Everything you need to know for effective healthcare marketing in 2024

This is an exciting time to build your medical practice. Crafting an effective healthcare marketing strategy is more affordable — and crucial — than ever. With tons of tools and strategies available, practices of all sizes can now implement tailored campaigns that make sense for your budget and goals.

But having so many choices can be overwhelming. You might even wonder if investing in marketing is worthwhile, especially on top of patient care. The good news is that quality patient care and effective practice growth aren’t mutually exclusive.

Modern healthcare marketing, particularly digital marketing, is a unique way to attract new patients improving the experience of your current ones. According to Tebra’s 4th annual Patient Perspectives report:

In other words, current and prospective patients expect to be able to reach your practice online. And if they can’t, it could cost you in the highly competitive healthcare sector.

This guide will review everything you need to know to effectively market your healthcare practice, including:

Many physicians and office managers wonder “What is healthcare marketing?” and “Is healthcare marketing different from regular marketing?”

Marketing for a medical practice shares similarities with marketing in other industries, but it also has important differences. One of the biggest considerations in the healthcare industry is compliance. Healthcare providers must adhere to the HIPAA Privacy Rule, the Stark Law, the Anti-Kickback Statute, and many other regulations.

It’s also vital to make sure your practice's website is compliant. You can market your practice in any number of ways, but always be sure that you comply with the legal requirements regarding patient data.

Before you get started with marketing your practice, you’ll need to answer a few questions:

Digital marketing for healthcare providers often gives a bigger bang for your buck than other types of marketing. But you have to do it correctly. Digital marketing is popular because it’s fairly budget-friendly and it's easier to grow and manage than in-person activities.

But before you do anything else with a healthcare marketing plan, it’s essential to define your target audience. For your practice, you'll want to create an ideal customer profile (ICP).

An ICP gives you a way to think about your perfect patient. If you’ve read a few marketing articles, you may think this is the same thing as a “buyer persona.” There's a big difference, however. A buyer persona targets a specific individual, while an ICP targets a desirable demographic for your business. It's more useful for healthcare organizations to develop an ICP.

Building an ICP doesn’t necessarily take a long time. It does, however, require thoughtful reflection about your customer base and your business services. It takes roughly 5 steps:

Pain points are factors that irritate or stress your patients. Many medical practices might assume that the answer is obvious — your patients have an illness or injury, right?

But it’s not that simple. Consider individuals with chronic shoulder dislocations. They need a physical therapist, but they likely have pain points besides their injury. Besides receiving quality healthcare, they want to:

Knowing the pain points can make your communications with patients more effective. You can explore ways to supplement current services or improve care delivery to solve them. When you do, you’ll likely have happier patients, leading to better reviews and referrals.

The point of collecting customer data and building an ICP is to help you better position your practice to attract the right customers. This may highlight growth opportunities or patient needs, but it can also make the marketing process less stressful. A clear, concise ICP makes it easier and faster to decide on the content and graphics that will work for your organization and your audience.

As you attract more new patients and grow your healthcare practice, you may expand your team. Your draft at the start will make communication easier as you delegate your marketing efforts to other practitioners or to administration.

Once you have determined your ICP, it’s time to determine your goals and budget. 

When it comes to objectives, how will you know you’re successful? Success might look like a specific number of referrals, website views, new patient bookings, positive patient reviews, or patients who select a supplemental service. Establish where you are now so you can track any changes over time. 

Then, set time constraints around your goals — for example, 3 months. Adding a time component makes it easier to track your progress and manage your bandwidth. And it gives your plan time to pay off. 

Now we get to a big question: what about budgeting?

Digital marketing is often more affordable than ads in print newspapers or on local TV. In addition, assets like your website and your evergreen blog posts require minimal upkeep, and they can attract patients for years.

On average, most businesses alloted 13.6% of their total budget to marketing in 2023. But whatever you can afford to spend, it’s important that you prioritize your marketing efforts. 

In general, it helps to set up or optimize your long-term, patient-focused digital assets first. For example, you may want to:

There are many other marketing tactics you can use as you grow. You can attend networking meetings, seek guest spots on podcasts, or write articles for a local publication or medical blog.

There are an unlimited number of ways to get creative with marketing your healthcare practice. But some tactics are more than short-term strategies — they become long-term assets.

 Here are 5 proven marketing methods that can help you grow your practice:

Many patients report that a sound website is very important to them when selecting a healthcare provider. When you think about this, it makes sense. Your website is your digital front door. It’s your first impression in the marketplace. And it’s the cornerstone of any digital marketing campaign. 

A high-quality website makes it easy for both new and existing patients to find the information they need. As users become increasingly accustomed to interacting with more and more services online, it also becomes a central component of your patient experience. It puts you among the healthcare innovators.

One goal in customer acquisition is to drive as much relevant traffic — traffic from users who match your patient profile — to your website as possible. You expect that individuals who see your page will book an appointment, but be careful. Posting content on your website that doesn’t relate to your services can attract people who are not your target audience. 

