Winning Healthcare Digital Marketing Strategies During A Recession: Get More Value for Your Money

A recession refers to a significant downturn in economic activity and growth in a country. One of the leading causes of recession is reduced consumption and investments, as corporations and other entities slow down (usually because of debt obligations). As such, the current recession also affects medical practices at varying rates.

If you want to safeguard your medical practice this year (and beyond, because the impact of recessions do last), learning more effective medical marketing during a recession is essential.

Medical Marketing in a Recession isn’t Complicated with the Right Partner

Marketing during a recession can help your medical practice acquire more patients, and regardless of the size of your practice, recession marketing can help brighten things for everyone.

The right digital marketing platform can also help you accomplish other essential marketing activities like SEO, PPC, and reputation management. However, cutting your marketing budget during the recession may be counterproductive, according to the Harvard Business Review.

Medical practitioners are often at a crossroads when they decide to increase their marketing efforts during a recession. Mainly, medical practitioners want to maximize the value of their hard-earned cash by using the proper channels in digital marketing.

It’s Time to Attract Patients, Maximize Your Investment, and Thrive In A Recession

Interested in overcoming recession hurdles? Start by seeking guidance from our marketing specialists and amplify your practice’s growth today. Increase your engagement in your area of practice and maximize the value of your marketing budget to reach more patients this year.

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Three Common Mistakes When Marketing During a Recession

No one wants to make mistakes, especially now that medical practices need viable solutions to improve visibility and cash flow. Here are three things that medical practices should avoid when engaging in digital marketing during a recession:

1. Freezing Up and Not Doing Anything

The recession can be overwhelming, and it’s easy to freeze and forget that marketing is an active process/effort where you can measure results differently. If you feel that the recession is a sign that you should “save up” and do nothing, we’re here to tell you that taking advantage of opportunities during the recession is a much better solution.

It all begins with partnering with a reliable platform and intelligent marketers who specialize in working with medical practitioners. Then, instead of pulling down the marketing flag, raise it at full mast because medical practices can succeed during the recession.

2. Relying on “Feel Good” Marketing

Some older strategies from traditional marketing are now outliers in the era of social media and mobile websites. One such strategy is “feel-good marketing,” which no longer suffices in the age of personalized patient experiences. The success or contribution of activities like sponsoring sports events and giving away promotional materials (like mugs) is hard to measure. The medical practice loses even more precious resources if they don’t work.

3. Throwing Things at the Wall (And Hoping Something Sticks)

Not having a clear plan and just “throwing things until something sticks” can be just as ineffective as feel-good marketing or not having a marketing plan.

When your marketing budget is tight, it’s essential to get to the heart of the matter: 

  • Establishing trust with potential patients
  • Providing patient education
  • Make it possible for patients to connect with you through the proper channels

Having a reliable digital marketing partner saves you from the guesswork and helps maximize your marketing budget at any stage of the effort.

Lets Ride Out This Wave Together

It’s Time to Attract Patients, Maximize Your Investment, and Thrive In A Recession

Effective Healthcare Digital Marketing Channels this Year

Online patient trends in the past decades have significantly impacted the marketing strategies employed by medical practices. Patients nowadays want cutting-edge digital healthcare services, just as they look for customized patient experiences and exceptional digital experiences in other markets. In addition, patients now want the same ease and convenience when looking for a healthcare provider.

Medical practitioners and healthcare systems are constantly adapting and evolving with the times. They do so to keep up with the times and to prevent them from falling behind.

Potential patients now have more options for finding an ideal healthcare provider or medical practice, and the right digital marketing strategies can ensure that they will be taken seriously.

Patients are looking online for health-related information now more than ever, but they have done so for years. Patients use the information they see online to decide how to get help for their health conditions.

Even if your current medical practice is doing well with its existing number of patients, the current recession necessitates reviewing digital marketing strategies that can help you improve your practice’s reach and financial outlook. Digital marketing platforms like Officite can help get your medical practice on the right track in recession marketing.

It’s natural for healthcare providers to want to focus on patient care, and that might leave even less time for marketing planning. That’s why working with a healthcare digital marketing platform that offers a great track record and expertise working specifically with doctors makes sense.

While this may require you to draft a marketing budget to tap different digital marketing channels, you can expect great ROI from all your efforts.

Digital marketing in the healthcare industry might be challenging for a beginner because of the complex regulatory framework that must be followed to avoid legal ramifications. Therefore, it is crucial that you only go about through a healthcare digital marketing platform that knows how HIPAA compliance works.

SEO for Healthcare Digital Marketing

Medical practices can use search engine optimization to make their websites a comprehensive and trustable resource for patients seeking information about the specific medical care they offer.

