Do you own or manage a medical center? If so, you will agree that the World Wide Web is a brilliant place to advertise what you do. Of course, many medical centers seldom know how to market themselves online. If that sounds like you, don’t despair.
It’s pretty straightforward to build an effective online marketing strategy. The trouble is; how do you know which methods are the best for your niche?
The good news is that you can find out here on this page which ones work well for medical centers. Here is what you need to know:
Work on your website’s SEO
In case you didn’t know, SEO refers to the art of promoting a site through the use of several optimization techniques. It’s easy to make a website, whether you code it “by hand” or use a website builder program.
But it’s not always easy to learn what SEO techniques you should use to make your site search engine (and human) friendly. One of the first steps in medical marketing is to start with your website’s layout and structure.
For example, are you using “alt” tags with all your images? Are you internal and outbound links to pages that are relevant to your content?
In fact, there’s a whole host of things you should add to your SEO checklist! I recommend checking out Google’s SEO guide for a useful primer on the subject.
Make your site mobile-friendly
OK, so this topic ties in with the SEO section above but it warrants its own section. Have you ever tried to look at an old website in your smartphone’s browser? If so, you’ll remember how hard it was to read the content. And how you had to zoom in on the content!
The best way to make your site mobile-friendly is to use a responsive design. In a nutshell, you are using a layout that adapts to the screen size dynamically. You might be wondering why this ties in with SEO – let me explain.
Search engines like Google are penalizing sites that do not use responsive layouts. If that is true of your existing site, it’s time to get it redesigned!
Offer a patient portal
One of the ways your medical center can get set apart from the rest is by offering an online “patient portal” system. It’s a way for your patients to have secure access to their test results and medical history, should they need them.
It saves both you and them time, because it means they don’t have to book an appointment to see you unless they need to. And if they do need to see you, they can make their appointments online without needing to queue on the phone for ages!
So, that sounds like a useful feature, but how does it tie into a marketing strategy? Some social networks like Facebook allow you to embed content in your “fan” pages. That means your patients can securely log into your portal through your site or your Facebook page!
You can promote your page as a means of keeping up-to-date with your latest news. And, of course, logging into the patient portal system.
