If you’re like many of the practices we work with, the main things you want from your digital marketing is more patients and higher revenue. What digital marketing trends do you need to keep in mind for 2021 to help you get there?
Some of the key digital marketing trends include more personalization and interaction within your marketing efforts, and having a cohesive strategy that bridges multiple avenues, called omnichannel marketing.
Let’s jump into the breakdown on these and other important tactics that practices like yours should be incorporating into your marketing strategy this year.
1. Conversational Marketing
Potential patients like to feel like they’re speaking with a person – not an automated robot. Using natural language that reacts based off of what the user has said and mimics the conversational style can make future patients feel like they are having a personal experience with the practice.
One way we do this is through conversational text marketing. Give it a try and see how it works! Text “knee” to (727) 295-3660. You’ll go through a sample of one of our text marketing campaigns, and it feels like you are chatting right with the doctor.
This easy, back-and-forth texting helps the potential patient form a connection with you and your practice and become more likely to be your patient, not someone else’s.
2. Video Marketing
It is believed that 80% of all internet content consumed in 2020 will be in video form. If you aren’t creating videos (and marketing them), you are missing out on a TON of eyeballs! Not only that, but marketing messages that come from video are retained at a rate 9.5X higher than written ones!
Creating videos isn’t always enough, though. They need to be marketed. With YouTube being the world’s second-largest search engine (its monthly search volume is bigger than Bing, Yahoo AOL & Ask combined!), making sure your videos have been optimized for search engines is as important as it’s ever been.
Letting patients get a glimpse of you, your staff, or your practice on video can help them feel a connection with you before they ever even visit your practice.
3. Voice Search
It is estimated that 50% of all searches will be done by voice this year. How you can capitalize on this trend is by having strong, well-written content that answers the questions your target market is asking. When they go to Siri, Alexa, or Google to ask about your services, you want them to find your answers and get taken to your website. This ties in with point number six and should be part of your overall content strategy.
Results found at the top of Google are perceived as authoritative – if Google picked your website to answer their question, you must be the best! Being found by voice search adds additional status to your practice in the patient’s mind.
4. Personalization
It’s 2020. The days of emails going to “friend” should be long gone. But personalization extends to a lot more than just email marketing these days! Text marketing, the ads viewers see across different platforms, and their entire journey through the marketing funnel should be customized and personalized for them and their pain points. If they came into your marketing funnel by searching for “knee pain,” they should be seeing emails, texts, and ads across the web for knee pain relief.
This consistent personalization can help create a sense of personal importance within the patient – that your practice cares about their specific case and condition, and they are important to you.
5. Content is Still King
There have been major Google updates to their search algorithms to help the AI understand the natural and conversational language most people use when searching online. With an average of 9 updates to the algorithms per day, the safest way for you to remain at the top of the search results is to have a lot of well-written, useful and informative content for the search engines to read & refer users to.
With the content we produce for our clients, we highlight the difference between relief care & corrective care, educating the soon-to-be patients on their condition and treatment options. We use the content as not just an entrance point for how new patients find you, but as a tool to convert as much as 8-14% of your visitors. That’s massive! Most marketing companies have around a 2% conversion rate.
6. Omnichannel Marketing
You may have heard “omnichannel” used as one of the biggest buzzwords of 2019, but the strategy is still relevant and incredibly effective now in 2020. Practices that are reaching their future or current patients with a cohesive message on three or more different channels (email, text, web, email, social media, etc.) are seeing dramatically improved engagement rates, conversion rates, and retention rates.
The key to a successful omnichannel program is that it is well thought out in advance, with each step of the journey fully planned out and advanced digital marketing tools in place to help pull visitors through each phase, turning them into patients, clients, or customers by the end.
At Just Click It Digital Marketing, we help doctors with every aspect of the lifecycle of a new patient. We create the leads, follow up to qualify them and set the appointment, appointment reminders, and even a phone call the morning of the appointment. Once you’ve done your exam, we’ve got a web app you can go through and use to create reports for these prospective patients that will help increase your case acceptance rate tremendously. You’re not alone in this. You just need the right team on your side.
For help determining which trends can best serve your practice now and throughout 2021, reach out to our team to set up your free strategy session.