50 Awesome Marketing Ideas For your Medical Practice Business

As the old saying goes, you shouldn’t put all of your eggs in one basket. Likewise, you shouldn’t stick to just one marketing strategy for your practice, either. Incorporate different elements into your strategy for the best return on your investment.
Below are 50 different ways you can market your practice, grouped by type of effort (including SEO, community outreach, patient communication, etc.). As you read, you’ll find that a lot of these items are interconnected and work very well when combined.
We’re certainly not suggesting that you go out and try all 50 at once (although more power to you if you have the time and resources to do so!). However, this list should give you some ideas of what you can incorporate into your marketing strategy. We’ve also updated this list to give you an idea of the effort and cost it will take to implement all of these suggestions, so you can prioritize your strategy that way.
We hope these suggestions put you well on your way to developing a solid and scalable marketing strategy for your medical practice.

1. Get a website to serve as a central hub of information about your practice.

Research shows that 72% of adults have searched for health information online. This means that if you want to attract new patients, you’ll need to market yourself online. There are lots of different ways you can market yourself online, as you’ll see below, but all of those marketing efforts need to point to one central location, or hub: your website. Don’t have a website? You’ll definitely want to get one if you want to be able to compete with other practices in your area.
Your website is the one location that you can always drive patients to with any of your marketing efforts to give more information. Since it is online, it should also be fairly easy for you to update information about your practice as needed, either through a content management system or your web provider. Though a professional, well-built website is a more costly investment upfront, it will pay off in the long run.
Effort: High in the initial setup, but lower-effort after launch if you have the right solution in place.
Cost: Initial costs can be higher, but a future-proof website solution can help offset future costs.

2. Make sure your website is mobile-friendly to attract patients on mobile devices.

Not only do you need to have a website, but you also need to make sure it’s mobile-friendly. Is it easy to navigate your site on a smartphone or tablet? If not, it’s time to consider getting a responsive, mobile-friendly site. Google has been issuing warnings to sites that aren’t mobile-friendly, saying that these sites may not rank well in search results. We’ve built hundreds of healthcare practice websites at Netwalkers NG. Across all of our websites, we’ve seen an average of 40% of a practice’s online traffic come from mobile phones and tablets. This percentage is often higher in larger metropolitan areas. You certainly don’t want to miss out on that much traffic.
Depending on when your current website was built, you may already have a solution in place for mobile. If you aren’t sure, we definitely recommend checking with your web provider. If you’re considering redesigning or upgrading your website, you should also make sure that the web provider has a plan for mobile. The best option is to use a web provider that uses responsive design, as this will allow your website to adapt to a wide range of screen sizes, auto-fitting the content so that your patients always get the best experience.

Effort: The amount of effort needed can range based on the age of your website and current platform. We recommend choosing an agency that understands responsive design to help reduce the effort needed to keep your website mobile-friendly.
Cost: A mobile-friendly design can be costly if you don’t currently have a good solution in place. Though it may cost more upfront, we recommend moving to a responsive website design to better “future-proof” your website as screen sizes change.

3. Implement SEO best practices to improve your ranking in search engines.

Search engines are constantly evolving, and in order to get a favorable spot in search results, you need to follow the best practices of search engine optimization (SEO). Unfortunately, there are no shortcuts to get to the top of search results, but taking the time to correctly implement SEO practices can pay off in the long run.
Weed out things like low-quality or duplicate content, and avoid using spam tactics like keyword stuffing and link scheming. A good SEO strategy should focus on quality content, local listings, and other, more technical optimization. To really improve your SEO strategy, it’s a good idea to work with someone who specializes in SEO. By working with an expert, you can improve SEO and develop a plan to keep your website optimized as you add and update content.
Effort: The amount of effort can really range based on what you need. Some SEO best practices are a quick fix, but others (like content writing) will require more in-depth work.
Cost: Costs for SEO work can also vary based on what you need. In general, the more in-depth the work, the higher the cost.

