Marketing your business allows you to target new audiences, heighten brand awareness, boost customer loyalty, and increase your revenue.
These same benefits also apply to medical practices, which can use a wide range of marketing techniques to reach prospective patients, improve patient retention, and establish themselves as leading experts in various fields of healthcare.
So, which marketing strategies yield the best results and make the most effective use of your organization's resources?
This article explores four popular physician marketing strategies for clinics, hospitals, private practices, and other healthcare providers in 2024, including content marketing strategies, advertising with Google Ads, and optimizing your website to rank higher in Google searches.
It also features a guide to some of the leading doctor and dentist review sites, along with quick answers to physician marketing FAQs.
With the right marketing efforts, you can grow your medical practice by:
An effective marketing strategy can not only strengthen your practice, but also boost patient engagement, which has been linked to improved health outcomes.
Let's examine four strategies that healthcare professionals can follow to accomplish these outcomes, which include:
We'll also look at a few statistics that highlight why these approaches work.
Simply creating a web page for your medical practice isn't enough — you also need to make sure it's optimized for search engines like Google.
You should pay particular attention to local SEO, which aims to boost your page rank when people perform location-specific searches.
Here are some examples of ways to improve your SEO:
In addition to performing regular on-page SEO, don't forget to optimize your off-page content as well, like responding to Google reviews, building quality backlinks, and making sure your Google ad campaigns are mobile friendly.
Paid search advertising is also called pay per click (PPC), because each time someone clicks your ad, you pay a small fee. Google's advertising platform, which is aptly named Google Ads, uses a PPC model that allows your business to advertise using both text and video.
Google defines "clickthrough rate" (CTR), or "click rate," as "the number of clicks that your ad receives divided by the number of times your ad is shown: clicks ÷ impressions = CTR."
The higher the CTR, the more often the ad succeeds at convincing people to click on it — and the more opportunities it creates for your practice to acquire new patients.
According to WordStream's research on Google Ads, the average PPC campaign for healthcare services has a CTR of about 3.27%.
That's a higher percentage than most other industries — including e-commerce, employment services, consumer services, industrial services, home goods, legal, and technology — which highlights how much potential this strategy holds for physicians.
The purpose of content marketing is to educate and attract potential customers — or, in this context, patients — by providing interesting, helpful information that's relevant to your product, service, or industry.
For example, you can:
The content you create can be published to your website, shared on social media, and incorporated into your email marketing campaigns.
Creating content gives you an opportunity to work keywords into your website, which are the main indicators that your content will appear on relevant SERPs (search engine result pages).
It also lets you demonstrate your expertise and thought leadership in your field, which is key to building trust with patients.
Finally, content marketing is a great way to increase your organic traffic, or traffic that doesn't come from paid advertising. According to Healthgrades, which is a platform we’ll come back to later, "The top three organic [Google] search results yield average click rates of 28.5%, 15.7%, and 11%, respectively."
One great tip for physician content marketing is to divide your audience into before/during/after procedure questions. Make sure to cover the three aspects to address the reader no matter the stage they are in. For example:
As of 2024, exactly 50% of consumers say they "trust consumer reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends and family" — an increase from 46% the previous year.
Meanwhile, according to research from Press Ganey, 84% of patients will only consider physicians with ratings of 4 stars or higher. And, depending on which survey you check, anywhere from approximately 70% to 90% of patients consider reviews when choosing a new healthcare provider.
With impacts like these, online reviews are a powerful tool for marketing your practice. For example, sharing positive reviews to your website is an effective way to leverage user-generated content (UGC), which consumers trust more than advertisements, according to this research.
Review management is also a key part of local SEO, which we discussed a little earlier.
As Forbes explains, "One of the most important local SEO tactics...is generating genuine positive reviews from your happy patients on your Google Business Profile as well as on sites WebMD, Facebook and Healthgrades. This helps Google consider your healthcare practice as an authority, which can boost your position in the SERPs and attract more potential patients to your website."
Let's look at six physician review sites and apps that your medical practice needs to be monitoring:
Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business) is, without question, the most important review site for physicians to be tracking.
According to BrightLocal, more than 80% of consumers have used Google to research local businesses during the past year, which is nearly twice as many people as the second-most popular platform, Facebook (used by 45% of consumers).
Creating a Google Business Profile lets you edit your practice's information on Google Maps (such as your hours of operation), respond to Google reviews, and answer Q&A's from prospective patients.
Check out some of the best Google review responses for 2024, or explore additional templates for responding to positive Google reviews.
You might also be interested in our guide to Google reviews for doctors.
After Google and Facebook, Yelp is the third most popular review site across industries, with 44% of consumers saying they used the platform to "find business reviews" in 2024.
Yelp reviews are also perceived as highly authentic, with only 23% of consumers claiming to have seen fake reviews on Yelp in 2024 compared to 38% on Google and 40% on Facebook.
Vitals is a physician directory and review site that enables users to rate and review their experience, find doctors using various filters, book appointments online, and more.
There are over 7.8 million reviews of medical services on Vitals, making it one of the largest platforms for doctors.
RateMDs is a website that gives patients the ability to rate and review healthcare providers on a scale of one to five stars.
Over 2.6 million reviews are currently featured on RateMDs.
Zocdoc, which is both a website and a mobile app, combines doctor reviews with appointment scheduling tools and other patient care resources.
Zocdoc doesn't allow physicians to respond to reviews due to concerns about patient privacy. However, it's still an important site to monitor due to its impact and size, currently featuring more than 1.8 million reviews.
Healthgrades, which functions as both a review site and physician directory, currently boasts close to 13 million reviews.
Considering that statistic, maybe it's unsurprising that Healthgrades is ranked as a top review site in BrightLocal's most recent consumer review survey, with 9% of respondents saying they used the platform in 2024.
And here's an even more compelling statistic to consider: according to Healthgrades, "67% of patients who visit Healthgrades physician pages schedule an appointment within a week."
Review management is an essential part of any successful marketing strategy. The issue is that it takes valuable time from your already crowded schedule — and, as your practice continues to grow, so will the volume of reviews your team needs to handle.
With ResponseScribe, which uses AI to deliver personalized responses to your reviewers within minutes, you can spend less time managing reviews — and more time treating patients.
Here's how it works:
Improve patient satisfaction and retention, rank higher in local search results, and generate more website traffic — all while gaining valuable insights about the patient journey. By using our done-for-you review response service, you can reply to feedback faster and get your name seen by more potential patients.
Accelerate the growth of your dental or medical practice. Get started in minutes with your free trial of ResponseScribe.
Done-for-you review response service for local businesses.
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