Medical marketing can often be considered as a set of strategies thrown haphazardly at a medical business and expect for it to start converting patients immediately. In reality, that is not the case. Medical marketing or marketing, in general, requires a carefully structured system that calculates and analyzes the potential of strategies and then the estimated conversion rates.

Creating such a system is medical marketing, in a nutshell. Lead generation or conversion requires a calculated plan to be successful. To create one, there is a system of protocols that must be administered to enable the medical marketing strategy to start working and begin generating leads.

This plan, funnel or system demonstrates the stages that a potential patient must go through to become a converted patient for a medical business. As a doctor and an owner of a medical business that thrives online, it is crucial for you to understand the funnel to create your marketing strategies, respectively. 

What Is a Medical Marketing Funnel?

A medical marketing funnel refers to the stages that your potential patients go through to convert into your patient. This marketing funnel is often distributed in 4 stages, each representing the different marketing-conversion stage.

A marketing funnel won’t just assist you with understanding the central stages that convert leads, but it will also help you in earning more online income, increased patient traffic, better ROI, and overall, a better perspective of your medical business in terms of integral marketing.

How Does A Medical Marketing Funnel Work?

Many marketing experts regard a marketing funnel as subjective. However, generally, it is divided into 4 stages. Each stage assists with defining marketing strategies and how they will convert patients. The four stages go as:

Awareness — Stage One

This stage deals with the marketing strategies that center around getting the word about your medical business out there. Your potential patients can’t become your patients if they don’t even know about your medical services. During this stage, it is essential to have the marketing strategies set up that deal with acquainting your content or medical services with your leads. The marketing strategies for this stage are:

• Creating a strong landing page for your medical site.
• Sharing content and doing SMM to let the online traffic know about your medical services.
• Displaying medical infographics and first-rate visual content.
• Using paid ads to reach more patient traffic.

This stage’s objective is to get patients intrigued enough to dabble in your medical services and content. Once this is executed successfully, the next stages take care of lead conversion.

Engagement — Stage Two

After you have successfully integrated stage one for your medical business with your intended patient group and have gotten them to begin looking into your medical services, you need to draw them in and convert those interested individuals into solid patient leads.

Engagement mainly deals with strategies that work to show patients why your medical business is worth choosing from the many others online. You will need to develop trust with your patient crowd by offering some benefits that will carry them further down the marketing funnel.

This is considered a very crucial stage in marketing since almost 50% of patients will fall off the funnel if your marketing strategies in this stage aren’t strong enough. The marketing strategies in this stage mainly are:

• Displaying patient testimonials and reviews on your medical site.
• Show your social platform presence.
• Have interactive CTAs and features on your medical site.
• Offer a leeway of open communication.
• Sending newsletters via email marketing.

In the end, this stage holds the patients long enough for your lead conversion strategies to become active on them.

Conversion — Stage Three

Conversion is every medical marketer’s favorite word, and for good reason too since this is how your medical business survives. This is where all your marketing strategies pay off. This stage is the most tricky since it is very likely that your patients may choose to not pick your medical services at all. This is why SEO experts very carefully consider the strategies for this stage, which are:

• Use SEO optimization everywhere.
• Apply strong and relevant call-to-actions (CTAs).
• Use CRM methods.
• Offer discounts or special offers for first-time patients.
• Keep up a chain of communication.

Once you have integrated the above marketing strategies for this stage, you can count on patients to begin converting in no time. But your marketing funnel is not completed yet.

Advocacy — Stage Four

This stage is where many businesses may draw out thinking it is useless and a waste of money. However, stage four, advocacy is one of the most important parts of marketing since it deals with post-marketing. You have converted a patient successfully and they have used your medical services. But what are the chances that the patient may not choose to come back, again? The chances are very likely.

A medical marketing funnel deals with long-term marketing. With this stage, you will ensure that all your strategies will continue to pay off in the long run and you won’t have to start from scratch again. Some post-marketing tactics for this stage are:

• Follow-up calls or texts.
• Monthly if not weekly email notifications.
• Sending offers and deals.
• Reaching patients on social media to ask about their experience.

This is your medical marketing funnel, designed to keep converting patients for you as you continue to offer exceptional medical services.

