If what you’re doing to grow your practice is not working anymore or not working as well as it used to, this list of popular marketing trends guide is for you.
Hi there, it’s Huyen Truong here and welcome to OMD TV the place to be to grow and scale your practice.
The world of consumer demand, technology, and marketing continues to change so it behoves you to change with it to keep up.
There’s a new term called “Smarketing” which sums it up beautifully. You educate yourself and invest in smart marketing efforts that give you better results for less cost. That means more profits for you to do what you like.
If the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that we never really know what’s around the corner. But, we’re a brave crew at OMD so we’re going to make some predictions anyway.
That’s because we’re not stabbing in the dark. We’ve been listening, watching, observing and testing many different marketing strategies. We know what worked last year and we know what’s likely to gain prominence in 2023 and onwards.
So here are 6 marketing predictions for 2023 brought to you by OMD team. If you’re a healthcare professional or medical device company hoping to expand your business in 2023, then we’d strongly encourage you to adopt these particular marketing strategies to propel your business growth.
1. Video is Uber Popular
Videos do a great job at building awareness and are extremely engaging
since a majority of your audience would prefer watching videos about you over reading long copy on your website.
It’s not unique to healthcare but it’s a strategy that all healthcare businesses should adopt. That’s true whether you’re a global device company, a multi-practice megaclinic or a solo practitioner.
Statistics show the strength of video:
- 59% of content marketers use video
- 76% of marketers who invest in video testify to its effectiveness
- 1 in 3 content marketers say video provides the strongest ROI.
Videos educate, entertain and captivate so use them to position you as the expert.
In today’s world of authenticity and transparency, your prospective patients want to know you as a skilled surgeon AND as a real person. That’s what builds your brand.
They want to see you in action and hear what you have to say! These would be patients who are looking for someone they can connect with and video helps with that.
Here’s how to get ahead of the pack in 2023;
- Organise at least two photoshoots and video shoots for your business throughout the year. The OMD team can help ensure these are AHPRA compliant and will generate results for you from online channels. You can check our photography and videography packages in the link in the show note below
- Rather than writing a blog, record a video. It could be a quick 30-second video to engage someone’s attention or communicate short bits of information. Or it could be a longer form educational video (up to 20 mins) going over FAQs of popular procedures
- Or you can do a tour of your office, interview a patient to describe her own journey and story.
2. Trend: Personality Marketing is Hot
You can no longer hide behind a surgical mask and only be the surgeon and your headshot on your website doesn’t cut it anymore.
That’s a great start but you also need to be seen as a human being and a great boss, a devoted family man, a fitness buff, dog lover, philanthropist, weekend pastry chef, or anything else your patients would be interested in knowing about you.
They need to see you in action so to keep it simple, select someone in your office to be the “Roving Reporter”. Their job is to follow you around with an iPad or iPhone to capture moments of “A Day in the Life of a Surgeon” and even on weekends.
You are the content. It’s you preparing for surgery, doing surgery, your post-op visits, consulting with new patients, interacting with staff and so on.
It’s endless content for you since no day is the same and you have an endless stream of patient stories, their journey and their results.
3. Trend: Retention is the New Patient Attraction Strategy
It has become more important than ever to use patient loyalty and retention strategies to grow a practice.
The barrage of marketing messages pummelling prospective patients today leaves them confused, overwhelmed and indecisive.
These factors make attracting new patients to your practice expensive, complicated and frustrating.
It costs 7-12X more to acquire a new patient than to retain an old one and one of the biggest mistakes established practices make is putting all of their resources into new patient leads and ignoring the existing patients who have grown their practice for them.
An easy solution is to set up an automatic system to nurture your current patients who can help you grow your practice by returning, referring, and reviewing.
This prevents your competitors from luring away your patients.
So, here’s the bottom line…
Maintaining relationships with your current patients is the only reliable and predictable strategy that gives you a competitive advantage.
Your current patients grow your revenues for you which brings you cost savings you may have not considered. For example:
- Reduced advertising costs
- Less of your valuable time wasted on price-shoppers who are not likely to book
- Staff time used more productively working with good quality patient leads that convert
- Reduced patient turnover expenses and fewer lost patients to replace
- Increased lifetime value of patients via cross-selling
- Less patients lost to competitors
- More positive word of mouth referrals
If you want to learn more about how to maintain existing patients and increase their referrals, please check out the podcast number #35 – 3 Creative Ways to Boost Existing Patient Referrals
4. Old School Mailing and Faxing Marketing Makes a Come Back
While the challenges continue with privacy laws and google changing their rules regularly, old school mailing and faxing make a comeback.
