3 Marketing Strategies Your Practice Needs Now to Accelerate Through COVID

Sep 1, 2020 | Marketing

1. Reach People Searching For Your Products and Services

If you haven’t been actively pursuing Local SEO to your increase organic results in search and enhance visibility in maps, we recommend you boost near-term results with a paid search program. Having a strong Local SEO strategy is critical for your practice, but organic search can be inconsistent and takes time to generate results. There are no guarantees where you will be ranked in search results, because search engines are always changing their ranking factors, which can severely affect where you fall. Paid search marketing can help ensure your practice always has a consistent presence in search results, because you are directly choosing the keywords and search terms you want to target. Essentially, with paid search, you are in almost complete control of where and when your ads show up.

A minimal investment can significantly improve your ability to be found as potential patients begin emerging from their homes and seek delayed treatment.

Search volumes for related terms like “audiologist” are starting to increase in volume and get back to normal levels.  We are seeing volumes get back to 70% of the past 12 month high which happened back in December.

audiologist term trend

 

Additionally with Local SEO it can be a challenge to reach an audience outside of the city your business is located in. If you are a practice that wants to reach new patients outside the actual city you are located in, it can be difficult to do so with local organic search listings. The reason for this is that one of the biggest search ranking factors for local search engine optimization (SEO) is the actual location of the searcher and the practice itself. If your practice is located in Vancouver, Wash., and you are trying to reach patients in neighboring cities like Camas or Battle Ground, it is going to be difficult for your practice to compete with clinics physically located in those cities. Paid search marketing will allow practices to target potential patients in the exact locations they want to reach.

 

radius-targeting-in-google

Recommended Action: Paid Search Marketing
 

2. Nurture Your Existing Database

There’s no better time than right now to activate your existing database. Thanks to our new stay-at-home lifestyles, email-open rates have increased 20% year-over-year! This means your audience is now more receptive than ever to your message. They want to know how your business is adapting and responding, and most importantly, that you’re open and ready for them to return!

Here are 6 email marketing best practices when running a campaign.

Set Clear Goals For Your Email Marketing Campaign: Eager to get patients to review your practice online? Want to increase monthly appointments or referrals to your business? Every successful campaign starts with a purpose — an endgame — so it’s important to know yours before sending a single email or otherwise investing time, labor, and money in the process.

Use a Professional Email Marketing Platform: It’s possible to launch a DIY email campaign using a basic email service such as Google’s Gmail, but nothing takes the place of higher-level platforms that are specially designed for email marketing, let you create templates with a more sophisticated look and feel, and reduce the risk of being labeled a spammer.

Rock the Subject Line: Other than the sender name, what’s the first thing you notice in an email? Likely the subject line. Marketing emails live and die by this essential element, so you can’t afford to give it short shrift.

Deliver Good Email Marketing Content: Getting patients and prospects to open your email is more than half the battle, but how do you keep their attention once you’ve cleared that hurdle? It’s all about providing timely, relevant content that helps build a connection. That may involve providing lists of important things that might be beneficial to the reader, advises Audigy’s Senior Email Marketing Manager Kate Bluhm, or it might concern a new product or service your business is offering.

Keep Testing and Improving: Technology evolves, consumer habits change, and audiences can sometimes prove fickle, which makes analyzing your marketing campaign results and keeping an eye on trends an important part of staying atop your email game. As mentioned earlier, goal-setting helps determine what to measure in evaluating results — the number of registrants for an event or the increase in monthly appointments, for example — but a key measurement for any email campaign is the open rate, which tracks the percentage of recipients who opened the message.

Recommended Action: Audigy Marketing Automation Program
 

3. Engage With Your Patients and Reach New Patients Via Social Media

With many in-person communications moving to a virtual platform, now is the time to focus on promoting your business through social media. Social media is a low-cost marketing activity that gives you an opportunity to create a community and connect with current and future patients by sharing tips and tricks, company news, videos, photos, etc. You can also be extremely targeted in who you want to reach with the vast advertising opportunities Facebook and Instagram offer. Two such targeting options are by location and demographics.

Location Targeting on Facebook and Instagram: Through city, ZIP code, or dropped pin, you can select exactly which area of the country will see your content pushed through to their timelines. Whether these people live there or are just passing through (or both), anyone within your selected area will potentially view your ad within their newsfeeds. In addition, Facebook allows targeting by age, gender, and language. And at the end of your demographics tuning, you have the chance to customize in even more detail. This is where the whole process seems to reach full circle.

facebook-geo-targeting-options

Demographic Targeting on Facebook and Instagram: Whether you like it or not, if you use Facebook, there is a vivid and monstrous consumer profile built around you. And if that doesn’t make you feel special enough, consider that it may very well be the most complete and comprehensive data set on earth regarding you as a consumer. This includes everything you’ve already provided through your profile and page “likes,” any external webpage you’ve loaded with a “like” or “share” button while logged in, and every other inexplicable piece of information scoured by third-party data-aggregating firms. For better or worse, Facebook compiles this astronomical amount of information into a mind-bogglingly complex model formulated for your eyes only.

Oh, and did we mention that having a strong social media presence may help you boost your search engine rankings?

Recommended Actions: Audigy Social Media Management and Facebook Advertising