What Are Some Key Benefits Of A Medical Marketing Funnel?

Creating a medical marketing funnel doesn’t just have singular benefits. It will act as a backbone for all your marketing endeavors. While creating and implementing each stage of your marketing channel, it’s essential to understand how each stage benefits you, in the long term. The essential benefits of a medical marketing funnel are:

• Increased potential of all lead generation strategies.
• Gives valuable insight into each marketing stage and how it affects the lead generation of your medical business.
• Customizable and permeable which saves time.
• Creates a fortified value around your medical business. 
• Strengthen all other marketing aspects
• Less chance of human error, since the funnel is AI-based.

While it may be impossible to see the benefits immediately, they certainly pay off in the long term.

Understanding Medical Marketing Funnels Is Crucial For Doctors

A medical marketing funnel is a necessary piece of the business expenditure and an essential requirement to create a marketing plan, at all. Creating a marketing funnel will have all your future and present doctor marketing strategies covered in the long run.

The objective of every medical PPC campaign remains the same — gain exposure and convert as many patients as possible for low cost-per-click (CPC) rates. When you think of medical PPC, you just think of creating ads, developing target groups, and leaving the rest to the automated AI campaign. However, this is easier said than done. Countless things can go wrong with your PPC campaign and can cost you hundreds of dollars as consequences. 

Preferred as the more outcome-bearing marketing channel, pay-per-click (PPC) ads can be a powerful gateway for a medical business to draw in new patients and fortify its position in the medical field by gaining exposure. Yet, PPC is also known as the most complicated and complex marketing platform. With countless factors to consider when creating a campaign and investing hundreds of dollars, it is quite easy for it all to fall off the wagon and turn things around for you in the worst way possible.

PPC campaigns are complex and it is often advised that startup medical businesses should hire PPC advertising service from a medical marketing agency. Nonetheless, there are still aspects that you should know as well, even if you hire a medical marketing service just so you can stay ahead of committing these mistakes and making sure that every penny invested in your medical PPC campaign is earned back to you in high ROI and new leads.

What Are Some Common PPC Mistakes in Your Medical Campaign?

As mentioned above, there is a 90% chance of missing something or choosing the wrong option when creating a medical PPC campaign. While these mistakes may vary, the five below are the ones that are the most common.

Poor Ad Navigation

Your PPC ads act like a guide for potential patients to follow back to your medical site. If your navigation route is confusing or linked wrong, the whole potential of that PPC ad goes down the drain and you end up wasting that potential patient’s time, your money, and a potential patient.

Build specific ads and navigate them to your specific medical site’s pages.  For instance; if you have a page that says “dental services in Utah”, have an ad routed to guide patients to that page, specifically.

Unoptimized Mobile Ads

75% of patient’s view ads on their mobile phones. If you missed the option of optimizing your ad for the mobile view when setting your campaign, you are likely losing that percentage of patients. Make certain that your medical PPC advertisements are mobile-optimized and have a high loading speed.

Unspecific Keywords

If you offer delta services in Utah and your keywords are similar to just “dental+services+in+Utah” or “Utah+dental+services”, you’re setting up your medical PPC campaign to flag down before it even begins. Ensure you’re focusing more on specific medical keywords with general as well. Make sure that you add “services” and “area” as well in your medical keyword research.

Exclusion Lists

There is a high chance that you are targeting your existing patients with ads of converting nature. This wastes their potential and is essentially a loss of money. This is why it is necessary to keep an eye out for exclusion lists. These lists reject patients who are not a fit for your advertisement, for example, existing patients. This helps in defining your ad’s target power and advertise to potential patients only.

Outdated Information

PPC is constantly changing, therefore it is likely that you may be using an outdated strategy. Make sure you stay up-to-date on PPC strategies and campaign settings. Google Ads keeps adding new features for campaigns, and learning about them all to keep your medical ads on top is very important. 

What Are Some Pointers for A Successful Medical PPC Campaign?

While knowing the common PPC mistakes is helpful, learning about some helpful pointers that can add potential to the success of your medical PPC campaign is also beneficial.

