How Hiring A Medical Marketing Agency Can Help Your Practice

When you think of healthcare or medical marketing, you might picture TV ads for prescription drugs with smiling couples. While this is one form of medical marketing, it’s not really the kind  medical marketing used by regular doctors for their practices.

Doctors who are working to build their own brand or grow their practice require a more personalized digital medical marketing approach that will target their specific needs, goals, and audience. Hiring a professional medical marketing agency is a good way to start, and it will allow you to focus on your job, which is treating patients.

Medical marketing professionals are trained to develop campaigns and creative tactics that will bring tangible results and patient leads to your practice. 

Here are some ways in which doctors can benefit from the help of a medical marketing agency.

An Expert Healthcare Marketing Team

There’s no better sales tactic than quality care, great customer service, and showing true empathy to your patients. Patients interact with each department in your clinic, allowing each employee the opportunity to make a positive or negative impact on the patient experience. 

When there’s a need to “get the word out” about a new service offered or provided at your practice, a physician generally doesn’t have the time or expertise to effectively engage in marketing.

Maybe you want to set up a PPC ad on your latest service, or share a video on your social media channels educating the public on ED treatment, or make updates to your website. 

Whatever it is, your time is valuable as a physician, and a marketing agency has a team of experts that can creatively execute the right strategies and tactics for you. 

There’s no need to burn yourself (or your staff) out simply because you are trying to be a marketer as well as a physician. 

Strategy & Planning Analysis

A marketing agency can help you perform a deep dive into complex business development challenges, and implement solutions to keep your practice afloat and profitable. 

Have you seen a dip since a new practice opened in your town? Are consumers going elsewhere based on online reviews of your practice?

Hiring a medical marketing team can help doctors determine things like: 

  • What number of patients and “sales” will guarantee enough income for overhead costs? 
  • How to set a goal for profit. 
  • How to put a strategy into action in order to reach more people and drive conversions on your site.

They Will Handle SEO Smoothly

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the method of ensuring your practice will come up near the top of the search engine results when potential patients are looking for a medical practitioner in your geographical window and area of expertise. 

Multiple factors determine what moves a particular practice to the top of the search list, with just a few including competition, backlinks, website structure and readability, and age and credibility of their domain name. Those are just a sampling of things taken into consideration when improving SEO.

Most physicians would prefer to spend their time caring for patients or improving their specialty over learning the logistics of SEO. 

Choosing not to participate in SEO monitoring isn’t a feasible option, though. Medical practices are missing out on prime growth by not paying attention to their ranking on search engines. By hiring a medical marketing agency, this allows physicians to use their time where it is most valuable.

They can help to target your ideal patient utilizing paid advertising

Unlike traditional broadcast and print media, a medical digital marketing agency helps you to be specific with your target through the ability to streamline them through certain features.

Digital marketing enables physicians to target patients by a specific condition, age, gender, demographic, or even zip code.

The ability of digital marketing to target consumers through the use of certain keywords increases the chance to reach the patients you want. 

Also, this ability to target certain conditions can be done in real-time, and is a cost-saving move that cannot be done via traditional advertising methods.

PPC advertising allows you to pay for targeted ads across a specific demographic and/or geographic location. 

For example, an orthopedic practice could invest in Google Ads to target a specific location – for instance, “Orthopedic specialist in Waco, TX” – this will help push prospective clients to visit their website or call their practice.

A medical marketing agency can help make sure you reach the patients you want in the area you want. They know all the ins, outs and tricks to make sure your paid advertising is successful. 

They Can Create an Text & Email Marketing Campaign

Hiring a medical marketing agency like ModFXMedia allows you to ensure your communications with your patients aren’t going straight into the spam folder. 

The marketing team will carefully craft the texts and emails and then schedule them at appropriate intervals. 

They can also help you determine what type of text and email marketing would work best for your practice.

Some physicians send out bi-weekly or monthly informational content and practice updates to patients on their mailing lists. While others prefer to stick with a simple pre-appointment reminder email and patient satisfaction survey. 

Working with a professional agency can help you to determine what works and what doesn’t to ensure your practice is keeping your current patients up to date while constantly gaining fresh leads from new subscribers.

They can improve patient reviews

Consumer-driven review websites like Yelp and Google are influential to consumers when looking for everything from a new hair salon to a doctor’s office. 

As a consumer, why ask one or two friends for a recommendation when they can have instant access to dozens of reviews to get a variety of perspectives and help make their own decision?

These reviews can really make or break a practice, and they may be the reason you aren’t seeing return patients or even new patients. 

Having a medical marketing team on your side can help you analyze these reviews daily and help you understand a common theme of either good or poor service. 

