Online lead generation is one of the most significant challenges medical practices face. Why is that? For one, many medical marketers are tackling a whole new landscape. Where word-of-mouth referrals and print advertising once ruled the day, now the vast digital landscape is the primary source of leads for practices. Many practices are struggling to learn how to leverage the web to drive more traffic and qualified leads to their digital doors.
Effective lead generation — the process of attracting potential new patients to interact with your business — requires a strategic approach to digital marketing. Below, we outline nine lead generation strategies that will draw more visitors to your brand and website.
1. Build a User-Friendly Website
The goal of lead generation is to get people to come to your website and stay. Having an organized and professional website will improve your brand’s trustworthiness and credibility in the eyes of potential new patients. Your site should be mobile-friendly, easy to navigate, fast, and contain valuable content that helps visitors find the information they’re looking for. Additionally, your website should contain multiple ways that visitors can contact you when they’re ready to take the next step. Providing patients with a useful and well-organized site experience will help them feel more confident about your services and offerings.
2. Start a Blog
Blogs are one of the most effective lead generators on the web. Starting a regular blog on your website serves multiple purposes: it improves your search engine rankings and attracts more traffic to your website, establishes your brand as a thought leader in your industry, educates new and returning patients, enhances brand awareness, and increases your brand’s trustworthiness and credibility among patients. Consistent blogging helps you build connections with your online audience — and over time, you’ll be able to nurture those relationships into leads and conversions.
3. Stay Active on Social Media
Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn have become valuable tools for brand visibility, engagement, relationship building, and lead generation. Social posts provide a great opportunity for you to interact with your brand followers online and build a positive relationship with them. Furthermore, social media is a great place to share compelling content — like blog articles, videos, webinars, and infographics — that draws more traffic to your website.
4. Use Email Marketing
Like social media, email marketing is another good tool for cultivating trusting relationships with your online audience. Effective email messaging that shares relevant, useful content with your audience will encourage readers to click through to your website and keep you top of mind when they need the services and products you offer.
5. Buy Online Advertising
Paid advertising has always been a standard lead gen strategy, but online advertising with Google Ads, Facebook, and other platforms has become much more effective than print advertising in recent years. Digital advertising is highly targeted and allows you to direct ads toward specific search terms, demographics, locations,occupations, interests, and behaviors. The primary benefit of targeted online advertising is that you can put ads in front of the audience most likely to click through to your website, increasing the likelihood of generating quality leads.
6. Create Compelling Content
By now, you can probably guess that producing content — through blogs, social media, emails, ads, and more —is at the heart of generating leads for your medical practice. But it’s not enough to churn out content for the sake of it. Your content should be well-written, well-organized, relevant, and educational to entice people to read it (or engage with it, like commenting or liking a social media post). Consumers are more likely to trust you if you’re offering them valuable information they can’t get anywhere else. And consumers who view you as trustworthy and credible are much more likely to turn to your brand when they need the services you provide.
7. Optimize for Search Engines
Optimizing your website, landing pages, and blogs to be found and indexed by search engines helps web visitors find you online. When you write content built upon relevant, high user-intent keywords and keyword phrases, you increase the chances that your ideal audience will discover your content from search queries in Google, Bing, Yahoo, or another search engine. Deploying effective SEO strategies is a crucial part of attracting worthwhile leads to your website.
8. Encourage Reviews
Today’s consumers use online reviews to help them find reputable products, restaurants, gyms….and health care providers. Make sure your practice and physicians are set up on reputable review sites like Google, Facebook, Yelp, Vitals, ZocDoc, RateMDs, and Healthgrades so that satisfied patients can have a place to leave glowing reviews. Additionally, don’t be afraid to ask happy patients if they would write a good review for you. Seeing good reviews will encourage potential new patients to head to your website to learn more about you.
9. Analyze the Data
Effective lead generation is data-driven. One of the primary benefits of digital marketing is the ability to track and document the results of your online outreach efforts. Your team should be regularly analyzing your website and web content data to determine where the most traffic, leads, and conversions are coming from. From there, you can use data-driven insights to modify your lead gen strategies and funnel resources more effectively into high-performing channels.
Learn More About NewGen Marketing
The NewGen Marketing team has years of experience driving sales and business growth for industry-leading health care brands. We recognize the value of integrating multi-channel marketing campaigns with a proven acquisition and nurturing process that turns leads into patient conversions and treatments.
We provide broad-spectrum medical marketing services, including strategy and investment, analytics, paid media, social media, remarketing, content marketing, and acquisition and call centers. When you’re ready to hire a marketing agency who can drive more to your bottom line, contact NewGen Marketing for a free consultation.