How to write a marketing plan for a medical practice

As a healthcare professional, your entire focus has been on patient care. But once you start your own independent practice or clinic, you’ll need to participate in marketing, too.

The challenge in marketing is also its greatest strength — it’s flexible. Your marketing strategy is often customized to your specific needs and stage in your business. The possibilities are endless. Thus, it’s important to have a plan. 

In this article, we’ll review what a marketing plan is, what sections are usually included, and the 5 steps you can take to create a cohesive marketing plan for your medical practice. 

A marketing plan is essentially your strategy for acquiring new patients. And while there are many templates and best practices, marketing plans are fairly flexible. Depending on your practice size and needs, it can be long or short, detailed or concise. Many solo or new practices can even get started with 1-page documents.  

But having a plan matters. 

According to research, businesses that failed to plan adequately:

In contrast, planned projects were often completed under budget and ahead of schedule. And changes to the project’s scope only affected 7% of the budget — half the amount from unplanned endeavors.

This is all to say that having a marketing plan can help you succeed, stick to your budget, and complete tasks on time.

So, what do you need to get started? 

Most marketing plans are divided into 7 sections. You may divide yours into even smaller categories or add new ones, but these core components will ensure you have the essentials ready to start marketing: 

In addition, you’ll want to consider how HIPAA compliance and other potential regulations will interact with your marketing efforts. 

You can draft your healthcare marketing plan on a piece of paper, a word processor, or even with spreadsheets.  

Also referred to as describing your “target audience,” this step is the most important one of all. Every other decision you make will be based on your patient’s expectations.

It can be helpful to list common attributes your current patients have in common. You may even ask them what social media networks they use or how often they read health content online.

For new practices without patients, it’s possible to create a user “persona” to start with. Depending on your specialty, you can reverse engineer your ideal patient. 

Consider: 

Next, you’ll want to combine research into your local market and healthcare digital marketing benchmarks with your patient profiles. These 3 items can help you develop specific and realistic goals. 

For example, a speech therapist might see that other speech therapists are not blogging about specific conditions, but patients seem to self-diagnose and look up tips online. This healthcare professional may decide to post once a week, answering common questions in hopes that they can increase website traffic by 5% and get 4 new patients a month.

Keep in mind that you’ll also want to determine what’s reasonable for you. Marketing is an essential part of business, but you are a healthcare professional first. You may choose to outsource certain tasks to other members of your team, but it’s always important to choose goals you can realistically carry out. 

High-growth medical practices will have a website, social media channels, and streamlined patient communication tools. It’s important to consider how your goals will use all of your available tools and whether or not you may need to invest in new techniques.

For example, you may have a website with a PDF intake form for new patients. But what if you offered online intake forms that patients could submit from home? Could that improve not only the acquisition process but also retention? 

Simply making certain aspects of your patient’s journey easier — such as online appointment scheduling, onboarding, or asking questions — can improve traction. 

As a result, you may want to list some of these sub-tasks you can accomplish that will support your goals. 

No matter the size of your practice, you can always find marketing tactics that will work with your budget. But having a set budget ahead of time will prevent you from overspending and from selecting your strategies wisely. 

How much should you set aside? In healthcare, marketing budgets tend to hover around 7% of patient revenue. But this isn’t a hard or fast rule. Your budget should, however, make sense for what you want to do. It should also factor in potential returns.

Finally, you’ll want a clear way to gauge whether you are meeting your goals in a timely manner. In some cases, this will be as simple as saying you want to complete your medical practice website in 2 months for no more than $8,000. But you’ll likely need more nuanced data as you expand your marketing efforts.  

Some common metrics medical practices choose to track are:

All you need is Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track most of these numbers. For ads, your chosen ad platform will provide statistics for you. 

But the important thing is to do more than list the data. You will want to use these numbers as a way to find out what you should do next in your strategy.

Should you revise the content on your website pages or blog posts? Maybe you should develop a short PDF or lead magnet to help patients better understand your approach. Or maybe you’ll discover that Instagram provides more website traffic than Facebook or Twitter. 

When measuring data, it’s also important to space out reviews. For example, it is unlikely you’ll see immediate results after posting a blog article, adding a new web page, or your first week on Facebook. It’s often better to look at metrics either every month or quarterly for better-quality information. 

Your marketing plan can streamline your strategy, make it easier to decide what tactics to pursue and allow you to define success clearly. Over time, you may find yourself revising or expanding your marketing campaign — which is a good sign. As you grow and learn more about medical marketing, you will discover what works best for you and what doesn’t.

For those itching to get started on their marketing plan, finding out what your potential patients want is the first step. You can get additional insights from Tebra’s 4th Annual Patient Perspectives Survey and discover what patients expect to see on your website, social media, and more.