It’s important to know what your consumers are saying about your office to help decide what changes are needed to improve patient quality and happiness. 

Once you know what to fix, your medical marketing agency can launch campaigns to promote these changes and get more patients through your door who will, in turn, leave better reviews!

The time is now to invest in a Digital Marketing Agency

From well-established healthcare practices to fledgling offices, maintaining a robust digital presence will provide the stability required for a business to flourish. 

If you want to win patients, you’ll need to create social profiles, optimize your website for SEO and mobile, and run paid advertisements to attract new patients. 

Adopting a digital marketing plan for your practice will level the playing field so your practice can reach potential patients who are searching for services also offered by larger healthcare systems. 

At ModFXMedia, we have years of experience in healthcare/medical digital marketing. We handle Healthcare practices, Dental Practices, Regeneration Clinics, Integrative Medicine, Ophthalmology/Vision clinic as well as Veterinary clinics. And the best news is you start to see results right away! 
To learn more about ModFXMedia, and how we can help your practice, request a free strategy call with us by CLICKING HERE to fill out the form on our website. Or call us directly at 1-904-673-7587.

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What Exactly Is Permission Marketing?

How many times you have signed up to receive an email notification and special offers from different brands and services. I know the answer, “Yes, many times.” When I open my email, I can see tons of notifications and promotions about products from Etsy and Amazon, etc.  

Since I am a member of Bealls, a local departmental store, they text me on my mobile device whenever there is a special offer. This is known as permission-based marketing.

What Exactly Is Permission Marketing?

Permission Marketing is when you give the recipient of the email/message an option, whether the audience should receive the promotional message or not, it would be their choice.

Permission marketing has become a very popular marketing strategy during the boom of digital marketing and social media marketing. 

Subscription emails, application updates and emails/messages- these are all very good examples of permission marketing. 

Permission marketing is where the users have chosen to receive the emails and other promotional messages of a specific company-i.e your company. 

They do this by subscribing to your website or they install your company’s applications on their device.

How Did Permission Marketing Come About?

In 1999, Seth Godin first floated the term ‘‘permission marketing’’ in his book, Permission Marketing: turning strangers into friends, and friends into customers. He discussed the concept of permission marketing as something personal, relevant, and expected. Permission Marketing is contrary to the traditional type of direct and promotional marketing where you send one email to all the customers in the database without their permission.

Permission-based Marketing Vs Traditional Marketing

Yes, there’s a difference between Permission Marketing and good ‘ol Traditional Marketing. 

Permission marketing is when you do a little research about your target customers. For example: Better Homes and Gardens uses permission marketing when doing their giveaways. 

These giveaways are usually sponsored by other businesses, such as Honda, Lumber Liquidators, etc.  which is clearly explained while you the individuals are signing up to enter the contest. 

Another page is brought up which offers free subscriptions and permissions from the sponsors. I think most people believe they’ll have a better chance of winning if these permissions are clicked yes, and way at the bottom of this list is the enter button. 

This clever type of permission marketing got the individual to sign up for other businesses newsletters and promotions- they got their permission! But, this is only one way that Permission Marketing is used in a marketing strategy- we’ll go over more strategies in a minute. 

First, let’s move onto what traditional marketing is. 

Traditional Marketing

Traditional marketing is a type of marketing where marketers use traditional platforms such as: print, broadcast, direct mail, email and telephone/texts.

Before the popularity of digital marketing and social media marketing, traditional marketing was the choice of companies to promote their products to their customers. With the boom of digital marketing and everyone glued to their phones traditional marketing has been expanded into sub-categories in which business use to better market their products and services.

Traditional marketing falls under the type of marketing category called blind marketing. To give you a better understanding we’ll use our Better Home & Gardens example above. Better Homes and Gardens would send one (or a 4 week) blast email to all their signed up customers without mentioning their previous history with them. 

Customers receive such promotional emails all the time, and they usually avoid looking at the emails.

Benefits of Permission Marketing

Some of the benefits and advantages of the permission marketing strategy are as follows:

Cost-Effective Strategy

Sending emails and messages is much cheaper than any other kind of marketing technique. All you have to do is to research and send precise and relevant information to the customers. If the information is relevant, they won’t ignore your message and hopefully your business converts a new customer at a low cost.

Higher Conversion Rate

The conversion rate is higher in permission marketing than the traditional type of marketing because you follow the personalized approach with your target audience and develop a relationship with your targets. 

When you provide the relevant information, it makes the bond much stronger and increases the conversion rate.

Personalized

One of the most interesting features of permission marketing is the personalized approach. It means that you invoke the previous history and start things where you have left them. It makes the customers feel that you haven’t forgotten about them. By mentioning their name and the previous records/appointments/products it makes your business connect with them immediately.

