The trinity of medical marketing is one where each component supports each other to make you stand out from others in your specialty while strengthening your brand and boosting visibility for both search engines and prospective patients.
Just what is the trinity?
The components consist of SEO (Search engine optimization), email campaigns and content marketing. A strategy like email marketing enables you to promote your content, tell your stories, inform your viewers and highlight your keywords.
Keywords are the 3-4 word phrases that people type in to find you when they are looking for your services, and a big component of SEO. Using them lets people and search engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo) know who you are and what you do. The more high-quality content you produce utilizing keywords, the greater the search ranking results which also garner more inbound links. The higher the rankings, the more people are driven to your site which gets more exposure and more people like an unending cycle.
Cost Benefit
Email marketing shows an ROI more than four times higher than social media, the next-highest marketing strategy. The advantage to an email campaign is that it is free or relatively inexpensive. You can start with a small list of subscribers (from your patient list), some messages that you would like to impart and a mailing platform.
Link Influx
SEO will not be effective without a strong link profile. The way it works is that inbound links garners site authority. Without this, organic searches will bypass you to the sites that do have them, rendering you much less likely to be seen by prospective patients.
Email marketing attracts attention to your original, relevant and useful content posts, encouraging shares which leads to a flood of new links. Foster sharing of your information with their audiences.
Content Endorsement
Emailing your followers gives you the opportunity to spread your content including surveys, case studies and original research. When they haven’t gotten the views yet, email is a great tool for driving traffic to the content and increasing views.
When your patients and followers see the relevance to them and enjoy the way you’ve presented your content, they will be more likely to be engaged with it and share with friends and family. Because email blasts are cheap and happen instantly, it’s a natural key to your marketing strategy.
Brand Building and Patient Loyalty
Loyal patients are more inclined to become interested in your content plan and advocate on your behalf, thereby strengthening your brand. This makes it more likely to become cited in “influencer” sites which then increases your visibility with exposure to larger audiences, further driving traffic to your webpages.
Sending emails out consistently with your content, announcements for new services, medical breakthroughs and health events bolsters patient loyalty and strengthens your brand reputation.
Social Media
Embedding links to your social media accounts in your email blasts, enables viewers to follow your brand on social media channels, and possibly influence greater engagement. If you have solutions to the problems that they have been struggling with, this is a no-brainer.
Having social media followers won’t improve your SEO results directly, but they do increase your SEO by furthering your content’s visibility and reach, yet earning more inbound links.
Subscriber Buildup
Post opportunities to subscribe to your email list everywhere, whether it is a sign-up at the front desk of your office, your website and your social media profiles. The more engaging and relevant content you produce, the bigger your subscriber base becomes. The larger your email list, the greater potential reach of your content.
For ideas on how to grow your email list, see 50 Proven Ways To Grow Your Email List.
Tips
- Don’t be a spammer! Sending too many emails in a short time period to hasten your results will be perceived as spam and once that happens, you’ve lost them as readers. They will delete your messages and unsubscribe to any further content that you publish.
- Be of service. Email messages should offer some value and be relevant to your users. It should also be in sync with the services that you provide. Tell them information they won’t find elsewhere so that they feel you are the go-to person for them.
- Build a relationship. Don’t buy an email list to grow your database- this is often a mistake. You put yourself at risk for being red flagged as a spammer.
- Trial and Error: have fun with your posts. Try different stories, topics, headlines and designs. Check the analytics to see which strategies are better received by your readers so that you can focus on that in future posts.
Using the proper strategy goes a long way to building and growing your practice.
Need help? No worries- outsource it! Give a call at 516-647-3002 for a free consultation and we can discuss which strategies work best for you.