Medical practices can also foster long-term engagement with patients by providing informative and engaging patient education materials. SEO helps a healthcare provider’s website through better visibility and provides a better user experience by following industry best practices in publishing content and web design. Among the top priorities of SEO for medical practitioners are the following:

  • Improving the ranking of pages and content for essential keywords related to your top services
  • Omnichannel distribution of branding and marketing assets
  • Improving the website’s clickthrough rate (CTR)

Social Media Marketing for Doctors

Medical practices can use social media marketing to improve focus and reach more ideal patients. Some of the social media marketing activities that will significantly benefit a medical practitioner are:

  • Routinely publishing information about accomplishments in your practice
  • Informing patients of medical services and their benefits
  • Making sure that your Facebook Messenger chatbot can interact well with potential patients
  • Providing the appropriate links to patients so they know where to go to learn more about your medical practice
  • Publishing more patient education materials
  • Creating and posting interesting and engaging visuals to boost your medical practice’s branding efforts online

Healthcare PPC Marketing

PPC ads can rapidly open new doors and bring in more qualified visitors, increasing the number of potential patients for your medical practice or healthcare business. In addition, you may obtain a clear picture of what works and what doesn’t by monitoring the daily performance of your ads across all the selected internet platforms.

Platforms like Officite can help you maximize your marketing budget by using 360-degree marketing, reducing ad budget waste, and adhering to established ad guidelines.

Reputation Management for Doctors

The proper healthcare digital marketing partner can offer invaluable assistance in managing a company’s online reputation. Establishing, cultivating, and upholding your medical practice’s online reputation as a trustworthy healthcare provider in the United States goes a long way.

Reputation management is essential to any healthcare digital marketing effort during the recession. If you love patient reviews, you’ll love the concept’s expansion. Online reputation management practices ensure your clinic is well-represented on Google Reviews and other review sites that matter to patients.

Medical professionals must be well-represented in their area of practice and recession marketing guarantees that you can improve your ROI and help your practice flourish through economic fluctuations. So, while we can’t do anything about the fluctuating nature of the economy, we can do something about the success of your medical practice.

Email Marketing for Physicians

Email marketing for healthcare providers always begins with segmentation or by sorting your email list into subgroups based on demographics or patient behavior. However, crafting effective emails is also essential: for example, the subject line carries so much weight in the context of people opening your emails (or not).

Healthcare providers should aim for well-planned, automated email marketing to remind patients regularly of their existence and products. In addition to attracting new patients, email marketing can help you keep the ones you already have happy with your healthcare business.

Key Takeaways:

Medical marketing during a recession is best accomplished by combining digital marketing channels to increase patient reach and engagement.

Doctors are often at a crossroads regarding how to use their healthcare marketing budgets. Healthcare providers can solve this problem by partnering with a reliable marketing partner like Officite.

Relying on “feel-good marketing” and other conventional strategies can lead to resource wastage, which is the last thing medical practices need during the recession.

Search engine optimization increases website traffic and patient engagement, and creates more opportunities to address patient pain points even before patients walk into your office.

Social media marketing offers countless opportunities for low-cost patient education and engagement moments that will continually put your medical practice in patients’ memories repeatedly through regular communication via different platforms.

Starting a PPC campaign is one of the most efficient ways to dive into the competitive market and put your brand in front of patients. Efficient ad budgets use and improve the moving parts that make online ads work.

Platforms like Officite can help you maximize your marketing budget by using 360-degree marketing, reducing ad budget waste, and adhering to established ad guidelines.

6 Ways To Use Social Media To Boost Patient Acquisition

More than half the world’s population is on social media (that’s a whopping 4.9 billion users!) and nearly half of all adults in the U.S. want to follow their doctors on social media. Inevitably, if you’re not promoting your medical practice on social media platforms like Facebook, Google Business Profile, Instagram, or LinkedIn, you are likely missing opportunities to reach more patients and grow your practice. Social media marketing can help establish your brand, increase your website traffic, and give you a new way to engage with new and existing patients.

Adding social media to your healthcare marketing strategy may seem daunting at first, and that’s okay! Consider this guide the first step on your social media marketing journey. You may not know the best ways to tackle the digital landscape and what types of content to create for these platforms, but you don’t have to do it alone. Soon you’ll understand the benefits of marketing on social media, how it can be an invaluable tool for your practice, and find a few helpful hints to get started.

1. Share Your Practice’s Story

When people search for a medical professional, they tend to choose someone they feel they can trust with their health. Telling your practice’s story is key to building trust with your current and future patients.