Long Term Customer Relations

When you provide relevant information, you’re following the personal approach which makes them feel comfortable and valued. These types of relationships with your target customers usually last longer because they have a shared common history with your business. 

Maintain Reputation

When you follow the personal approach and ask their permission, then it makes the consumer feel under control. Because of this, when you send out an email or text blast they are less likely to ignore them and click through to your desired goal -i.e a new landing page, sale, new product, service etc. 

When people don’t avoid your messages, it means that you have maintained a good reputation in the community.

Levels of Permission in Permission Marketing

There are different levels of permission in the permission marketing strategy, which are:

Intravenous Permission

Intravenous permission is the highest level of permission a consumer can give to the consumer. The permission is in the form of a subscription.

Buying the subscription of Netflix or Hulu is a very good example of intravenous permission. When you buy the monthly package, whether you watch it or not, the channel would charge money for the whole month because it has the right.

Points Level Permission

Point- level-permission is a type of game. We mean this literally, you see this a lot in game apps. You also see this alot with credit cards and any clothing store points subscriptions. (Walgreens is another common one that uses this).

Points Level Permission is the second highest level in permission marketing. 

Points are a good way to keep a consumer’s attention, and are a good way to solve the problem. Spend more, get more points. 

Points are also a good way to reward consumers for paying attention or for buying something.

The object is- Your business would reward customers with different points if they remain attentive. In the end, customers can cash out those points. If the consumer remains more attentive, then they would earn more points, and more points means more money.

You’ll notice this with a lot of game apps. They’ll reward you with daily points or coins to get you to play. If you spend more money when you’ve used all their free points, they’ll give you a better deal and rewards.

Personal Relationships

The Personal relationship level is usually used in business relations, where you leverage the personal relation and ask something in return. It’s like word of mouth marketing.

It’s a business strategy that builds and nurtures long-term personal connections between your brand and your existing customers, increasing engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty.

For example, T-Mobile captured the elusive millennial market. They began offering consumers mobile service without contracts. This approach proved wildly successful, improving customer satisfaction, engagement, and referral business.

On top of this to build relationships they provided weekly thank-you gifts and customer rewards to participants.

In addition, they focused on their mobile app, offering reward redemption opportunities and targeted offers that captured customers’ attention and enhanced engagement. 

Brand Trust

Brand trust is often the desired level of permission marketing. However, brand trust can be lost with one misstep. For example, Coke nearly lost all of its brand trust overnight when it introduced its new formula.

But don’t let this deter your business from looking into this strategy. Brand trust is a bit lower level strategy when it comes to permission marketing- you may pay a heavier price to certain brands, but the company would provide you with a high-quality product. Starbucks coffee and Campbell’s soup are a very good example of brand trust.

Situational Permission

Situational permission is the lowest level of permission where you ask for a certain thing depending on the situation.

It requires that the contact is first initiated by the customer. Once the customer makes first contact, situational marketing can occur. 

A good example is when you go to a fast food restaurant like McDonald’s. You put in your order and they would ask “would you like to supersize your order?”. Or if you’re at a restaurant and you order a margarita and they ask you if you would like top shelf tequila. These are good examples of situational permission- upselling to the customer. 

Spam (No Permission)

Spam is the level where you don’t have permission. 

Permission Marketing Examples

Some of the examples of permission marketing are as follows:

Opt-in Emails

Opt-in-email is a very good example of permission marketing. It means that the customer has chosen to receive the promotion of certain products. The company only sends emails to those clients who have chosen the opt-in email.

RSS Feeds

An RSS feed is when a company sends a notification to all of its subscribers about the latest promotion.

Loyalty Cards

Loyalty cards are when companies encourage their customers to keep shopping for their products, and the brand provides gifts to their most loyal customers.

YouTube

YouTube is a product of Google and it’s where content creators share videos. When a channel uploads something new then all the channel’s subscribers would receive the notification.

Facebook

Facebook is a social media platform where people share and post written, pictorial, and visual content. However, marketers would like to connect with those people who are influential and many people follow them. When they endorse your product, hundreds of people then try your product because of their referral.

Conclusion

Is your business interested in using the different types, levels, and benefits of permission marketing in your marketing strategy, but still aren’t sure how to effectively implement it? 

At ModFXMedia, our team is an amazing mix of analytical and creative-minded people, each of us capitalizing on our own strengths to prop up the team as a whole. We use our strengths to scale and boost your business on all platforms. 
If you’re interested in incorporating permission marketing into your marketing strategy, click here to schedule your FREE strategy call with our award winning marketing team

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