The massive number of details that you're managing to launch a new service line or office location can crowd out one important area - marketing. Great healthcare offerings need great patients. Starting the marketing process early and ensuring that you cover the essential elements will make the investment in clinic space, and time pay off earlier.
Highlights to Help You Market Your Clinic:
- Community Insights - Knowing the unique needs, style and preferences of the community can shape the way you promote and market your new clinic. This includes referral sources, but also social networks and the unique style of the community. Market research and customer interviews along with published data can add a lot to the demographic and economic data that you probably already have reviewed.
- Competition Analysis - Your competitors should be analyzed to discover service gaps, geographic opportunities as well as service focus areas. While you may align with the competitor on the service you provide, you don't want to line up on the branding and language you use for promotion. Finding the gaps can pay off.
- Persona and Brand Story - Written personas are a staple for effective marketing plans, but they do something that's important. They put a face and a story behind the patients you want to reach. >Get the Persona Tool. A brand story is vital too. It pre-writes the story that your customers are going to tell after you serve them effectively. This approach makes all of your marketing more powerful and ensures that it will reach beyond your ads to live in the lives of people.
- Brand Adjustment - If you have an existing brand, you'll want to look at that brand to see how it should be applied for the new location. It could require just a little adjustment, or perhaps a great deal. If you are building a new brand for your clinic, then be clear that the brand is about how you appear to the patient - not how your brand appeals to your personal preferences. A brand is more than a logo >Get the Brand Platformula.
- Campaign Plan - This is the tactical plan for what you are going to promote and how you will deliver the creative, content and ads to market your clinic. A combination of media should include SEO, Digital Ads, strategic print, events and referral cultivation along with all the assets required to run these effectively. Together the steps 1-5 make up your marketing plan.
- Local SEO - The start of your SEO is ensuring you can be found online in local search. Local search carries with it a high customer purchase intent, and is the SEO battleground that is found in the map listings on a web page. Get started with a Google My Business listing as soon as you have an address and phone number and then build from there. >Check the local listing and improve it.
- Website and Conversion Zones - Healthcare consumers do a lot of online research, and no matter how they hear about you, you'll want to make sure they can find you online and have very concrete ways to connect with you. Different generations have different communication preferences and you'll need to address website, landing pages, various messaging and chat tools, and email. Creating the right landing zone for specific services will increase the conversions - the number of people who move from visitor online to the patient in the office.
- Audience Building - you begin your marketing with a target market. These are the patients you want to reach. Building an audience means that people become aware or are interested in you - that is what makes them an audience. Once they are patients, they become a community. Audience building is an intentional process that uses multiple digital tools and reduces ad costs. And don't forget to include recruiting in the audiences that you need to build.
- Sustained Campaigns - The launch of your websites and marketing should take at least a year of sustained intentional marketing. It takes that long to ensure that people have become aware of your services. It may take longer. By combining organic search through valuable content and strategic ads, you can adjust the rate of growth.
