You’re a doctor, not a marketer. You didn’t go to medical school to market your practice, but every day, your marketing is shaping whether your patients find you, trust you, and ultimately book with you. At Bubbly Creative, we work with doctors, dentists, OB/GYNs, dermatologists, therapists, and other health and wellness providers who are excellent at patient care, but frustrated by inconsistent social media, outdated websites, wasted ad budgets, and marketing that gets handed to the front desk as an afterthought. After helping practices grow new patient volume, improve their online reputation, and create brands patients genuinely trust, we’ve learned one thing: most marketing problems aren’t caused by a lack of effort; they’re caused by a lack of strategy.
Who is Marketing Your Practice?
Doctors can get very overwhelmed when it comes to their marketing. They have patients to meet, records to write, practices to run, admin to manage, finances to manage, and more, and that’s not even scratching the surface of all the patient care they have to deal with daily. This can be stressful, so marketing often gets delegated randomly. It can be handed off to an intern or a medical assistant with a few spare hours, but 90% of the time it’s delegated to the admin team. We hate to break it to you, but your front desk is not your marketing team, your web development team, your social team, or your strategists.
Random Acts of Marketing
A lot of times we find that health and wellness service providers are doing “random acts of marketing,” as we like to call it. A post here, a national holiday there, maybe a behind-the-scenes post of your team at lunch. You see an opportunity for an ad in a magazine, so you put an ad in there, but you don’t have a dedicated landing page with a proper URL for you to track. You have a nephew who just graduated from college, and maybe he’s setting up your Google Ads. If these sound a little too on the nose, then you are doing some random acts of marketing, and this is not a strategy.
Why This Sucks
A receptionist in charge of social media is going to post on social when they remember, which is very likely not every day or even every week. There’s no strategy or real planning behind it, mostly because they are not equipped with the right tools or the time.
When there’s no strategy, there’s no measurement, consistency, or ownership. It becomes really difficult to track what is working and what isn’t. What is driving traffic to your business and what kind of posts are people resonating with?
The worst part of having random marketing that’s not hitting the mark is that you’re going to get overlooked. Even if you’re doing great work, delivering great care, providing great medicine, and have a fantastic care team, the right patients will not be able to find you on the internet.
How Patients Choose a Doctor
There are many different ways a patient chooses a doctor. One potential (and most common) flow is as follows:
- Someone conducts a Google search.
- They read reviews.
- If the reviews are between 1 and 2-3 stars, people are likely to drop off, especially if you have a 1-star review with no reply. People may think you don’t care, or you’re not good at what you do, which we know likely is not the case.
- If your reviews are pretty good and you have a good amount of them…
- They check out your website.
- Does your website suck? They may once again drop off.
- If your website is pretty good…
- They check out your social media.
- If your social is weird, or really clinical, or you come across in a way they don’t feel comfortable coming to your practice, then they drop.
- If they like the way you look on social media…
- They make an appointment. Woo!
- Don’t be fooled, though – you can still lose a lot of people here if your appointment-making process is too difficult.
Patients often struggle to find the right practice for them. They put a lot of thought into who is providing their services and care, and earning their trust. If you lose trust, you lose your potential patients, and there are a lot of things that can easily cause you to lose trust – few reviews, low ratings without replies, a really clinical website that looks like a textbook, an outdated website. Your online presence must represent who you are as a provider because all of these touch points build trust and can be improved with strategic and cohesive marketing.
Things We Always Hear
Here are a few things we always hear when working with health and wellness providers:
- “My office manager posts on social, it’s not consistent (or good), we don’t see any ROI”
- “We pay someone to run our Google Ads, but we can’t tell if it’s actually working… and they’re expensive!”
- “We have a website, we have social media, we have Google Business… but we’re kind of embarrassed by them.”
The one takeaway from all of these common headaches is to work with an expert. It’s okay if you’re not sure how to do these things or do them well. If it all feels intimidating, it makes sense because this stuff is for a marketing agency, not for you. You’re a doctor, not a marketer!
Building Trust Through Marketing
Patients choose the practice they trust first. But how do you build trust through marketing?
There are many different ways, but one of the main ways is focusing on patients. This doesn’t necessarily mean hyperfocusing on getting new patients, but instead thinking about what patients want and need, and getting to know them really well. To do this, you need to know who you want to get in your practice. If your instinct is to say “Well, we serve everyone,” then remember this: if you market to everyone, you market to no one. Hyperfocus on your ideal clients, get to know them, and then speak directly to them.
Some other ways to build trust through marketing include:
- Testimonials – These are not necessarily reviews. You can leave a five-star review with no text. A testimonial is more in-depth and typically shows how a person’s life has been touched because of the care they received at your practice. It does not necessarily need to be via Google – it can be an amazing email, a message, a video, etc.
- Real people – Get rid of the stock photos on your website and social media. Do a photoshoot and get some real providers and patients up there to show what they’re like. Smiles and team photos are wonderful!
- Cohesive branding – You want everything to flow and look like you know what you’re doing.
- Web design that’s easy and functional – Make it easy for them to be your patient. You don’t want to make them jump through hoops.
- Pleasant patient experience – Highlight a positive patient experience as much as possible through reviews, testimonials, and happy smiley faces.
Don’t Do Everything
Absolutely do not try to do everything. Deeply get to know who your patients are, and then focus on where they are. Don’t try to be on every platform. If you’re looking for an older demographic, for example, maybe it’s Facebook, maybe it’s Facebook groups, maybe it’s Reddit.
From here, talk about your goals. Not everyone wants new patients! Sometimes you want your website or ads to look or perform better, you want to share your expertise, or you want to do speaking engagements. Whatever the goals are, they will dictate your strategy.
Plan ahead so you can get away from those random acts of marketing. Identify low-hanging fruit, which is anything you can do that is easy and will make a big impact on your plan. These are things you can start with, often quickly and inexpensively, that will have an impact immediately.
Working with Bubbly Creative
Ask yourself: are you proud of your current marketing efforts? You must be proud of it because when you are, you stand a little taller, you feel better, and you want people to take a look. People will notice how you hold and present yourself. When your website, social, and overall presence shine, people want to work with you.
At Bubbly Creative, our primary focus is female-owned health and wellness service providers, so we understand how difficult it can be to navigate this industry. When you’re a doctor, you’ve worked so hard in your career and should not have to worry about marketing. That’s why we’re here!
We act as your full-service marketing department, creating and executing custom strategies with our deeply experienced team helping providers grow their practices and get their ideal patients. When you become a client, we’ll sit down with you to review:
- Your goals
- Your website
- Your social media
- Your Google Business Profile
- What’s working
- What’s not working
- Opportunities for growth
If you’re not quite ready yet, but want to learn more, Founder and Creative Director Cara Chatellier is hosting an online session on Tuesday, August 4th, and will be breaking down why great providers often get overlooked online and what can be done to fix it. This event is ideal for OB/GYNs, dentists, orthodontists, dermatologists, therapists, private practice physicians, practice managers, practice owners, and more.
Register now to learn how to turn scattered marketing into strategy that supports real growth.