the stages of the sales funnel and turn it into a loyal patient.
Automated email marketing methods can also help with retention, referral programs, and patient re-engagement campaigns.
5. Combine SEO Services with Content Marketing
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a major part of your lead generation efforts. By optimizing your website to appear on top spots of the SERPs (search engine result pages), you are making it more visible to potential patients.
SEO is a set of measures that includes on-site adjustments, off-page optimization, technical tweaks, and much more. While they don’t start working immediately, these tactics can achieve tremendous results in the long run. However, unless you have years of experience in SEO, it’s better to outsource it to professionals.
Content marketing involves creating valuable content, optimizing it for SEO purposes, and placing it in the right place and at the right time. When combined, SEO and content marketing can yield excellent lead generation results.
6. Run Pay-Per-Click Ads
Pay-per-click (PPC) ads are a fast way to attract leads to your website. For these ads to be cost-efficient and effective, it’s important to identify your target audience, research the right keywords, have a sufficient budget, and create high-quality content.
The types of ads that can help with lead generation for medical clinics include:
- Google Ads (Paid Search): ads that appear on top of the results on the SERPs.
- Google Display Ads: ads that come up when your leads are surfing other websites.
- Facebook and Instagram ads: both platforms have robust paid social media advertising options with advanced targeting capabilities.
7. Take Advantage of Social Media
In the United States, eight out of ten internet users conduct personal health research online. Many of them use social media. By adding social media marketing tactics to your campaign, you can boost lead generation results.
Building an organic following on social media platforms can be tough. However, coupled with paid marketing options, you can attract followers. If you already have a following, you can leverage it to nurture leads, retain patients, increase brand loyalty, and much more.
By providing valuable social media content on platforms, such as Facebook and Instagram, you can reach a wide audience while creating additional touch points.
8. Solicit and Collect Google Business Profile Reviews
Reviews can be just as useful for lead generation as word-of-mouth marketing. Essentially, they do the same thing as a personal recommendation. That’s why soliciting and collecting reviews can bring you high-quality leads.
To do that, you need to create or claim your Google Business Profile (GBP), fill it out, and encourage existing patients to use it for reviews. Online reviews don’t just attract patients, they help you establish credibility, build better patient relationships, and boost local SEO efforts.
9. Use Conversion Rate Optimization on Landing Pages
Conversation rate optimization (CRO) is a set of tactics aimed at improving the conversion rate on your website. Once the lead arrives at your landing page, it’s your goal to help it stay and make an appointment. Some of these tactics include:
- Improving the strength of your calls to action.
- Making sure appointment scheduling or contact buttons are easy to find.
- Providing valuable and concise content.
- Making forms easy to fill out.
The key to CRO optimization on landing pages is easy navigation. Leads shouldn’t have any trouble finding relevant information and taking action.
Should you use a healthcare lead generation company or a digital marketing agency?
It may seem easier to leverage lead generation services than working to attract your own leads. However, the cost of these services is often misleading. You pay for a number of leads without a guarantee of their quality.
Low-quality leads aren’t just wasting your time, they are eating up your marketing budget. You could be paying for a hundred leads but getting only ten prospects with a high-conversion potential. This can increase your cost-per-patient tenfold.
The long-term ROI of SEO and content marketing is much higher than the ROI of lead generation services that offer questionable lead quality. Meanwhile, a healthcare digital marketing agency like DoctorLogic can improve your entire online presence through:
- Implementing 24/7 managed chat
- E-mail marketing automation
- Real-time appointment scheduling
- SEO services
- Content Marketing
- PPC Ads
- Social media marketing
- Automated online review solicitation and collection
- Landing page optimization
To learn more about how DoctorLogic can help your medical clinic, check out our demo today.