4. Create custom content for your website to attract patients seeking specific procedures & services.

Quality custom content should be a part of your SEO plan. You can create custom content to inform patients about your practice, qualifications, procedures, and services. Some practices write this content themselves, but you can also pay for content to help you put content together. Quality content is an important factor in search engine ranking. It shows that you are knowledgeable and an expert in your field, which improves your chances of ranking for relevant searches. For example, a page that explains your expertise in hip replacement and answers common patient questions will improve your chances of showing up in search results when local patients searching for a hip replacement surgeon.
Don’t try any of the “shortcut” tactics we mentioned in #3, though–they could actually hurt your chances of ranking. Instead, create content with your patients in mind; what information do they want and need to know? Search engines are now intuitive enough to figure out whether or not you are providing quality information, so stuffing the content with the keywords you want won’t work. However, if you have well-written content with accurate, descriptive information, search engines will recognize it and award you with a better ranking.
Effort: If your practice plans on writing the content, you will need to dedicate at least a few hours per page to make sure the information is thorough and easy to read. Hiring a content writer can reduce the amount of effort needed on your part.
Cost: You can keep costs down by writing the content yourself. If you want to hire a content writer, an experienced content writing service is more of an investment. For example, our content writing packages start are by medical savvy persons. However, if you are going to pay, it’s paying more money to invest in a content writing service that understands medical practices and the latest SEO standards so that you get an end product that will actually help you achieve your goals.

5. Claim your local listings to help patients find your practice.

Once a patient has decided to schedule an appointment with your practice, he or she will need to know where to find you. This is where local listings come in. If you claim and verify your local listings in search engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo, these search engines will display that information when patients in your area search for you. If your listing doesn’t show up, or your listing information is incorrect, your new patients may have a hard time finding you and get frustrated.
This is something that your practice can manage in-house if desired. It does take some effort up front to get all of your listings claimed and up to date, but maintenance is fairly simple once you get that done. You’ll really only need to check in if you need to change something, or if you get a notification about a user-submitted change. Although many listing services are free, you can also use a paid service if you don’t feel your office has the time to keep up. You can also have a marketing company completely handle the management of your listings. This is a service we offer for all of our clients.

Effort: If you’re managing your listings in-house, it will require some ongoing effort on your part, but listing maintenance will generally not require much of your time. If you use a paid service for listing management, your required effort will be even less.
Cost: Most listing services like Google and Bing maps are free to use.

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6. Optimize your local listings so patients can quickly find the important details about your practice.

Once your listing is claimed and verified, don’t stop there! Fill out as much information as possible to make your listing stand out and improve your chances of showing up in search results. Currently, Google only shows 3 map listings on the first page of search results (and sometimes includes an advertisement for a fourth listing), so it’s important to optimize your listings as much as possible to get that prime placement on the map results.
Add photos of your practice, fill out hours and specialties, and add a short description of your practice. The more information you can give, the better. Google My Business is also constantly rolling out features like user-submitted Q&A functionality, so make sure you stay on top of the latest online listing features so that you can be prepared.
Effort: It will take a bit of effort to optimize your listings and keep up with responses to user-submitted features like Q&A. However, you can also outsource some of this work to a marketing company to ensure your practice stays on top of the latest features.
Cost: If you do this in-house, it won’t cost your practice anything. If you outsource this work to a marketing company, you can expect to pay a monthly fee.

7. Regularly update your website so patients can always get the latest

information about your practice.
If your website contains old, outdated information and potential patients can’t find the information they are looking for, they may get frustrated and move on. It’s important to check for updates periodically to avoid this frustration. If your website has a content management system, it should be relatively easy to make updates to your content. If you aren’t able to make updates on your own, you may have to pay your web developer to make those updates.
In addition to keeping your website content up to date, you also need to keep your site up to speed with the latest technology. If your site is very old, it may not be up to date with all of the latest security and functionality standards. This can create more frustration or distrust among your patients, and
may eventually cause you to lose search engine ranking. In fact, Google Chrome has started marking non-secure websites as “Not Secure” in the browser bar. We suggest going with a website platform that regularly rolls out updates so that your practice’s website always utilizes the latest technology available.
Effort: If you haven’t updated your website in a long time, it may take a good deal of effort to get it up to speed. If you regularly check for updates, you won’t need to spend as much time making updates all at once.
Cost: If your practice’s website has a content management system, updating your content shouldn’t cost you any additional money. If you have your web developer, make changes, that will likely incur some type of fee. If you need more technical updates, like an SSL certificate or other security features, your costs could be higher, depending on what is required of your web developer to make those changes.