Use your knowledge of healthcare technology and healthcare spending to your advantage. Build a high-conversion website with your end users in mind. This often means creating several informational pages. 

Patients tend to find these medical website pages most important:

In addition, if you offer several services, you may want to offer separate pages for each one. This gives you an opportunity to go into detail, making your services clearer, both for patients and for search engines.

Outside of this framework, it’s also important to ensure that your website is easy to use. To start:

Search engine optimization (SEO) makes it more likely that patients will find your website when they search on Google, Bing, or another search engine. For example, if you are a speech therapist for children based in Los Angeles, good SEO makes it more likely that you’ll appear in a search for “children speech therapist LA.”

This is why marketing professionals will tell you: independent practices can no longer afford to ignore SEO. While patients use Google to investigate their symptoms, they also use it to find practitioners. And the best way to get seen is to invest in local SEO in order to improve your rankings.

To get started with local SEO:

You can also:

Most medical website builders focus on these items when filling out information about a page or image. No coding required. Just remember: medical SEO is an ongoing project that gains traction over time.

Social media is a way to find your patients and publicize your website. How you decide to use social media largely depends on your ideal client and how you want to present yourself. Different practices use different approaches. Consider these questions, for example:

Building a social media presence also takes time. Be sure to post on a variety of platforms and engage with as broad a portion of your potential patients as possible. Posting is important, but engaging is a way to become part of the larger conversation.

Currently, 1 out of 4 millennials follow their doctor on social media. And while many patients don’t follow their healthcare provider, they say that they would if the provider created content regularly.

Today, there are a few different social platforms from which to choose:

Once you decide which platforms to use, it’s time to start to draft content. You don’t necessarily need to post something every day, but what you do post should be interesting and relevant for your patients. 

To create engaging social media content for your medical practice:

Just remember: Never post about specific patients. Data privacy is critical. Sharing anonymous cases or anecdotes may seem like an easy source of content inspiration, but it will erode your patients’ trust. It may even violate HIPAA. Instead, look for trends among multiple patients — their questions, concerns, and goals — and discuss those topics more broadly. Patients will feel a sense of your personalized care, even though your content is written more broadly.

Once you have your website and social media up and running, decide whether to invest in content marketing.

Content marketing focuses on creating blog posts, videos, infographics, and other related items to attract and gain patients. You can publish this content on your website and use snippets of it on social media. You can offer more personalized medical information, help your readers on their patient journey, and offer patient education.

There are 2 main content marketing goals for medical practices:

One of the most common methods for medical marketing is to publish a blog on your website. For example, if you’re a psychiatrist, your posts might discuss:

The sky's the limit. But for content marketing to work, you need to have a strategy, which involves researching and tying your content to SEO keywords and phrases. Doing this thoroughly and carefully will attract more traffic to your website. Often, patients find your content from either social media or Google.

It also builds trust and patient satisfaction. Patients can scan through articles and see your expertise, so they are more likely to view your practice as an authority — especially if other practices in your area aren’t providing the same experience.

Before diving into the numbers, remember that content is a long-term asset. When you create content — whether you make it or pay someone else to do so — it contributes to your ever-growing archive for months or even years. It’s a long-term investment. Consistent marketing will snowball your efforts.

In other words, if you optimize your site and content, you will progressively get more and more website traffic and, eventually, more patients. 

What should your budget be for marketing, and specifically for content marketing and website design? That depends on the size of your practice and on your needs. It is possible to fit content marketing into just about every budget. If you’re running a new practice and only have a handful of patients or clients, you will likely create most of the content yourself.

Keep in mind that as you gain patients, it is likely more cost effective to hire a medical marketing expert or company to take on these content tasks so you can focus more on patient operations and patient care.

Repurposing and reposting content, particularly on social media, can be a way to drive traffic and engagement and to appear to be creating more than you actually are.

How to repurpose longform medical content

For example, say you paid an expert $2,000 for a 3,000-word blog post about gallbladder diseases. The next time you want to talk about gallbladder diseases, you can break the topic down into smaller chunks for social media posts, email, and a short video. You can repost all these smaller chunks across your marketing channels, highlighting different pieces of information. 

This makes it easier to keep up with your digital marketing, since you can reuse the same long piece of content multiple times.

How to repurpose short-form medical content

Let’s say you have a really popular TikTok video about anxiety coping skills. You can write a blog post about that topic, post it on your website, and include the original TikTok video. You may even be able to use parts of the new article as the basis for a second or third video.

Patient reviews can be a prime factor when prospective patients are deciding on visiting a doctor. However, asking for reviews can feel uncomfortable. After all, your job is to help people. And if you do your job, patients will post reviews on their own, right?

The problem is that patients are often busy. They might not realize that they can share a positive experience with others. Or they might forget to do it. However, when people have a bad experience, they often feel motivated to let everyone know.

