Have you found that your clinic’s marketing strategy has not been working? Maybe you’ve spent some money on some Facebook or Google advertising, or you’ve been working on some amazing content for your clinic website, yet it’s still not translating into more customers! 

Perhaps, it’s time to relook at your overall strategy and figure out just what exactly you’re doing wrong and how you can fix it.

Why Is a Clinic Marketing Strategy Important?

As with all businesses, a marketing strategy is the key to increasing revenue. It is no different for your clinic. You need to put the message out there that you provide healthcare services and your patients are your top priority. 

Relying simply on word of mouth is not something clinics can afford to do in today’s current day and age. Tossing some money on some digital advertising and flyers also does not constitute a marketing strategy. You’ll need to have a well thought out plan on how you are going to make your presence known and have marketing initiatives that synergise with each other. 

Picture yourself going to war with your competitors. You’re going to need to strategise the use of your troops (which in this case is dollars) and how to best allocate them to achieve victory. The survival and success of your clinic depend on your clinic marketing strategy! 

Why Isn’t Your Clinic’s Marketing Strategy Working?

There are several reasons your clinic marketing strategy may not be working (or perhaps you do not even have one at all!) but either way, let’s take a look at what could be going wrong and then what you can do to correct them.

A Lack of Strategy

The first most obvious reason your clinic’s marketing strategy may not be working is that you don’t have one! It’s important to note here that performing a specific marketing initiative is not a marketing strategy.

Printing flyers, doing up your website SEO and paying for Google Ads are all examples of separate marketing initiatives. 

Developing a clinic marketing strategy takes many individual initiatives that work together and build on each other to drive traffic to your clinic. Using them individually can reap some rewards, but without a comprehensive overarching plan on how they work together, you are not effectively maximising the benefits of these initiatives.

One example of how one aspect of your strategy would look like would be using flyers to advertise testing nearby the clinic. These flyers should also have a QR code that will direct people to your website, where they can find out more about your services. 

These flyers should be done alongside a new blog article on your website that covers the basics of the type of testing services that you are offering in the brochure. As you can see, the two separate initiatives work together and complement each other. This is what is meant by building a clinic marketing strategy.

A Budget That Is Too Small

Not prioritising your marketing or seeing it as an important enough aspect of your business can be another reason why your clinic’s marketing strategy is not working well. An effective clinic marketing strategy should be based on your current clinic’s revenue or forecasted revenue. A good estimate is to take 8 – 12 percent as a budget for your marketing initiatives. 

That might seem like a lot, but an effective marketing strategy should expect to at the very least double the amount of money spent to come back as added revenue. On that basis, you can see why spending too little will mean that you will only get back at least double what you put in.

Losing Sight of Your Target Audience

If your strategy looks like everything should be working well together and you’ve spent the appropriate amount of funds, perhaps you are not resonating with your target audience. It can be quite common that your vision of what your clinic means to you may not be the same as what your patients see your clinic as. 

The best way to correct this is to ask your patients what they think about your clinic and have them do a quick survey before they collect their medication. 

Most patients will be happy to help you out, and by asking them what they come to your clinic for and what additional services they need can be a great way for you to understand them better. Therefore, figuring out how you want to tailor your clinic’s marketing strategy to serve them better.

Expecting Immediate Results

You’ve launched your amazing marketing strategy after getting feedback from your patients, and you’ve spent the right amount, but nothing is happening! What is going on? 

Well, perhaps you just haven’t been running it long enough. More often than not, your digital marketing efforts will take time to rank and take time to convert into customers. Don’t fret if you’ve been at it for a week and haven’t noticed results. 

Closely monitor your clicks, and be sure to ask new patients who contact you how they found out about your clinic so you can monitor how well your marketing initiatives are working. 

Also, don’t forget that tweaking your ads along the way is very important. See what works and doesn’t; sometimes, certain targeting or specific topics will perform better than others. Just do more of what works and less of what doesn’t.

Failing to Follow-Up

Lastly, failing to follow up on new patients can be the most significant waste of a brilliant clinic marketing strategy. If you’ve already done everything right, you want to turn all those new leads, whether they be emails, calls or walk-ins, into patients.

These are hot leads, and it means that you’ve already managed to pique their interest, and your message in your marketing materials have connected with them. Be sure to engage with these people and treat them with absolute professionalism, even if you may not be able to serve them immediately. 

Communicating with them now will be your second chance to impress them on why they should come to you for whatever they are looking for, and just being responsive can often turn them into a customer further down the road.

Conclusion

You want to be sure that you: 

1. Have a clear clinic marketing strategy
2. A reasonable marketing budget based on your clinic size
3. Understand that you know who your Target Audience is
4. Give time for your marketing efforts to yield results
5. Always follow up with new patients

Paying attention to these things will help you figure out where your clinic marketing strategy is going wrong and allow you to fix the problem so you can go on to serve more patients and show up your competitors.