The 2024 guide to attracting patients to your medical practice

Summary: Tebra surveyed medical practices to find out how they plan to expand their practice, allocate their marketing dollars, and engage patients in 2024. We compiled a comprehensive guide to attracting patients with this fresh data and unique insights.

Very few doctors, dentists, or therapists likely went to school dreaming of marketing. But knowing how to get more patients is a necessary — and even fun — part of starting a practice, replacing patients, and expanding into new locations. 

Attracting new patients isn’t usually as simple as running a few ads in the local paper. The most effective programs often use paid digital ads, as well as free — but harder and slower — tactics like search engine optimization (SEO) for their local practice. That doesn’t mean old-school tactics are totally out, though: networking, print ads, and mailers have their place. 

Marketing involves a lot of decisions, from how much to budget to where to spend ad dollars. This article maps out all the basics for how to get more patients into an independent practice, with links to additional resources for exploring a topic in depth.

This article will cover: 

There’s no magic number for a healthcare marketing budget because it depends on the practice’s goals and market. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t some useful benchmarks. In November 2023, Tebra surveyed owners and managers of 106 private practices to find out how they allocate their marketing budgets. About a third spend less than $2,500, another third spend $2,500 to $10,000, and the top 29% spend over $10,000. 

Agency fees are optional, but a good healthcare marketing agency will save time and likely money. They will have insights and data around keyword targeting and optimization techniques that drive down the cost of clicks for medical practices. For instance, they are likely to have an analysis of keyword gaps to target for your specialty locally.

Spending around 25% of an ad budget on agency fees is typical. This typically includes copywriting, design, management, optimization, and reporting. 

Here is what our survey found.

PPC ads are the most common way medical practices advertise online as they’re effective, targeted, and work for small businesses.

Digital ads, especially PPC, are a great way to get quick wins, like acquiring new patients and boosting profitable services.

Here’s what you need to know about PPC ad budgets:

Having a comprehensive, user-friendly medical website and online scheduling tools will make paid digital ads more effective. A convincing website that’s easy to navigate — and provides a painless way to schedule an appointment — will see a higher conversion rate. 

Here is how our survey respondents plan to allocate their dollars.

A practice website and blog can attract visitors without any help from paid ads, but doing so takes time and energy. Many practices outsource these to agencies with healthcare marketing experience marketing. 

SEO starting costs can range from $5,000 for a quick site review by an expert to $15,000 for deep insights and a new strategy. While investments can take up to 6 months to really pay off, well-done SEO can deliver for years with continued investment.

Expect ongoing SEO maintenance to cost anywhere from $2,500 to $10,000 a month. Search engines want to know a site is current, so prevent gradual drop-offs — and strengthen the investment — with ongoing fresh content. Search-optimized blogs are a great way to do this. 

Managing a practice online reputation on review sites is the second highest-value activity for practices Tebra surveyed. Here’s what you need to know about budget and time to get reviews for your practice:

Over 60 internet sites aggregate health provider info. Practices must claim listings and update them to reflect any new information, e.g., changes in hours or providers. Practices Tebra surveyed said managing this was the third most impactful marketing activity. 

Here’s what to know about online listings:

Print ads and billboards require the least expertise — they can be designed inexpensively by in-house staff or an agency and reused multiple times. But there are some downsides. It’s hard to track the results. Plus, practices Tebra surveyed ranked their effectiveness as low: print ads and billboards tied for last place out of 15 marketing tactics, with only 3% citing them as their most successful tactics. 

Budgeting basics:

Advertising is great but practices cited networking and referrals as their most successful tactic. Getting referrals — from doctors and patients — takes time, effort, a practice patients love, and partnerships with referring doctors. Consider that attending events and tracking referrals may take significant staff time (not accounted for in budget numbers). 

Networking expenses often include health fairs and other events. Expenses include business cards, booth/table signage and decorations, brochures, and promotional items. 

Budgets:

Writing a medical practice growth plan may seem a little onerous, but it will be a huge help in planning an overall practice strategy and creating a budget. 

Get tips for how to write a marketing plan for a medical practice and a medical practice marketing template

Pay-per-click advertising is probably the easiest to implement and measure. A minimum budget focuses on basic patient acquisition — for example, searches like “dentist near me” or “urgent care clinic in Small Town, USA.” 

Another way to think about a healthcare marketing budget is to start with the budget and work backwards. A common formula is thinking in terms of a percentage of revenue. 

Tebra asked what percentage of gross revenue practices spend in a November 2023 survey of independent practices.

