How to get more patients to your clinic — without draining your budget

How to grow a medical practice: 5 low-cost marketing ideas for clinics

There are a few proven healthcare clinic marketing strategies to attract patients and grow your practice. Not only are these marketing ideas for clinics effective, they also are cost effective and can result in long-term, sustainable growth.

1. Improve your web presence

A strong web presence is key to standing out in today’s landscape. With a strong web presence, potential patients are more likely to find you – via your website, your online profiles, and even your social media accounts. If you’re seeking how to get more patients, you need to appear online with the right information. Audit the information you have online and ensure it is both complete and accurate.

Social media is particularly important to your web presence without dipping too far in your medical clinic budget: 62 percent of consumers agree brands and companies that do not have a strong social media presence will not be able to succeed in the long run, according to Sprout Social.

2. Expand your web presence

Beyond improving your current web presence, it’s important to grow your web presence as well. You can easily increase the number of places you appear online by claiming any unclaimed listings for your clinic or creating new ones. A simple google search for your practice name or your providers can show you where you’re appearing online. That way you can check if your information is correct. 

If you’re not listed at all in a prominent directory such as Google My Business, creating a profile ensures that your information is available in more locations. 

If your medical clinic budget allows for it, paid advertising is one of the top marketing ideas for clinics.  Paid advertising supplements your organic search strategy as paying for Google ads allows you to rank at the top of the search page for terms your site may not yet be ranking for organically.

Depending on the keywords you’re bidding for, your spending might vary, but it is easy to set a cap on overall spending and to customize your bidding, so it does not become too expensive. Strategic bidding on select keywords can help your business secure patients it would have otherwise missed out on.

3. Ask for patient feedback and reviews

If you’re researching how to have more patients choosing your practice, then look no further than your online reputation. In fact, patient reviews are the single most important decision-making factor for patients choosing a doctor, according to the PatientPop patient perspective survey.

Although many patients are accustomed to leaving reviews for a variety of businesses, patients are twice as likely to leave a review when asked for feedback, according to PatientPop survey data. That’s why asking patients for feedback should be a key focus in your clinic marketing strategy.

If you’re wondering how to get more patients to leave reviews, here are some easy ways you can begin gaining patient feedback:

• Ask your patients for feedback in person. Just like hotels often do, simply ask your patients for feedback after they receive service or during check out.

• Offer digital feedback automatically. Automatically send your patients a message after their visit that links them to a patient satisfaction survey.

• Set up a suggestion box. Although an old-fashioned suggestion box won’t help your online review situation, it could help your patients feel heard. This can, in turn, translate into patients feeling more motivated to fill out online reviews as well.

4. Use content marketing to build trust

Content marketing is the creation of content that informs, educates, or entertains your users while indirectly marketing your brand. Those quality articles you read on the blogs of other companies? That’s all content marketing.

Creating content on your site is a great way to establish yourself as an expert in your field. If you’re seeking how to have more patients land on your practice website, start blogging. This is an effective clinic marketing tactic because it allows you to write answers to questions your patients are searching for online.

You can write blog posts that offer advice on staving off the inevitable cold during the winter, posts that update people on your services and newest physicians, and so on. Most importantly, make sure your content is informative, entertaining, and of high quality.

5. Modernize your website

Search engine optimization (SEO) is all about getting people to your site and content. A big part of that is having a modern, optimized practice website.

To ensure your website is up to par on the technical side of things, consider the following:

• Is your website mobile-friendly? A mobile-friendly or responsive site will load and display properly on mobile devices. With 56 percent of web traffic coming from mobile devices in 2021, according to statcounter, it’s clear that prospective patients are visiting your site from their smartphone a good portion of the time.

• Does your site load quickly? Site speed plays a huge role in the overall user experience. Make sure your site isn’t getting hung up on anything and that it loads quickly. Site speed is a Google search engine ranking factor, which means the slower your site loads, the lower it may sit in search results. What’s more, web visits are more likely to be abandoned if a page takes longer than 3 seconds to load, according to the Google blog.

• Is your content on the site optimized? If your site is loading quickly but your content isn’t optimized, you’ll still have a tough time with SEO and finding patients. Make sure you’re following best practices for on-page optimizations when it comes to your content. This will ensure you’re getting the most value out of your content, and increase the likelihood that people find your site and become your patient.

How to grow a medical practice is often atop of every practice owner or manager’s mind. Digital marketing is a great investment because it is medical clinic budget-friendly, customizable, targeted, and measurable. 

Don’t let the stress of figuring out how to have more patients at your practice get the best of you. Learn the best healthcare marketing strategies for the digital world.