You might not want to hear it, but some businesses are just easier to market than others. If you’re running a company selling consumer products, it’s easier to win people round. There are obviously a lot of obstacles still, but people will want to buy the products. When you’re running a medical business of any kind, people aren’t going to be excited about your products. Nobody is counting down the days until their next surgery. While your products are incredibly important, they aren’t sexy. You still need to convince potential customers to choose you over your competitors, but you won’t be able to bring in customers that don’t require your services in the first place. Don’t be disheartened, there are still plenty of things that you can do to market your medical business successfully, it just takes a bit more thought. If you think that your marketing strategy is looking a bit sickly, here are a few remedies that can help you nurse it back to health.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is often used to inform customers about new products and offers. This strategy might not necessarily work for you because customers won’t impulse buy your products. Where email marketing will come in handy, is keeping in touch with existing customers. Scheduling emails to remind people about follow-up appointments a few months after they’ve been to see you. You could also try advertising annual check-ups through email marketing.
Content Marketing
If you’re asking yourself whether you should use content marketing for my med spa, the answer is a definite yes. Content marketing is one of the best ways to market a medical business. The best content marketing campaigns offer their customers useful articles and present themselves as a valuable source of information. This is one area where marketing yourself might even be easier than other industries. As an expert in your field, you can offer advice that only a few professionals can. Providing your customers with medical advice for free will develop a trust between you, and they will look to you when they have more pressing medical issues that need dealing with.
A good content marketing campaign is also central to effective search engine optimization. If your SEO is not up to scratch, then you will lose out. One of the biggest factors, when customers are choosing fashion photo editor, is convenience. They are likely to search online for the nearest practice, if you don’t appear near the top of the list, they will go to one of your competitors instead.
Social Media
Too many medical practices neglect social media because they think it’s not for them. It is often seen as a marketing tool more suited to flashy, consumer businesses, but that isn’t true. You will need to tackle it differently to a lot of other businesses but you can make it work for you. One of the main things to be careful about is your tone. The medical profession is a serious one, so you shouldn’t be using the light-hearted, conversational tone that is beneficial for a lot of other companies. If your customers don’t feel like you are taking things seriously, then they are unlikely to trust you. Instead, you should present yourself as an expert in your field. Use social media platforms to distribute the quality content that you are producing on your website, as well as sharing other useful articles, but make sure that you aren’t promoting your rivals.
Media Exposure
Media exposure is sometimes seen as an old fashioned way of marketing your business. The tech-savvy marketers are all opting to spread their own message on social media platforms, rather than have somebody else do it for them using traditional means. The reason for this is that it is quite time-consuming, and requires a good knowledge of the print media industry. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that it isn’t worth your time, good media exposure can be a great tool for bringing in new customers. In your industry, you are likely to be seeing a lot of patients from the older generation. The modern formats of marketing are much less accessible to them, so print media is a good way to reach them.
Newspaper editors are incredibly busy, and they won’t put up with any messing about, so you need to know what you’re doing. If you are pitching to a newspaper, you need to come up with something good. The best way to do it is to focus on a good patient story. Perhaps an underdog story about a patient that pulled through against all odds, or a famous patient if you have any. Write yourself a good press release and send it out to some papers. A good press release should be no more than 500 words and should include all of the necessary information in a clear and concise way. If your press release is good enough, you may be asked to do a feature story; this is where you should flesh out the narrative a bit more. When you are writing a press release, focus on the patient rather than yourself. If you keep banging on about how great you are, people will think that you are exploiting your patients for your own personal gain. That is not the kind of business that people want looking after their health.
Become A Community Figure
Back in the good old days, everybody knew their doctor, and there was just one that would look after the neighborhood. Although things have moved on a bit since then, this relationship between doctor and patient can still be very valuable. If you establish yourself as a local figure in the community, you will start to establish trust. Trust is one of the most important things that people look for in a doctor, so being on first name terms with some of your potential patients can help to increase the size of your practice.
Using these alternative methods, your marketing campaign should be back on its feet in no time.
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