8. Start a blog to share helpful tips and information with your patients on your website.

Blogs are a great way to continue adding content to your website on a regular basis. This content should differ from your other website content (see #4). Rather than explaining your procedures and services, you can give health tips (#16), talk about innovations in healthcare, give injury prevention tips, or any other relevant topics your audience would be interested in.
Blogging is more of an advanced strategy we’d recommend trying after tackling things like mobile friendliness, SEO, and improving other content throughout your website. In order for your blog to be successful, you’ll need to tackle these things first.
Effort: A blog can take a considerable amount of effort for your office to maintain. You can hire content writers to help you write your blog content, which would reduce the amount of effort required.
Cost: If your website doesn’t currently have a blog or an easy way to publish content, you may need to budget more upfront to have that functionality added to your website. These costs can range quite a lot depending on your website platform. Hiring content writers will also add to your costs.

9. Help your patients find your website so they know you have an online presence.

This one’s pretty simple: If you have a website or are on social media, let your patients know! They won’t know to look for you if they don’t know you’re out there! Put up “Find us on Facebook” or “Visit our website” signs in your office, and include that information in your marketing materials, too.
Effort: This is a fairly low-effort, easy way to remind patients about your web presence.
Cost: Unless you have to reprint marketing materials or redesign ads, this is a low-cost way to let patients know about your website.

10. Use review sites like Google my business to establish your reputation online.

Review sites like Google my business is becoming increasingly popular among patients. Current or former patients can leave reviews about the quality of care they received at your practice, and new patients will often look at those reviews when researching to find a new doctor. Online reviews are even becoming more prevalent in search results, and may also factor into your search ranking.
If you don’t have time to solicit reviews from patients, you can use a service bulk SMS service that is sent to patients upon discharge with a review link.
Effort: If your office manages your online reviews without the help of any outside tools or companies, you’ll need to put in a considerable amount of effort to keep up. Services like our Reputation Marketing offering can greatly reduce the amount of effort in your practice.
Cost: Claiming and maintaining online review profiles is free. If you choose to use a Reputation Marketing company to manage your online reviews, costs can start around 50000 NGN/month. However, if online reviews are an issue for your practice, it’s worth budgeting for a professional service to help you.

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11. Respond to online comments & reviews to show patients that you care about what they have to say.

Review sites and social media pages allow other users to leave reviews and comment on your posts. Don’t just ignore those comments! This opens up the door for you to engage with your patients. It could be as simple as thanking a patient for a positive review, or you could engage in a conversation.
You shouldn’t ignore negative reviews, either. Respond in a professional, well-thought-out way, and provide a way for the patient to resolve the issue with you offline. Even if you have some negative responses, if other potential patients see that you have taken the time to address those concerns, it could help to quell some doubts about your practice. Our Reputation Marketing service even helps you keep track of negative reviews so that you can respond right away.
Effort: Depending on the number of responses you get, this could be a high-effort undertaking. However, it’s worth the effort if people are responding to your posts–it means you’re doing a good job with your social media. Also, responding to negative reviews shows patients that you care about their experience.
Cost: Responding to posts and reviews won’t cost you anything.

12. Get patient testimonials to reinforce your marketing messages.

Patient testimonials are a great addition to your website. Testimonials show the success stories of patients under your care, which can be reassuring to new patients.
You can make it easy for patients to submit testimonials via a form on your website. We also recommend placing relevant quotes from your testimonials throughout your website and marketing materials to reinforce your marketing (just make sure you have the right permissions in place with your patients before doing so).
Effort: You’ll need to monitor your testimonials and take some time to find the right quotes to use in other marketing content, but overall, this is a low effort on your practice’s part.
Cost: If your website doesn’t have the capability to allow for testimonial submissions, you’ll probably need to pay your web developer to get that setup. However, it’s typically the most cost-effective and time-conscious way to collect and share patient testimonials on your website.

