In this day and age, you not only need to be marketing your medical practice, you need to mobile-friendly! Two-thirds of Americans currently own a smartphone and many will be finding you or browsing your practice website on their phones.
So how do you succeed with mobile marketing? Read on for 7 mobile marketing tips that are crucial for healthcare providers and medical practice managers.
1. Make Your Practice Website Mobile-Friendly
Step one: you need a mobile-friendly website, and that means responsive design. Ensuring your content will be accessible and easy-to-read no matter which platform patients use to find you is absolutely essential. A whopping 40 percent of consumers will abandon a website that takes longer than 3 seconds to load, and that's a statistic you don’t want to play any part in.
2. Create a Unified Brand
Your main focus may be patient care, but for your business to succeed – and make no mistake, you are running a business –you have to figure out ways to stand out and bring in new faces. Start by identifying and outlining your brand and making sure it's consistent across all your channels. Who are you? What do you stand for? What are your practice's goals? You can have a snappy practice name (beyond your last name, that is), a slogan, even a mascot – just make sure your advertising and content always look like you, no matter where that content is displayed.
3. Craft a Patient-Centric Social Feed
An impressive 46 percent of smartphone users in the United States use their smartphones to access social networking websites. Having professional pages on social media is important, but if all you're sharing are self-promotional posts, then you're doing more harm than good. Design a narrative with patients in mind: what do they want to see? How will each post benefit them? How will your newest service or product solve one of their problems?
4. Be a Community-Wide Authority
If you want to attract new patients, waiting for them to pick you out of their insurance company's provider book isn't the most efficient way to do it. Work to become your community's leading authority in your field – be it dermatology, pediatrics, or a broad topic that's a combination of specialties such as health living or wellness for the elderly – by contributing pieces to local blogs, acting as a consultant to local companies or news stations, and giving talks and demonstrations at businesses and/or schools.
5. Go to Video
Video marketing is becoming an increasingly valuable tool. Some 46 percent of users report taking action after viewing a video ad, and blogs that incorporate video attract three times the amount of inbound links as their video-free counterparts. Record some instructional videos, do short interviews with your colleagues - basically anything your patients might find useful that can be translated into video form is fair game.
6. Get Personal
Eli Rubel of Helpshift said, "Today’s customers want to be cared for everywhere, so it’s important that we cater to their needs and create personalized campaigns. As we move further into the mobile era, it’s crucial that companies create a human experience inside mobile." Create that "human experience" by sending SMS messages reminding patients of appointments, wishing them a happy holiday season or birthday, offering informational seminars or links to blogs relevant to their health concerns, and so on.
7. Ask for Feedback
About 75 percent of the mobile phones currently in use globally are SMS-enabled. Using text messaging to reach patients is an efficient way to communicate and it opens up untold realms of possible creativity, including the opportunity to take your patients' temperatures, so to speak. See what they think of your practice and even your bedside manner by doing one revolutionary thing: asking. An SMS poll or survey sent using mobile marketing automation will be easy to track and the data it generates can be automatically analyzed as well. Just make sure you’re using a HIPAA compliant solution.
Knowing how to build a killer mobile marketing campaign might be all that's standing between you and an uber-successful 2016. Isn't it time to step up and commit to making your practice healthier than ever?
What's Next?
What do you think of what I've covered so far? Will your practice adopt mobile as your tool for marketing? I would love to read your comments below.
