As with all businesses, medical practices face competition from other offices in their area and must differentiate themselves by portraying value and quality to their prospective clients. Your practice’s marketing plan must be centered on helping prospective and current patients best understand how your practice works, what services you provide, and act as a non-invasive way to bring new procedures or products to the attention of your clients. In a 2009 study, Forrester Research showed that almost 1/3rd of the population in the United States now visits a social network at least once per month. The use of Social Media outlets like Facebook, or collaboration tools like blogs or wikis, have provided a place for patients to learn about your practice and decide on the value and quality of your company before they become a patient. These conversations and decisions are taking place whether your practice personally participates or not. With the use of Social Media doubling since 2007, medical practices should be looking for ways to include themselves in the conversation.
Social Media as part of your marketing plan is used by companies to change mindsets, reinforce their practice’s “brand”, and extend their organizational goals. Social Media should always be a complementary part of your marketing mix and your practice should begin by considering your total marketing goals before creating your Social Media presence. If your practice already has a website that contains educational materials, use your Social Media apps to drive traffic to this already present content. When you are offering a new product or service that your patients might not fully understand, create a long-term strategy to educate them about the product or service by posting updates with a new piece of information each time.
Your selection of Social Media applications should be used to apply the practice’s marketing goals while targeting distinct social communities. Your patients currently meet in different online spaces where they learn about, comment on, and influence others opinions about products and services they personally care about. With over 200 different Social Media applications to start your conversation from, it is important to understand what applications make the most sense for your practice. Having a Facebook fanpage so you can update your patients on what is going on at the practice might make sense for some, while having a YouTube account and posting educational videos about procedures might be more beneficial to others. Using your Twitter account to link your latest press releases to, or the use of educational blogs about specific ailments, is a quick and easy way to spread awareness of your practice’s products and services. Your Social Media goals should focus on corporate awareness, public relations duties, and a recognizable increase in patients and improved search engine rankings for your company’s website.
As with most marketing initiatives, reaching your Social Media marketing goals requires commitment and a desire to engage your end client. What makes Social Media different from other marketing tools is that it requires dedicated manpower to maintain. Once a website has been created, it will continue to bring information to prospective and current clients when that patient reviews your corporate site. Newspaper, radio, and television ads need only to be created once and then set against an automated schedule that will provide results assuming your message is powerful enough. On the average, a successful Social Media campaign requires someone to be committed to managing the practice’s Social Media strategy for at least 1-2 hours per day. With that being said, it is important that your employees don’t allow Social Media to become a distraction from their day-to-day responsibilities and kill their productivity. The need for dedicated manpower is why it is important to have top level and employee buy-in in order to have contributors for content.
A solid user policy must be set in place to ensure everyone understands the boundaries of Social Media tools while at work. Your Marketing team lead should develop a policy explaining your practice’s guidelines for the use and integration of Social Media. This step becomes more important when multiple people are responsible for updating and contributing to the practice’s Social Media sites. The policy should describe the Social Media tools that are acceptable for use at work, what is appropriate or inappropriate to discuss through the practices’ site, and even what to do in the case of discovery of bad publicity about the practice from Social Media sites. Each practice, as part of their Social Media strategy needs to define what your company culture is and what kind of participation can be expected from your staff.
Finally, a way to measure the results of your Social Media efforts need to be put in place so that changes to the overall marketing plan can be adjusted. There are range of paid analytics tools, like Omniture, and free analytics tools, like Google Analytics, Quantcast or YouTube Analytics, can be implemented by your inhouse marketing team to review the fruits of your efforts. Whether you are looking to increase patient traffic to your office, enhance your reputation in the community, or just want to supplement your other marketing efforts, a benchmark needs to be set.
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