Keeping an Eye Out for RLSA Settings

Remarketing lists for search ads (RLSA) allow you to redo your ads for the patients who have recently visited your medical site. By choosing “target and bid” you’ll just show your previous successful ads to the patients that liked them, previously. Similar to reusing your medical articles, RLSA tailors your successful medical ads and targets them to specific patients.

Stepping Down

Stepping down from competing for the highest medical keyword can help your PPC campaign. For startup medical businesses, it is unwise to spend all your money on bidding on high-ranking medical keywords. Try bidding for the next ranking medical keywords instead and then level up, accordingly.

Using Ad Extensions

Ad extensions are extra bits of information such as phone numbers, area codes, site links, and pictures that you attach with your ad copy. Incorporating them in your actual medical ad helps support the presentation of it and it helps Google what you are trying to advertise and prompts it to target the ad to the right patient crowd.

Professional Formatting

Make sure the formatting of your ad remains professional and free of any grammatical or linguistic mistakes. The formatting of your ad is what makes patients click on it. If they spot spelling mistakes or spacing gaps with irregular typography, they will think it spammy or unprofessional will less likely to click on it. For instance, try to keep the first letter of every word in your ad, capitalized. It’ll catch the patient’s eye and look professional, all the while.

Keeping Ad group Clean

Try to keep the medical keywords in your adgroup as organized as possible. Placing them all in one adgroup can lose you your invested money and the potential of those keywords. Placing a large number of medical keywords in a single adgroup makes it practically difficult to match with your landing page copy.

PPC Can Break or Make Your Online Medical Business

Simply saying that “create an ad and patients will come” is simply a fantasy that will cost you more than just the finances you invested in your medical PPC marketing campaign. While PPC has high success rates, it also remains the most difficult medical marketing channel to master.

Hiring medical PPC services remains a smart choice, you need to be aware of the common ways you can mess up a perfectly fine campaign and learn some pointers that can assist you with boosting the campaign from just “fine” to “patient-inducing”.

Online content is known to be ever-evolving. There are various mediums of content being introduced every once in a while since the digitization of marketing is evolving with it. While articles and social media posts do hold quite a large margin of marketable content that online businesses earn from, podcasts are becoming the “It” online content.

It is said that 78% of U.S residents prefer to listen to podcasts. This percentage shows the amount of traffic that is looking to be catered with audio content. To reach this online traffic, medical businesses are using podcasts as a medium of content.  Healthcare Podcasts are also a great way to re-use your textual medical content and turn it around for patients who are interested in an audio form.

Medical marketing is all about staying on top of every online promotional trend that comes your way and creating a podcast on your medical site will likely assist you with that.  Not only do podcasts cater towards a large percentage of a specific patient crowd, but also generate new leads, and build a sense of authority around your medical site.

Why Are Healthcare Podcasts A Must-Have For A Medical Site?

With AI taking over, online content needs to evolve with it. For online medical businesses especially, their content is their building block and these blocks need to be adaptable to the online mediums and platforms.

As the online business world becomes more and more digitized, articles are expected to have an audio version to them. Podcasts are like that, but more defined and structured. A report conducted showed that 49% of potential patients like to listen to medical podcasts as a way to form their opinion about a medical business. 

New Way Of Marketable Income

While creating a podcast may cost you some extra dimes in the financial department of your marketing, it earns back in golden ROI. Not only does having medical podcasts convert patients but it is a great medium for medical businesses to do sponsorships or promote their medical services. 80% of patients finish a podcast session, leaving your medical site with a low bounce-rate, as an additional benefit.

Extending Patient Crowd

Gone are the days where you could just have a couple of pages on your medical site and patients would come to you. Now that a plethora of medical businesses exists online, patients are used to receiving the finest of finest content.  Having a healthcare podcast on your site reaches the margin of patients that depend on audio content. With its high shareability, patients are likely to be impressed if they see a medical business putting forth a healthcare podcast and your medical businesses will soon be the talk of the town.

Building Trust And Authority

Similar to any other medical content on your site, if not more advanced, a podcast plays a huge role in building credibility around your medical site. Patients will know that you are an expert in your field of business if you can attempt to put a healthcare podcast on your site. It builds a sense of authority around your medical services and increases your patient conversion rate (CVR).

