PATIENT PERSONA
Your ideal current and prospective patient, their demographics, location, habits, job, income status, family status, influencers and detractors.
COMPETITORS
Examine the branding and the overall reach of competitors. Review their ratings, websites, logos, paid promotion efforts and other marketing methods as well as major differentiators.
UNIQUE QUALITIES
Define the healthcare professional qualities and benefits with emphasis to personal attributes as well as research and clinical interests.
MISSION STATEMENT
Develop a two sentence mission statement that sets the healthcare professional apart from the competition, reflects the entire branding process and resonates to the target patient audience.
BRAND VOICE
Define the brand tone of voice, i.e. personable vs formal, established vs modern, fun vs serious, accessible vs inclusive and develop the brand story and messaging.
LOGO AND CREATIVE
Develop several options of logo variations, fonts, color palette, tag lines, iconography, typography and the creative brand guidelines to ensure consistency across media.
1. Your Brand
What is it
Your Brand is a collection of attributes describing who you are and why patients should care about it.
Why it is important
Branding ensures that your "image" is attractive and consistent across your website, social media, email outreach, ads, listings.
Consistency ensures that patients remember your core values and unique qualities.
What happens without it
Lack of brand guidelines may lead to brand confusion and, when it comes to advertising, wasted dollars to unsuccessful promotion efforts.
What you should do about it
If you never went through the branding exercise, it does not mean that you have to start from scratch. A brief strategy call with PHARMED can help you outline your current brand, align your messaging and significantly improve your marketing efforts.
WORLD CLASS DESIGN
Fluid animated design, lightweight pages, custom videos and graphics, full mobile optimization, branding integration.
ONLINE FORMS
Digital intake forms, online registration, online appointment booking, online COVID-19 screening, online invoicing and payment portal, online store.
TELEMEDICINE
Fully integrated appointment booking, online payment and telemedicine system for existing and new patients
COMPLIANCE
HIPAA compliance must be implemented on all healthcare websites that facilitate patient - doctor informational exchange. ADA compliance is becoming mandatory and should be a standard component of medical websites.
CONTENT
Medical website content ought to be informational, balanced, clear and scientifically sound. Standard components are SEO, Blog, online illustrated guides for patients.
UPDATES
Develop several options of logo variations, fonts, color palette, tag lines, iconography, typography and the creative brand guidelines to ensure consistency across media.
2. Your Website
What is it
Your website is the projection of your physical office into the digital space.
Why it is important
New and existing patients will see your website before they book an appointment to see you. Nowadays the expectations of a website are high. A cutting edge website design is not "nice to have" its "must have".
Furthermore your website is the door to your physical practice. It should be kept open, in other words, your website design should convert visitors to appointments.
What happens without it
An outdated or badly designed website will deter patients from visiting you.
What you should do about it
Request a free access to our tools from the PHARMED client portal and see what you may be missing. Most importantly see what your competition does.
PATIENT PERSONA AND CHANNEL SELECTION
You start to realize now how branding integrates with the rest of your online presence. The detailed patient persona you created will inform the social media channel selection
CONTENT BANK DEVELOPMENT
Chose the topics you are expert on and excel on your communications by posting frequently credible and medically sound content.
INTERACT WITH YOUR FOLLOWERS
Replying to questions and comments posted by your followers is vital as it increases your visibility: Social media channel artificial intelligence algorithms will organically boost your reach if your media channels show significant engagement.
SET METRICS AND TRACK PERFORMANCE
Familiarize yourself with the build-in social media tools as well as with external, third party vendors that provide analytics for your social media performance.
INTEGRATE YOUR SOCIAL MEDIA
Integrate the various aspects of your online presence to achieve the highest results. Add social media channel links to your website and your listings.
NETWORK
Develop professional collaboration with influencers and relevant social media accounts to co-promote your posts and expand your reach beyond your current following.
3. Your Social Media
What is it
Social media is where your patients spend 10-40% of their time depending on their age and other demographics.
Why it is important
Social Media management ensures that you meet your patients where they hang out. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Youtube and other social media channels offer unique opportunities for a sound medical voice that will boost your reputation and directly translate to more office appointments.