Nowhere else can you have the 1-on-1 attention of patients as you can with mailing.
Think of your mailing list as a practice money-making asset because it is.
This is the highest quality list of prospective patients you have because they already know, like and trust you and are more open to what you have to say.
Mailing gives you the time and space to get your messages across that you can’t in social media….it’s too fast-paced.
And mailing allows you to segment and personalize. That’s how you convert more of your audience to take action.
There are so many ways to “slice and dice” your message to your patient list who are most likely interested in what you have to say.
This works well especially with referral marketing when you want to reach out to your referral doctors, old school mailing and faxing are the best way to reach them. The question is what to send in these letters to pick their interests?
We have helped a lot of our clients through our unique method called Dream 100 Best Buyer strategy where we define the top referral clinics and work out the content strategy to consistently deliver valuable content with clever small gifts to these referral targets to generate interests and take referral prospects from “I’ve never heard about this clinic” to “I want to refer patients to this clinic”.
If you want to learn more about our Dream 100 Best Buyer strategy for doctor referrals, please reach out to us for a 15 min discovery call which I leave the link in the show note so you can book a time to talk to our team.
5. Trend: User Generated Content (UGC)
This is the holy grail of social media marketing this year and onwards.
Users commenting and sharing your posts not only provide credible social proof for your services, but it is also a great way to boost your SEO.
Your greatest asset is enthusiastic patients willing to rave about you online and share your content with their own followers.
For this year, determine what inspires your audience to share your content with their followers and how can you engage them to create user-generated content.
Building relationships in the digital world is paramount to grow your audience of prospective patients.
TIP: Questions, surveys and contests are great ways to go back and forth with your audience.
6. Trend: Influencer Marketing
This will continue to be popular this year. Why? Because it’s human nature to do what we see others do.
That means when prospective patients are uncertain about what to do, they look to other people around them they trust (or want to be like) such as experts, celebrities, friends, etc.
People also make judgments based on their overall impression of someone. For example:
- We think anything that experts use is great because they are probably more knowledgeable than us in their area of specialization.
- So often we buy products and services endorsed by celebrities because we want to look like them.
- We trust user reviews because they have experienced the product or service already.
Since you probably can’t get a Kardashian to be your celebrity social proof, here’s the next best thing.
Your influencers are also your patients. They may not be a celebrity, but they are happy patients who can authentically relay their experience to other prospective patients.
Start with your patients with a strong social media following.
Have your staff ask your patients about their social followers in a conversational way or check out their stats on Instagram and Facebook and ask them how they got so many followers.
Videotape a Q&A with them so they are more comfortable. Ask them simple questions such as:
- Why did you come to me?
- How do you feel about your result?
- Any advice for others considering this procedure?
TIP: If you want to work with big influencers, there are plenty of influencer marketing platforms (just google it). However, be very clear what they will do for you to market your practice and what they expect in return. And be sure they and their followers match your brand and values.
And here is the last Medical Marketing Trend for this year and onwards: There are no more silver bullets, you must optimize for marginal gains to win
You used to be able to build your practice using only one marketing channel but not anymore.
Insane competition and technology make it harder to stand out, so marketing is now about “marginal gains” from many different marketing channels.
The shift is from focusing on one channel that is your “Holy Grail of marketing” to working on slightly improving each area of your marketing AND your new patient lead process.
It’s about improving your marketing results by making incremental improvements in your processes that add up to big wins overall.
So, rather than focus on new leads only, you also focus on:
- Lead response time
- Callers converting to appointments
- Consultations converting to paid procedures
- Following up on leads that don’t book and
- More Patients returning, referring, and reviewing
This shift in mindset and focus is how you will win in 2023 and beyond.
I invite you to reach out to me if you want to grow your revenues with “Smarketing” to attract more patients without discounting. So you have more income without working harder, more free time and you never again have to worry about attracting a steady stream of cash-paying patients.
Okay. That wraps up this episode. So please do me a favour and subscribe to our channel, so you don’t miss new episodes coming up. And if you feel so inclined, please share this with your staff and colleagues, and then you can always follow us on Social Media.
If you want to talk more about how to sell your services, just book a FREE 15 min discovery call with me via our website at www.onlinemarketingfordoctors.com. https://onlinemarketingfordoctors.com/discovery-call-booking/
Thanks so much and hope to talk to you in our discovery call soon.
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