How To Create A Podcast Strategy?

If you already own some sort of medical content on your site, creating a strategy for a healthcare podcast is very similar to that. Here is a defined podcast strategy laid out for you:

Identifying Patient Crowd

Like creating any other content, you need to identify who it is for. With medical businesses, the target is patients, however, identifying the demographic is also necessary. Make sure that your healthcare podcast will appeal to the general age, will be more accessible and shareable, and sorted into different groups.

Sharing

You need to decide how you are going to share and present your healthcare podcast. Similar to how medical articles can be shared on your SMM platforms. Your podcasts need the same level of exposure. You can also reach out to audio platforms such as Health Podcast Network or Redox to share your podcasts on them to gain more exposure.

Timeline

Once engaged, patients will look forward to hearing more podcasts from you. Similar to an article calendar, your podcasts need to be scheduled and published on a monthly if not weekly basis.

Representation

The core objective of your healthcare podcast remains simple — represent your medical business and its services and then convert patients. It is crucial that your healthcare podcasts have a promotional section for your medical business and stay true to your business’s image and voice.

Content

The most important factor of all, the content of your healthcare podcast makes or breaks the whole idea. Try to make it as interesting and simplified as possible. It targets the majority of patients, even those who are not educated in medical issues and services as others. If you are starting out and have a limited budget, you can reuse your medical articles, edit them a bit and convert them into healthcare podcasts.

Linking

Articles have backlinks to support them, podcasts have links to audio platforms so that your patients can access your podcasts, download them or listen to them on the audio platform of their choice. Make sure to link your healthcare podcasts to either Spotify or Google Podcasts so that your patients can access them.

Mobile-Optimization

A podcast is purely content that is feasible for mobile use. Make sure your podcast page is mobile-optimized with no lagging or buffering. You can use WordPress and Squarespace for mobile optimization of your podcast page.

Monitoring

Podcasts, like all content, need to be monitored for ROI and CVR to estimate their success. That way you can see what works for you and what you need to cut down. Don’t back down if you don’t get sky-high leads after a week of doing podcasts. They need time to gain exposure and then branch out patient leads for you.

Medical Podcasts Are The New Marketable Content

Healthcare podcasts are changing the online medical field as days go by. It is the type of content that 98% of general online traffic looks for in a site. Besides the sponsored aspect and CVR of healthcare podcasts, the exposure they bring to a site makes them a content choice that is becoming necessary for all online medical businesses to have.

Digital marketing has many heads and only businesses that master them all fight themselves to the top of SERPs with online traffic flooding to their site from every gateway possible. Social media marketing (SMM) and content marketing are two of the main heads. However, both of them require quite expert marketing efforts to master them.

To put it in simple words, it is not a single person’s job. By using SMM and content marketing tools, you are making sure that AI-based systems are developing an online image for your medical business and leaving no room for error behind.

These tools can help your potential patients connect with your medical business by social media chatbots, planning and posting medical content that is AI calculated, or simply creating recognition on social media platforms for your medical business. It is plain and simple that while your marketing structure won’t need them, they can certainly make your medical business successful and your marketing effective.

How Do SMM And Content Marketing Tools Help A Medical Business?

It is almost rare that a doctor would have the time to check the quality of backlinks on their site’s content, or pre-plan social media posts for their SMM plan, or check the SEO nature of their blog’s content. It is almost rare because tools for such marketing tasks exist.

Not only do they do these jobs for you but they consequently add to the bigger objective of your marketing efforts, which is to funnel in patients.  These tools help you make the most out of your marketing efforts and assist you with gaining leads.

The 5 Best Medical Content Marketing Tools

Your medical content is your biggest marketing platform. Your patients chose to pick your medical services based on the medical content you have on display. However, to meet the strenuous expectations of Google for content and to manage it, here are some content marketing tools that will help you out in the process:

Ahrefs

If you struggle with managing keywords in your medical content, Ahrefs will assist you like an expert. It focuses on the performance of your keywords and compares them to your competitor’s keywords. It also manages the patient traffic that comes via your medical content. It also has handy features such as keyword analysis, site evaluation, and identifying content gaps that help ultimately in content marketing.

