Your honour’s degree from that prestigious university, your specialisation in oral and maxillofacial surgery, or your residency at that world-famous hospital won’t mean a thing if nobody knows your practice exists.
It can be a real bitter pill to swallow (no pun intended) after all your years of sacrifice to get through med school, but that’s a reality you need to face squarely in the viscerocranium if you want to make your dream of having your own practice, a reality.
Medical Marketing is a Specialisation, Too.
Because while doctors or healthcare providers are experts in their field, they may not necessarily have the degrees or practical experience you need for marketing or advertising.
Even if they did, another reality is that marketing or advertising specifically for healthcare is also a specialisation in itself — after all, you don’t market an auto-repair shop, a bank, or an all-you-can-eat buffet the same way you would an ophthalmologist’s practice or a physiotherapy clinic.
Digital marketing agencies like The Marketing Clinic have the advertising expertise AND have racked up hours of hands-on experience working with medical practices just like yours.
Not only do they know which marketing platforms work, but more importantly, they know the ins and outs of marketing not just for healthcare but healthcare in specific countries. The way you would market an aesthetic clinic in Singapore, for instance, wouldn’t be the same as marketing a clinic offering the exact same services in Australia or the US.
The Challenges of Medical Marketing
Get these specifics wrong, and you could be paying fines and penalties huge enough to put a serious dent in the business growth plans of your practice. Or, it might take you quite a while to get back in the good graces of the marketing platforms you need for reaching new patients.
And even if you play by the book, scrutinising every social media post, search engine ad or blog post at a level that would put a paralegal proofreader to shame — another hard truth is that your marketing materials may not be “creative” enough to catch your target audience’s attention.
There we have the crux of the medical marketing conundrum: play it straight and you stay below the regulatory radar (and penalty-free). Play it “too straight” and new patients could ignore you, altogether.
There’s also the conundrum of just how creative medical marketing can be without sacrificing the professionalism a practice needs to inspire trust in those who could be your new patients. Sure, a viral video might take your vanity metrics through the roof, but would any of those viewers seriously consider going to your clinic for a consultation?
Medical Marketing Doesn’t Stop
If you’ve read this far, hopefully you’ve begun to appreciate the delicate balance you need to achieve between following regulations, attracting followers, and turning those followers into patients. But that balancing act doesn’t stop when someone schedules an appointment with you.
Your marketing or more specifically, your branding efforts need to keep going to make sure that person doesn’t become a no-show statistic, and stays connected with you from the moment they step into your waiting room, all the way up to when they hopefully, leave your clinic a rave review, or better still, tell all their friends and family about you.
Then you’ll need to keep connected until their next visit to your clinic or, at the very least, keep you in the front and centre of their minds for the healthcare services you provide — or better still, the values and quality service that your brand stands for.
Let Medical Marketing Agencies Help
This is a lot to take in, but there’s a lot to be said for giving it to people straight rather than sugarcoating or saying the shot won’t hurt. Nobody ever said a medical career of any kind was easy, and building a practice of your own might make med school look like a holiday in the Alps by comparison.
But that’s why medical marketing agencies are there — to help clinics and healthcare enterprises of any size go head to head with the big-name practice with branches nationwide or the hospital with shareholders and high net-worth donors.
Because in the first place, you got into healthcare to take care of people, you deserve to have medical marketing take care of the rest.
