An online/digital marketing plan is essential in today’s business landscape, especially in the world of healthcare where audiences are not only seeking out information on their own terms, but they are expecting to be provided with relevant, timely and personalized information that suits their needs. If you have a health practice, you also want to receive referrals on an ongoing basis and you want to manage your reputation, making sure that potential patients are aware of what sets your practice apart from the others.

We recently read an article from Ragan’s Health Care Communication News and wanted to share some best practices we feel are important when developing an online marketing plan for your health practice.

  • Set clear and realistic business goals. How many patients do you want? What kind of annual growth do you think is realistic? How many patients do you think will make an appointment as a result of the information on your website? How are you going to measure your business growth? These are a few questions that should be kept in mind when formulating your online marketing plan because they will determine your marketing efforts.
  • Determine who your target audiences are.  Are you interested in treating families? Single professionals? Patients living in a certain area? These factors will also determine your marketing activities.
  • Measure and test. When you are first starting out with your online marketing plan, certain activities are going to be more successful than others and sometimes it takes experimenting to find these things out. Monitoring patient feedback as well as online metrics will help guide your marketing projects. For example, your patients may prefer an electronic monthly newsletter as opposed to daily blog updates in their inbox. By encouraging feedback from patients, you’ll be able to test and further refine your marketing activities so you focus on initiatives that produce the most ROI for your practice.
  • Decide on a budget. Having metrics in mind for how much to spend in order to get certain results will also help determine your online marketing activities for the year.

A campaign can be delivered in multiple ways to your target audience(s) and below are a few examples of what your marketing campaign might include:

  • Blogs
  • Infographics
  • Electronic newsletters
  • Surveys
  • Publishing articles on relevant medical websites

Not every health practice will have the same goals, and it’s important to continue to refine your online marketing plan so that you continue executing campaigns in the way that works best for your practice.

If you’re in healthcare, insurance, technology or other professional services industries, and need help with a PR, marketing or social media campaign, contact Scott Public Relations.

how to best invest your marketing dollars
Like what you’ve read? Follow Scott Public Relations on Facebook , Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and Google+. For convenient blog updates, sign up for the Einsight RSS feed!

(Note: Many internet browser platforms are discontinuing their internal RSS reader. If you are viewing this in Google Chrome the RSS feed will not work properly since they discontinued Google Reader. If you have an independent reader set up already you should be fine. If you do not, may we suggest you look to Digg Reader, AOL Reader, or our personal favorite – Feedly to handle your RSS feeds. Happy reading.)