WordPress

WordPress is the most used content management system (CMS) by all online businesses and sites. It is an open-source CMS that permits you to host your medical site and control the content on it. Once set, WordPress contains module design and a format framework so it doesn’t require you to manually manage your medical content, it does the job for you.

Yoast

The most valuable content is SEO-based content and Yoast focuses just on that. Similar to WordPress, Yoast focuses more on SEO content including streamlining content for keywords, reviewing and altering meta-descriptions and URL slugs, managing backlinks, and checking for your content’s performance.

Airstory

If you don’t have a big content team and manage it all by yourself, Airstory is a great content managing tool for startup businesses. It connects Google Docs, Google Drive, or the content curation application of your choice and assists you with saving content, pictures, and multimedia. It also manages content of longer structure, such as medical eBooks. It is a tool that every content team must have. 

Buzzsumo

Buzzsumo markets and manages content like no other. It focuses more on marketing the content by reviewing backlinks, sharing the content and disturbing it widely and generating reports on its performance, and offering suggestions on what to improve and what to eliminate.

The 5 Best Medical Social Media Marketing Tools

Marketing on social media platforms is no easy task. Since there are so many and all employ different forms of interaction, marketing experts use SMM tools to make their job easier. Here are some of the top-rated medical social media marketing tools:

Tagboard

SMM is knowing all about what’s viral. Tagboard is an SMM tool that allows you to have a more integral view of the viral posts across various social media platforms and lets you create the medical content according to that. This can be useful in producing medical content that would connect with the potential patient groups interested in those viral tags.

HootSuite

Hootsuite is a tool that assists you with dealing with different social media platforms all at the same time so that you don’t have to shift between them. It allows you to plan and put together medical posts. You can also pre-plan and schedule the posting of your medical content on all your social media platforms with Hootsuite. You can also send messages to your patients and get email alerts, as well.

MobileMonkey

Connecting with patients on social media doesn’t just require posting medical content on it. It also requires you to communicate with them and guide them to your medical site. You need a chatbot for that and MobileMonkey is the one that assists you with making a chatbot with only a couple of clicks. This is a helpful SMM tool that creates a custom chatbot without creating a code line and generates AI-smart responses.

Tailwind

If your SMM plan includes the sharing of photographs and videos, Tailwind can prove to be a handy tool. It also does the job of creating hashtags for you. You can also observe the success of each social media post with Tailwind. It does the creative part of SMM for you, all in a few clicks and some adjustments.

IFTTT

If you have always looked for an SMM tool that can handle the content of all of your social media platforms, IFTTT is your solution. Also known as “If This, Then That” this tool is AI-based that allows you to post on all of your chosen social media platforms with equally less effort. For instance, it can simultaneously post your Facebook posts on your medical business’s Instagram page as well.

SMM And Content Marketing Tools Support Your Marketing Structure

Content and social media marketing are viewed as the most fruitful type of digital marketing channels. They both require to be internally controlled to make their lead generating potential more strong and effective.

Since it is not a one-man job, it is only fair that both content marketing and SMM employ some handy tools to make the social media services for doctors easier, effective, and result-inducing to ensure these marketing channels earn back their ROI via generating successful leads.

Facebook Advertising — The 101 For Medical Marketing

The most favored platform for SMM remains Facebook. Since it has evolved from being just a place where people liked and commented on each other’s photos, Facebook has developed into a proper marketing platform for businesses to advertise themselves through the network of potential clients living on its web. All this applies to medical businesses too, since they can create groups of patients to seek out other potential patients, create recognition around their name and develop market value.

However, to achieve that, there is more to the process than just posting a screenshot of your medical services on your Facebook page and waiting for patients to come to you. Since Facebook has developed into a proper marketing space, its way of advertising has developed too and it requires a proper setup and proper campaigns to make marketing successful.

Facebook ads are tied in with getting your message out there to the right group of potential patients. These are patients who are already looking for medical services such as yours to seek them out. For the best outcomes, it’s critical to understand the Facebook advertising types and compare them to your objectives to see if they will work out.

Why Is Facebook Advertising Important For Medical Business?