When you ask for patient reviews proactively, you highlight your investment in a positive customer experience and you potentially get ahead of any negative reviews.

 To help you in making that ask, here are some best practices for encouraging reputation-boosting reviews:

It’s also important to respond promptly to any negative feedback. In fact, Tebra’s 4th annual Patient Perspectives report found that 64% of patients said they would return to a practice if it addressed their negative review.

The biggest obstacle to getting more reviews is the ability to follow up with patients. Many physicians and healthcare providers simply don’t have the time to check in with patients and ask for reviews. 

Automating the patient feedback process and adding the request to your workflow can make it manageable. For example, you can add a review link to your patient emails and text messages. This link should open to a page where they can leave their review. 

You may even decide to set up an automated email sequence for follow-ups, just in case a patient forgets. 

Once you have reviews, you must manage them and respond to eventual negative comments. A platform that consolidates your online reputation management makes this easier because you can do everything in one place. 

Once you’ve laid the groundwork for your marketing strategy, you can improve it over time following these 5 tips:

You’ll often discover the best marketing topics by communicating with your patients. Keep track of patient questions and needs and build a record of responding quickly. Provide a good user experience and you'll receive good reviews. You can also apply what you learn through these communication channels to create content. 

In particular, you can add automated or online features to your operations that improve your marketing, patient experience and overall efficiency. These can include:

All of these can reduce your workload while also complementing your marketing efforts. 

Digital marketing — including paid social media advertising — isn’t just cost-effective. You can customize your campaign to make sense with your practice and schedule. At the same time, you can turn digital marketing on and off as you see fit. And the best part is this: you can get clear data from your campaigns. 

Whether you focus on social media, content, or both, you can set up analytics to evaluate your efforts. For example, you can track how many people visit your site, how long they stay, and whether they book an appointment. Depending on the platform, you can also track how many people see your social posts and which topics perform better. 

You can use data to improve your decisions around marketing, reduce costs, and improve customer acquisition.

You can use data to improve your decisions around marketing, reduce costs, and improve customer acquisition.

When you ask for patient reviews proactively, you highlight your investment in a positive customer experience and you potentially get ahead of any negative reviews.

 To help you in making that ask, here are some best practices for encouraging reputation-boosting reviews:

It’s also important to respond promptly to any negative feedback. In fact, Tebra’s 4th annual Patient Perspectives report found that 64% of patients said they would return to a practice if it addressed their negative review.

The biggest obstacle to getting more reviews is the ability to follow up with patients. Many physicians and healthcare providers simply don’t have the time to check in with patients and ask for reviews. 

Automating the patient feedback process and adding the request to your workflow can make it manageable. For example, you can add a review link to your patient emails and text messages. This link should open to a page where they can leave their review. 

You may even decide to set up an automated email sequence for follow-ups, just in case a patient forgets. 

Once you have reviews, you must manage them and respond to eventual negative comments. A platform that consolidates your online reputation management makes this easier because you can do everything in one place. 

Once you’ve laid the groundwork for your marketing strategy, you can improve it over time following these 5 tips:

You’ll often discover the best marketing topics by communicating with your patients. Keep track of patient questions and needs and build a record of responding quickly. Provide a good user experience and you'll receive good reviews. You can also apply what you learn through these communication channels to create content. 

In particular, you can add automated or online features to your operations that improve your marketing, patient experience and overall efficiency. These can include:

All of these can reduce your workload while also complementing your marketing efforts. 

Digital marketing — including paid social media advertising — isn’t just cost-effective. You can customize your campaign to make sense with your practice and schedule. At the same time, you can turn digital marketing on and off as you see fit. And the best part is this: you can get clear data from your campaigns. 

Whether you focus on social media, content, or both, you can set up analytics to evaluate your efforts. For example, you can track how many people visit your site, how long they stay, and whether they book an appointment. Depending on the platform, you can also track how many people see your social posts and which topics perform better. 

You can use data to improve your decisions around marketing, reduce costs, and improve customer acquisition.

The more regularly you post, and the more you engage with others on the platform, the more likely it is that you’ll reach a growing audience. 

As you continue to create content and monitor the results, you may find you need to tweak your marketing strategies. 

Your content might resonate more on TikTok than on LinkedIn, or you might find that posts about best practices for post-surgery do better than general posts about certain conditions. 

Ways to refine and adjust your marketing strategies:

Platforms and tools change constantly. Marketing is open to creativity. You can always find cost-effective ways to market your practice, from collaborations with local businesses and other practices to offering a Q&A session about your specialty. 

And so long as you have a clear ICP, your customized marketing strategy, your SEO-optimized website, and social channels with consistent content, you have a firm foundation on which to build. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars a month to get clients — you can find a marketing strategy that works with your budget.

Healthcare marketing for growth requires a small investment over time, and it offers the potential for big results.