Higher-profit services like cosmetic or bariatric surgery cost more to advertise than dental or family medical because competitive terms drive up bidding (for pay-per-click). They often choose to invest in higher-cost advertisements like billboards and magazine ads, too. 

New practices will also need to spend on the higher end until they attract a base of patients, whereas practices with many happy patients may not need to spend much at all. 

Many practices rely on a variety of traditional and digital techniques to attract new patients. 

Traditional advertising channels — like mailers, billboards, and print ads — tend to take a bit longer to pay off. People typically need multiple exposures before a name sinks in. The traditional rule in advertising is people need to see an ad about 7 times before they take action. 

Digital advertising may feel more intimidating, but it typically pays off faster. People who see an ad for a dermatologist near them at the exact moment they’re searching for “dermatologists near me” don’t have to remember anything — they can just click. These ads are low commitment, too: practices can spend as little as they want. In cost-per-click ads, the advertiser only pays when a user clicks on their ad. 

One of the reasons marketers have moved more to digital ads than print is accountability: with custom links, it’s possible to track exactly how many patients find the practice via ads. 

As with most advertising campaigns, the most effective method is often a combination of print and digital. 

Marketing shouldn’t be a financial black hole. A wise budget means getting a general idea of how much profit each marketing investment earns. 

That’s not as easy as it sounds, but directional information can help a lot. 

For example, some practices ask new patients how they discovered the practice (e.g., billboard, Google, social media, another patient, another doctor) as part of the intake form. Tallying those results monthly and comparing them to the average profit from a patient over a year will indicate whether investments are successful or in need of adjustment.

But to maximize resources, it’s important to track the cost and return of each ad by service and profit. For instance, set up unique links in pay-per-click ads to measure the number of resulting clicks, or use a vanity URL like LAdentist.com/spring in a print ad. For practices that offer online scheduling, tracking how many bookings result from a specific ad with a specific link should be possible. Measure the profit of those bookings and divide it by the cost of the specific ad that prompted them to get the real ROI. 

Manually tracking ads can take a lot of time, but a practice growth analytics dashboard can make it very simple to review the value of each tactic at a glance. 

A healthcare website is a key asset for new and existing patients. At its most basic, healthcare website design needs to follow a few principles: 

Advanced medical website design includes additional functions to make patients' lives more convenient. Online scheduling is key. It reduces the friction that prevents patients from booking an appointment, especially if it’s after hours or lines are busy. 

Remember: around half of users (but many experts believe more) will probably visit the practice site on their smartphone. The site must be mobile-friendly, both to ensure a good user experience and because search engines count mobile optimization as a factor that impacts search rankings. 

The Intake has a definitive guide to different options and must-haves for medical practice websites and budget.

Finally, remember that a practice’s website isn’t its only digital front door. Many patients searching online will find listings in review sites and provider directories. Google listings, in particular, are an important traffic driver. Claiming and enhancing a practice Google Business Profile is critical in providing accurate info that Google wants to give users. 

Medical practices have 2 excellent sources for referrals: doctors and patients.

Getting referrals from other doctors is about meeting people and promoting the practice. For a specialist practice, think creatively about the type of doctors most likely to serve the target patient demographic. For instance, a bariatric surgeon who owned a weight-loss clinic told us he networked with orthopedic surgeons because there are often weight-loss requirements before surgery. Established family practices are obvious targets but might already have existing relationships compared to newer ones. 

Some doctors send personal emails introducing their practice specialties, approach, and clinical background. Attending networking events is also a great way to build relationships. And don’t be afraid to draw on your own network of friends and alums. 

Finally, referrals depend on being a good partner and clearly communicating with the referring doctor about their patients. 

Boosting patient referrals requires different tactics — but is worth the effort. In Tebra’s 2023 Patient Perspectives survey, 54% of patients chose “word of mouth” as the top contributor in choosing a healthcare provider. 

The first tactic is the easiest: just ask. Post a sign in the waiting room and provide information about the practice (name, specialties, website, and contact) that's easy for patients to share. Or include the ask in an email newsletter. 

It's also important to claim the practice name online. Make sure all business listings (like Google and Yelp) have accurate information. It’s common for competing practices to buy paid ad searches for their competitors’ names, so many healthcare providers bid on their own names to prevent that from happening. 

But asking for referrals won’t be effective without high patient satisfaction. Automated patient surveys can lead to a higher volume of feedback — positive and constructive — via a system that sends a request after every appointment. 

For a more complete guide to this topic, read about 4 ways to get high-quality patient referrals.