Section 2: Patient Experience & Communication

By improving your communication with current patients and working to provide the best experience possible, you can make a lasting impression. When patients are happy with your practice, they will recommend you to friends and family who need your services. Word-of-mouth is a powerful tool, and the right patient experience and communication efforts can ensure that your patients will sing your praises.

13. Try out email & SMS marketing to stay in touch with your patients on a regular basis.

Email marketing is a great way to communicate with your patients and can be very beneficial to your practice. You can use email to send out routine information like appointment reminders, but you can also use email to send out marketing materials like newsletters (#15), upcoming events, or health tips (#16). When your patient’s opt-in to email newsletters or health tips, it gives you another way to keep communicating with your patients even if they don’t need to visit your office regularly (just be sure to remove them from your lists if they request to be removed).
Bulk SMS marketing: SMS still remains one of the most efficient mediums to reach a wider audience but having to type out SMS on phone is tedious and expensive. Thanks to bulk SMS services which makes sending these SMS easier, cheaper, and can be done from even a computer. It has the highest open rate and not limited by internet connection. Your practice can schedule SMS such as season greetings, birthday greetings, service offerings, appointment reminders, follow-ups, etc. Bulk SMS apps are packed with mouth-watering offerings to make your marketing hassle-free and worthwhile.
Email marketing systems like Constant Contact and MailChimp also allow you to target your audience so you only send emails to people who can use the information you are sending out, and you can automate your messages so the actual sending process doesn’t take up a lot of your time.
Effort: Tools like Constant Contact and MailChimp can help you save time with sending out your emails, but this method is high-effort in terms of putting your messages together. Again, you can always outsource the work to a marketing company if this is something you want to try, but don’t have the time to get it done.
Bulk SMS can be quite easy if you know your way around it but will need your time to compose, schedule SMS and organize who needs to send a kind of message.
Cost: You can expect to pay a monthly fee for an email marketing service, which can vary based on the size of your email lists and the number of emails you plan on sending out. If you hire a marketing
a company that also puts together newsletter content for you, you can expect higher monthly costs.
Bulk SMS is charged most times per SMS sent. The cost might range from 0.50NGN to 4 NGN depending on the number of SMS units bought.

14. Don’t forget about direct mail, though – you can grab patients’ attention there, too.

In a world where we are used to using email for our day-to-day communications, direct mail can make an impact–as long as you use it thoughtfully. When a new patient comes to your practice, send out a “Welcome to the Practice” letter. Also, since you have your patients’ birthdays on file, you can send out birthday cards. Appointment reminders for upcoming checkups can also be sent via direct mail. Small, personal touches like this will really stand out to your patients and make them feel welcome in your practice.
Effort: It will take some effort on your practice’s part to keep track of your mailing list and when to send out these different mailers. Often, postcards can be mass-printed so that you just have to attach an address label, which saves you some time.
Cost: You’ll have to budget for the cost of printing the necessary materials and pay for postage. Often, you can get a better deal if you print these items in bulk, but getting these postcards designed may cost a bit more upfront as compared to reprintings.

15. Send out newsletters (email, print, or both) to stay in contact with patients on a regular basis.

Newsletters are a great way to keep your patients informed. Your newsletter may include news articles related to different conditions you treat, health tips (#16), articles from your blog (#8), events in the community (#45), or a combination of those items. You may have to try out different types of content to figure out what works for your practice or conduct a survey (#22) to find out which types of content patients want to read.
If you do email marketing (#13) in a system like MailChimp or Constant Contact, you can create newsletter templates to expedite the process of getting the newsletter sent out. If you have enough demand and the resources to do it, you can also create a print version of your newsletter and mail it out to patients or keep some copies in your office for patients to pick up. Just remember, whether you’re sending newsletters to patients via email or regular mail, you’ll only want to send them to those who opt into the service. No use in wasting your time and resources on something a patient doesn’t want.
Effort: This marketing strategy is definitely higher effort unless you are able to work with a marketing company that can help you put together your newsletter.
Cost: Whether you use email or direct mail to send out your newsletters, you can expect to pay for this marketing effort on a monthly basis. Email may be a more cost-effective option than direct mail, though if more patients read the printed newsletter, then it makes sense to go with the print newsletter instead. Outsourcing the work will also add to your monthly costs.