What happens without it
Your competition is on social media, targeting patients. It will be an insidious slow process of taking over your patients unless you amplify your online voice.
What you should do about it
Based on the patient persona that you created during the branding process, identify the social media channels where your patients are, create your branded accounts and keep in touch with your audience at lease three times per week.
GOOGLE MY BUSINESS
The most important directory today. When patients look for medical care they primarily use Google search. Your Google my Business listing is vital for your local success and maintaining it requires weekly updates and posts.
YELP
Yelp's popularity for consumer reviews has been stable across years and both the quality and the number of reviews are shown on google searches, making it a must-go platform for your medical practice.
ZOCDOC
ZocDoc claims a leading position for doctor reviews and is the go-to platform for patients when they are looking for medical care. ZocDoc charges a hefty amount to physicians for their listing, as well as for every new patient who books an appointment through their platform. We strongly recommend against the use of ZocDoc and we will always emphasize the need for doctors to build their own online brand equity instead of depending on a third platform for their patients.
WEBMD + VITALS.COM
The platform that dominates search results for all medical related queries and a major listing directory for USA doctors. Despite the wide critisism against it's symptom checking model, it is an important tool for your online reputation.
HEALTHGRADES
A physician listing and review platform with controversial authority and a large number of BBB complains that remains a popular source for patients when looking for a provider.
OTHER PLATFORMS AND AUTOMATION
With dozens more platforms to list your practice you need an automated solution that can update your business listing and harness the opportunity to stand out on search results.
4. Your Listings
What are they
In the past it was the yellow pages. Now there are almost one hundred different listing directories that you can be present.
Why are they important
Although the vast majority of patients use Google search or Bing to find medical services, one needs to be aware that google pulls information not only from its own listings but from a variety of sources.
ZocDoc, Google my business, Yelp, Facebook pages, Healthgrades, WebMD, Doccafe and at least a dozen more listing directories can offer to you a valuable resource for discoverability.
What happens without them
If you are not listed on all major directories there is a smaller chance for a patient to find you and you only depend on the word of mouth reputation.
What you should do about it
Request a free access to our tools from the PHARMED client portal and see what you may be missing. Most importantly see what your competition does.
Ready to master your online presence?
Register with PHARMED for free and get access to your personalized report, DIY online tools and competitive intelligence about your practice.
CHANNEL SELECTION
Email outreach, Google search ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Youtube, Bing... For each type of patient journey, ad or promotion goal there is a good reason to chose one channel over another. Read on to find out why.
EMAIL OUTREACH
Usually forgotten, emailing regularly your current patients will help your retention rates and patient loyalty as well as provide valuable advice for their condition. In conjunction with website subscription forms it is also an effective tool for acquiring new patients.
GOOGE SEARCH ADS
The best platform for lead generation (appointment bookings) and brand awareness as well as promotions, store products and services. Superior to other ad platforms especially when the patient journey presents with a bottleneck, e.g. patient has a condition but is "currently" unwell and seeking for treatment.
For brand awareness and consideration in conjunction with your social media efforts, Facebook is an excellent choice to laser target patient demographics, especially for ages 30 years and above.
Instagram ads are an excellent choice for increasing your followers and driving traffic to your website and other online channels in order to achieve brand awareness and maintain relationships with your patients and greater audience.
Mainly for increasing your B2B professional network, form partnerships with adjunct specialties, co-promote and share referrals. The best B2B advertising platform today.
5. Your Advertisements
What is it
Everything we discussed so far, your website, your social posts or your listings will get a minor attention unless you promote them. To give you an idea, if you have 1000 followers on instagram and you create a post, about 100 of them will see it. If you promote your post for just $5 you will get 2000-4000 views.
Why it is important
A medically sound, compliant and balanced online post, or a medical advertisement are pieces that require medical marketing expertise, resources and time. Promoting a medical post means that we increase the number of potential patients who will see it and maximize the return of investment.
What happens without it
Less potential patients will know about you or consider to book an appointment with you. Needless to say that your competition may be using online promotion.
What you should do about it
Online promotion is complex and requires all the other elements of digital presence to be in place. Without expert help you will be wasting most of your advertising budget. Consider getting a trusted agency such as PHARMED to help.
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