Luckily for new practices, there are plenty of ways and spaces—both online and offline—where you can acquire patients and quickly build your patient base. Understanding these modern marketing concepts is essential to create as much brand awareness as possible in as short a time as possible.

Adapt to Modern Marketing Techniques

Here are five fool-proof strategies to help boost your marketing and patient acquisition efforts:

1. Optimize Your Website

Any modern practice must have a website to thrive in today’s highly digital healthcare landscape. However, it’s no longer enough to simply build a website just for the sake of having one. It needs to be optimized for search engines to maximize your online presence.

A staggering 82.8% of patients use search engines like Google and Bing to look for a healthcare provider. If your practice website is not ranking at the top of the search results pages (SERPs), you’re missing out on a patient acquisition gold mine.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an elaborate, technical field that requires an in-depth understanding of search engine algorithms, marketing trends, consumer tendencies, and other factors. So it’s highly recommended to bring an SEO expert on board so you can truly unlock your website’s full potential.

2. Prioritize Social Media Engagement

Social media is ubiquitous nowadays. You’d be hard-pressed to find someone who isn’t active on at least one of the prominent social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Tiktok. So what better way to build brand awareness than to go to where most people spend the majority of their time online?

Like your website, your practice’s social media accounts play a crucial role in establishing a solid online presence and connecting you with your patients. A recent study found that more than 95% of consumers believe that social media is the best way to reach patients.

Most social media platforms enable users to send and receive messages, making patient engagement more convenient and seamless. Actively posting relevant content and responding to comments can boost your practice’s visibility and engagement efforts. And the best thing about social media engagement? You don’t need a professional to do it. You and your staff can maintain your practice’s social media accounts.

3. Ask For Reviews and Testimonials

Patient reviews and testimonials are powerful ways of showcasing your practice’s brand of service, capabilities, and competence. It gives potential patients an idea of what they can expect from you and your team.

Using social proof as one of the focal points of your marketing campaign is a practical and inexpensive way to attract new patients. In fact, more than 80% of consumers in the country ask for feedback and recommendations from their friends and family first before making a purchase. The same goes for patients.

Healthcare consumerism is increasingly blurring the line between healthcare services and other essential commodities. The same factors influencing patients' buying decisions can also affect their healthcare decisions.

It’s vital to ask for and adequately document your patients’ feedback so you can turn positive experiences into new patients.

4. Invest in Paid Search Ads

Industry experts expect digital healthcare advertising to reach a market value of $24.7 billion by 2026. So if there’s one area in the digital marketing space you should be investing in, it's paid search ads.

Paid search advertising is a term that describes all paid advertising models in search engines. Google dominates this space with 89% of healthcare-related searches.

One of the most popular and effective paid search strategies is pay-per-click (PPC). It’s an advertising model where the advertiser—in this instance, your practice—gets charged every time someone clicks on your ad. The advantage with paid models like PPC is that your ad will automatically show up on top of the search results pages whenever someone types in a specific keyword that you’ve paid for.

And with an average return of $2 per $1 of ad spend, it’s not difficult to see why paid search is one of the most popular advertising models today.

5. Claim Your Local Listing

Claiming your local listing may be at the bottom of this to-do list, but this should be the first thing any business owner does before launching a marketing campaign. Doing so allows you to manage how your business information appears on Google Maps, search results pages, and online in general.

The process of claiming your local listing is fairly simple. First, you need to create a Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) account. After that, you will have to input your business address and pin its location on the map. Then you’ll choose your business category, enter your contact information, and verify your business.

Adopt a Multichannel Marketing Approach

Modern marketing strategies yield the best results when executed not as separate, individual campaigns but as integral parts of an elaborate marketing effort. In other words, these strategies require cohesion to maximize the benefits to your practice.

Once you’ve figured out how to market a new practice and see more patients coming in, the challenge is how to streamline your workflows to adapt to your growing business. All your marketing efforts will be for naught if you can’t retain your patients due to workflow inefficiencies.

Having sophisticated practice management and medical billing software can go a long way in keeping your operations running smoothly despite the added workload. With its cloud-based platform, billrMD simplifies your workflows so you and your staff can achieve more without the extra work. Whether it’s patient scheduling and eligibility verification or payment processing, claims submission, or other administrative work, billrMD has all the tools you need to keep your practice running like a well-oiled machine.