Your Facebook business page operates similarly to how your site nurtures your medical business’s image and generates leads. Facebook marketing allows you to pinpoint explicit potential patients who are on the lookout for medical services like yours. Leads generated from Facebook are more strong since they are coming from a place of trust.

According to a recent study done in 2020, Facebook has 59% of the internet’s traffic and Facebook advertisements for the most part have a click-through rate (CTR) of 0.051%, and a normal cost-per-click (CPC) of $0.80. Still, it remains the most viable form of SMM and when done right, it can open a gateway of patient leads for your medical business and expand business opportunities.

What Are The Most Effective Types Of Facebook Advertisements?

To advertise on Facebook, it is necessary to learn about the most effective types of advertisements available. This can help you pick one or a couple that would be the most compatible for your business objectives.

Classic Ads

Possibly the most used, Facebook offers its type of marketing with Facebook advertisements, which show up in the side sections of the page. These advertisements are the most basic yet popular since they seem to work for all businesses. They incorporate a feature with a post and a link to either a Facebook page or a website.

These classic ads seem to have the most click-through rate and are a sensible choice for a startup medical business, seeking to market to an extended crowd of patients. These ads are similar to PPC ads and are often enough for potential patients to catch interest if they are well executed.

Contests and Polls

Another great way to catch potential patients’ attention is by asking them to engage in an interaction with you. In this case, by contests and polls. When a potential patient sees a poll asking about their views on the Covid-19 vaccine, for instance, they are likely to become intrigued and then inserted with the source that put up the poll.

Asking potential patients to engage in polls and contests creates a sense of authority around your medical business’s persona on Facebook and patients are very likely to trail back from these polls and contest to your business’s Facebook page.

Promoted Posts

A more developed option for a developing medical business, Facebook’s Promoted Posts lets businesses pay a level rate to have their individual Facebook posts shared with a specific type of client, which helps expand the post’s potential to catch the eye of clients. Promoted Posts ups your odds of being seen on a client’s feed. Facebook Promoted Posts are shared with a business’s already following fans and their acquaintances.

Sponsored Stories

Facebook’s most effective ad type, Sponsored Stories follow a trailing method and capture the potential patients’ recent interactions with their acquaintances on Facebook. These help the pre-created stories trail back to the potential patients and their friend groups, bringing more exposure to the advertising for doctors business.

Sponsored Stories show up in feeds and the sidebar of target patients and are the most successful mobile-optimized type of advertisement available on Facebook. These stories have a 50% higher click-through rate than any other advertisement type on Facebook.

How To Make The Most Out Of Facebook Advertisements?

While knowing about the types of advertisements is certainly important, knowing how to make them work for your medical business’s objectives is also a requirement necessary for successful Facebook advertising Here’s how you can make them work:

Customizing Patient Crowds

To make any type of advertisement available on Facebook, you must create different patient persons and groups to make your marketing more focused and effective. You can sort these patient crowds by:

• Location: To make the most out of your ads, try focusing them on patients that are closest to your medical business’s operation. 
• Age Groups: Distribute your patients into groups by their age demographics. Focus advanced types of ads on younger patient groups and simplified ads on older.
• Preferences: Make use of your patients’ preferences and target your ads accordingly to them. Sort them out by their preferences.

One Call-to-Action (CTA)

The best Facebook advertisements have an unmistakable objective, if it is unclear, patients will likely be confused and your advertising efforts will go down the drain. There are three call-to-action for an ad.

• To build brand awareness.
• To generate leads.
• To sell items and services.

Regardless of either, your advertisement must contain one clear CTA that guides your potential patients to your objectives and what to expect them to do instead of muddling them with unnecessary information.

Picking Compatible Facebook Advertising for Medical Marketing

Similar to CTAs, understanding your business objectives and then selecting an ad type according to them brings out the potential in the ad. For instance, your business objective is to generate leads and you are putting up an infographic ad that raises awareness about HIV. While it may be beneficial, it won’t live up to its full potential and your objective is less likely to be fulfilled.

Facebook Advertisements Supports Most Of SMM For Businesses

Facebook holds the vote of 97% of advertisers for being the most successful SMM platform. Using Facebook advertising for medical marketing for physicians won’t just generate patient leads but create brand awareness and expand your medical business’s reach far wider into its huge traffic network.