Your practice’s story doesn’t need to be complicated, just sharing details about yourself such as your expertise, your background, and your values can actually boost patient acquisition and strengthen your brand because potential patients feel like they know you. For example, you may want to share what led you to the medical field and why you chose your specialty over others.


You can share your story in your physician profile or social media’s ‘About’ Section. These personal insights into your practice add an element of authenticity to your brand, helping your current and potential patients feel more connected to you.

2. Target Your Local Audience

While a large part of social media marketing is establishing yourself online to increase the traffic to your website, you ultimately also want to convert those impressions into profits for your healthcare practice. In fact, social media can be an effective lead-generation platform, helping you reach new patients and book more appointments. Some platforms, like Facebook and Instagram, have built-in tools that let you target and advertise to specific audiences. These tools let you narrow your audience by interests, age, geographic location, and more. This ensures your ideal audience sees your content.

This comes in handy if, for example, your practice is based in California and you want to target patients seeking physicians in the Los Angeles area. By selecting your filters and narrowing down your target audience, you will reach the prospects near you who are more likely to book your services, instead of those who are further away and less likely to convert.

3. Improve Your Website Traffic

Posting often on social media serves as a digital reminder of your practice and in turn, will encourage people to visit your website. This is a significant part of the social media marketing funnel in terms of growing your patient base. Since social media casts a wider net, people may find your social media profile before hearing about your practice or seeing your website. Engaging social media posts can encourage idle internet browsers to learn more about your practice, visit your site, and become a patient.

One of the great things about social media is your ability to get creative. While you can simply link your website in your social media platform’s bio, you can also entice your followers to visit your website with educational, relatable, or engaging content. Be sure to include a Call To Action (CTA) on some of your posts that link to your website to make it easy for people to click through to your site directly. Over time, you can tweak your strategy by reviewing your social media analytics and seeing which posts perform best with your followers.

4. Advertise Your Services

While creativity may be key to boosting engagement, be sure to include the concrete information prospective patients need, like which services or products you offer. There are several ways to share this information with your audience that may attract more attention than standard ad content, such as:

• Discounts: Highlight any new client offers, raffles, specials, or discount programs
• New Services: Showcase your latest offerings as you expand your practice
• Education: Explain the science or benefits behind one of your services
• Statistics: Feature interesting or surprising facts and statistics that relate to your medical specialty (Pro Tip: Emphasize your most-performed service!)

Anything from educational videos to relatable gifs, and everything in between can be used to attract new patients, inform your audience, increase your credibility, and differentiate your practice from the competition. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by your options, it may be helpful to use third-party sites, like Officite, to help you develop and implement a social media strategy designed to grow your practice. In the interim, pull some inspiration from our Downloadable Social Media Kit.

5. Boost Your Customer Service

Social media can be a great communication tool for building connections with your new and existing patients. If any patients have questions or concerns about your practice, they can ask via comments or Direct Messages and you can address them quickly.

In addition to sending personal messages to your patients, you can use your social media pages to monitor your practice’s reviews. Always show appreciation for positive reviews and do your best to respond to and resolve negative reviews. This is an important part of showing your community that you care about your patients and want to make their experience exceptional.

Social media is generally seen as a less formal, lower stakes form of communication, so it’s a great way to quickly and efficiently address your audience. You can save phone calls and other methods of communication for more formal matters, such as confirming appointments.

6. Inform Your Audience

The best way to establish yourself as a quality medical practice is to provide your audience with engaging and informative content that can teach them about your specialty. Highlight industry breakthroughs and facts that pertain to your field and explain how it relates to your audience. This will fortify your status in the medical community and show your audience that they can rely on you for relevant medical information.

Once you’ve proven that you are a trusted source of interesting, factual information, people will also be more likely to follow your social media profiles, visit your website, and book appointments.

Conclusion

Creating content for social media can seem like an impossible task, but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, it can be pretty fun! Don’t be afraid to show off your personality and prove that people in the medical field can bridge the gap between entertaining and enlightening content. Don’t feel like a social media guru just yet? With Officite’s social media package, we can create social media profiles for you, manage your existing ones, schedule content for you to post, and drive traffic to your website to grow your patient-base. Don’t let a lack of social media presence hold you back anymore, connect with our social media experts today.

About Us

Officite is a unique, all-in-one digital marketing service for medical practices. With both industry-specific knowledge and digital marketing expertise, we help practices grow their patient base with powerful websites, social media & reputation management, search engine solutions, telemedicine, and patient education. Officite automates your practice’s time-heavy processes (i.e. appointment scheduling, patient forms, etc.), so you can save your team (and patients) more time.

Officite makes marketing your medical practice easier, more affordable, and more effective by offering all of your digital marketing services under one roof. For more information, or to see a demo, visit officite.com