When you open a healthcare facility, you likely have two things in mind: helping people be the healthiest version of themselves and growing as much as possible. While guiding people through their health and wellness journey is built into your vision as a business, expansion takes time and strategy.
Growth marketing for healthcare can play a key role in helping you reach your long-term goals as a clinic owner. If it’s done in the right way, and at the right time, you can get your clinic on the path for expansion and bring your treatment to other communities that can benefit from your patient care.
We’ll talk about every part of growth marketing for healthcare: the what, the when and the how.
What is growth marketing for healthcare?
Let’s start off with the basics. In terms of the healthcare industry, growth marketing refers to using data-driven strategies to increase revenue by improving patient acquisition, loyalty and retention. It should be used as a way to measure your growth and provide the insight needed to boost it.
Is there a difference between growth marketing and traditional marketing? The answer is yes. They do have similarities, as both have a goal of trying to reach more patients and increasing revenue. But they use different focuses on their path to reach that goal. Growth marketing uses the power of data and evidence to widen a customer base while traditional marketing uses campaigns to promote individual services.
Essentially, traditional marketing focuses solely on acquisition, while growth marketing takes that a step further by adding retention into the mix.
When is the right time to utilize growth marketing strategies?
As much as we all like the idea of seeing significant progress the second you open your doors, sustainable growth is what leads to expansion. It’s important to know when to put your growth marketing strategies into practice so that you don’t lose sight of your customers in the expansion process. They should always be at the forefront. They’re your anchor during times of growth.
The right time to utilize growth marketing is when you have the capacity and resources available to do so. You must have a foundation of:
- Solid metrics to track progress of your marketing efforts.
- Employees who can focus solely on strategy.
- Budget that can be dedicated to tools for analytics, SEO and optimization.
- Loyal patient base that can benefit from retention strategies.
How to set your clinic up for expansion through growth marketing
The success of growth marketing all stems from strategies that appeal to not only new patients, but your existing patients as well. Effective strategies should be able to give you consistent and sustainable results that can be tracked to pave the way toward expanding your clinic.
Here’s a handful of growth marketing strategies that you should consider implementing:
- Referral incentives — Organic growth marketing can be achieved by collaborating with your existing patients. Referral campaigns can strengthen the loyalty your patients have for your clinic while boosting your customer acquisition. Successful referral campaigns come from incentives to motivate your existing patients to pass on a good word about your clinic. Check the state and federal guidelines regarding medical provider incentives.
- Reengagement campaigns — Email and social media retargeting campaigns can help boost your engagement with your past patients to remind them of your clinic services and benefits. By seeing your name as an ad on their social media feed or in their inbox, they can remember how you helped them in the past, and can do so again in the future.
- Content marketing — You should help a patient at every step of their health journey, from searching for potential answers, following through treatment and aftercare support. Creating content, such as blog posts, can provide knowledge for potential patients to determine if, and how, they would benefit from using your services. Those same blog posts can also help retain your current patients by strengthening their trust in your expertise.
Looking for a growth marketing agency? BURG+CO. can help
Increasing traffic to your website plays a role in increasing conversions and leading to new clients. However, it’s difficult to attract visitors to your site when you don’t know what to do. Fortunately, this is what we specialize in at BURG+CO.
Our team has years of experience in helping businesses improve their digital presence to attract new leads and retain existing ones. If you’re looking to perform better in search engine results and attract more visitors to your site, we’re ready to talk to you to see how we can help. Contact our team today for more information about digital marketing or to schedule a complimentary consultation.