Digital marketing for doctors and medical practices means checking a lot of boxes. But it’s also a cheaper and ultimately more convenient way of attracting patients than most offline techniques. 

But without certain foundational elements, the whole thing will fail. This checklist covers the basics. 

SEO is a critical tool for attracting patients. It’s an investment that takes a little longer than ads to gain results but pays off for a long time. Medical website SEO results can last years, especially with fresh content on a semi-regular basis. 

Optimizing practice website SEO isn’t just about figuring out some keywords and writing them a bunch (and “black hat” medical SEO, like keyword stuffing, can actually harm the rankings). Search engines like Google rank on several factors that boil down to good user experience: useful, relevant content delivered in a nice, fast package. 

And that goes for mobile as well as desktop. In an SEO survey of 207 healthcare digital marketers, mobile optimization was the top factor for healthcare SEO. 

Review The Intake’s medical SEO fundamentals to get more patients and grow your practice to establish the basics and SEO checklist to cover everything. 

Finally, local SEO for medical professionals is a really important factor for getting the right patients in the door. Consider using paid ads for terms like “dentists in Grand Rapids” to boost traffic on the way to SEO success. 

Think blogging is just for fun? Not anymore — medical blogs for patients can help practices retain current patients, encourage referrals, support SEO that attracts new patients, and build credibility. A practice blog can also educate and motivate patients to make healthier choices. 

So are blogs a no-brainer?

Not really. Researching and writing blog content can take a lot of time. And blogs aren’t the best fit for every topic — videos, short-form social media content, or infographics might convey the message better. 

But with the right resources — or willingness to outsource — medical blogs for doctors can pull in a lot of traffic from potential patients. Frequent blogs optimized for relevant keywords that link back to the practice’s core pages (e.g., “San Francisco therapy services”) also signal to Google that the practice website is an expert in that topic, which boosts its search rankings.

It’s increasingly unlikely a practice will thrive without great reviews. In Tebra’s Patient Perspectives survey, 46% of patients surveyed said reviews were a top contributor when selecting a provider and 93% said they’re at least somewhat important — making them more influential than online insurance directories or the practice website. And that’s not going to change: 62% of Gen Z respondents in the survey won’t even consider a provider with few or no reviews. 

And unlike other marketing techniques, asking for patient reviews can easily be done in house. Have staff ask, post signs, and even encourage them personally. 

Read Boost your reputation: Strategies for doctors to get 5-star patient reviews to help develop a robust review process. 

Marketing always changes, and marketing strategies should, too. Refinement has 2 big benefits: 

Here are some refinements to consider: 

Pay-per-click ads: If prices or volume are going in the wrong direction, adjust the targeted keywords. Consider quarterly audits to compare profit against costs. 

SEO: Check SEO dashboard rankings monthly or quarterly to monitor progress and support any set keywords (for instance, a blog about that topic that links back to the relevant page). Though self-Googling is a tempting metric, do so only from an incognito window to avoid skewed search results. 

Print ads, mailers, and billboards: After adding a question to intake to track which channels attracted patients to the practice, tally up the results quarterly to determine which delivered the most patients. Divide the results by the cost. Consider moving money away from the investments that aren’t paying off to double down on the ones that are. 

Reviews: Positive, frequent 4- and 5-star reviews across different review sites are important for reputation management. If numbers are lagging or stagnant month over month, it might be time to consider automating review capture or finding more ways to ask patients during or immediately after their appointments. 

The more sophisticated a marketing strategy, the harder it is to measure and understand. Tracking analytics is time-consuming but critical to forecasting success and investing well. 

Setting up dashboards is an important part of tracking. On the crude end, tracking might consist of a spreadsheet with some input fields and formulas for comparison. For instance, a practice might track unique website visits every month and include a formula that shows how month-over-month and year-over-year numbers, because numbers don’t mean much without a baseline. Or, tracking might involve charts that break down channel success after entering numbers for organic and paid traffic. 

Basic directional data is better than nothing. Yet creating these spreadsheets and keeping them up to date can take hours of manual work. Adding in revenue information adds a layer of complexity, though the result is much more useful. 

Automated marketing dashboards provide a more sophisticated view of every investment and associated revenue, as well as other indicators (like patient reviews across every site), and may be worth it for the time savings alone. 

In any case, the time spent up front on standardizing the process and cadence will build consistency and efficacy in the long run. 

Retaining patients, engaging them in timely care, and minimizing provider downtime can be the most effective levers a practice can pull. The Intake’s in-depth article Patient scheduling and retention tactics that keep your calendar full can help a practice maximize income.