16. Give out health tips to show patients you care about their health.

By giving out health tips, you are reassuring patients that you care about their wellbeing, even when they don’t need to come into your office. This can be helpful in building trust with your patients and retaining your current patients. You can send out health tips in a number of places: on social media (#35), in your newsletter (#15), or in blog posts (#8). You could even try sending out periodic emails with health tips as part of your email marketing plan (#13). You could email a health tip every week to patients who opt-in. You could also try a “Health Tip of the Day” on social media.
Effort: This is definitely a higher-effort marketing strategy, as you’ll need to take time to assemble the tips and share them on various mediums.
Cost: Depending on where you choose to share your health tips, costs could range from free (social media or an already-established blog) to a monthly cost for an email marketing service.

17. Send out appointment reminders to remind patients when to come into your office.

Patients appreciate extra attention like appointment reminders. This also helps ensure that your patients actually show up to their scheduled appointments. If your practice uses a HIPAA-compliant appointment reminder system, or an EHR (#21), it’s quite simple to automate appointment reminders. If you have a smaller practice and the staff available to do it, you could also call your patients to remind them of appointments.
Effort: Automated reminder emails can greatly reduce the amount of effort it takes to send out appointment reminders. Phone calls will definitely take more effort on your staff’s part but may be useful for patients that have missed appointments in the past.
Cost: Hopefully, automated reminders are built into your EMR system. If not, you will probably need to pay a monthly fee to have an automated service send the reminders out. Phone calls may not incur additional costs but can take up additional time in your day.

18. Produce pamphlets and brochures to give patients information about your procedures and services.

Pamphlets and brochures can help to inform patients about your practice, your services, and the conditions you treat. Be sure to incorporate your branding. You can give these brochures to new patients, have them in your office for patients to pick up, add them to care packages (see #27), or give them out at health fairs (#46) and other events. This marketing method may be a good option to have handy for patients who aren’t comfortable using the internet to find healthcare information.
Effort: If your practice puts together the brochure content, it can take a great deal of effort to get it done. There are also companies that specialize in putting together brochures and pamphlets for medical practices, which takes a lot of effort off of your staff.
Cost: The initial creation of the brochures and pamphlets will probably incur a higher cost upfront for design and/or content creation, especially if you are outsourcing the work. You should also budget for reprintings, should you run out of copies.

19. Offer take-away items to reinforce your branding and keep your practice top-of-mind for patients.

Everyone loves a freebie! Send your patients home with items that have your practice’s branding. It doesn’t have to be anything big or expensive–items like pens, magnets, and notepads are all small and relatively inexpensive to produce. Be sure to include your practice’s phone number so they’ll always have it handy. It’s another little reminder about your practice so that patients know who to call when they need healthcare.
Effort: This should be pretty minimal in terms of effort. You’ll need to order these items from a company that makes them. To get the best pricing, you may want to set aside a little time to research different vendors. Other than that, you just need to decide what to order and supply the information needed to get your branding placed on the items.
Cost: Costs can vary depending on what you order and quantities. Taking a little time to research vendors can help keep your costs as low as possible. Many companies also give discounts when you order higher quantities at once.

20. Focus on patient experience and quality of care to retain current patients and attract new patients through word-of-mouth.

Your ultimate goal as a practice should be to provide the best care possible to your patients. Other marketing efforts can help you get patients in the door, but if you want them to stay and recommend you to others, you have to make sure that every aspect of care is of the highest quality possible. Remember, word-of-mouth is a powerful tool–give your patients an experience that they’ll want to tell others
about. It may be helpful to use patient surveys (#22) to learn more about what patients think of the experience at your practice.
Effort: Hopefully, this is already a big focus for your practice, and it won’t require much additional effort on your part. If not, it’s an effort absolutely worth making.
Cost: Patient experience doesn’t necessarily cost your practice extra money unless you really need to overhaul your current processes.

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We are Netwalkers NG. Software and digital marketing agency in Ikorodu – Lagos, Nigeria. We are developers of Clinique Plus EMR software. Robust and sophisticated hospital management software that manages all of your clinical and administrative processes, hence almost eliminate paper works, increase efficiency, reduce the turnaround time, and drastically reduce operational costs. Contact Us Today