In this Digital Marketing Guide, we offer a step-by-step process to help you achieve the business goals for your clinic through online marketing. Our methods are tried and proven to generate more ROI that any other strategy you might deploy for digital marketing for your clinic.

This guide will help you generate more patient visits, increase your revenue, and as such provide more marketing budget for you to continue growing your business.

After years of iteration and testing different methods, we have come up with these four steps which when followed precisely will result in more calls and patient visits to your clinic.

• Website Optimization and Re-development
• Search Engine Optimization
• Google Search & Display Campaigns
• Social Media Marketing

We have labelled this a step-by-step guide because every element is essential to guarantee success and it is crucial to implement these strategies in the steps we have laid out. The rest of this guide will dig in deeper into each of these steps and give you practical steps on how to implement them to generate more business for your clinic.

1. Website Optimization and Re-Development:

What value does your website create for your clinic currently? Is it just for aesthetics or does it function as a lead funnel to guide prospective patients and customers to take action that will result in a phone call to and ultimately a visit to your clinic?

To properly optimize your website and have it serve as a viable marketing channel for your clinic, it is crucial to put yourself in the shoes of your target patient profile and structure your website to provide them with the information they need to make an informed decision about the care they need.

To gain more insight into this, a customer journey map analysis is essential for identifying the critical touch points a prospective patient goes through on their journey to identifying the right clinic and booking an appointment for their medical needs.

Once you have clearly defined a customer journey map,you can then structure your website to ensure that prospective patients can identify the solutions you offer for their medical needs and there is a clear Call-to-Action for them to either call your clinic or book an appointment.

With this knowledge, you can approach your web agency to audit your website and restructure the layout and content to speak to prospective patients and have them take desired specific action when they visit your website.

2. Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) simply means actions taken on your website and across the internet to ensure that your website pops up on search results when people look for the services offered on your website.

In the case of a clinic, you want your website to show up top of the page when people look for the medical services you offer. For example, if you are an Eye Clinic, you want your website to show up when people search for “Eye clinics near me” or “Eye clinics in Dubai” if your clinic is based on Dubai.

SEO is essential to create visibility and credibility for your brand as a leader in its industry. A comprehensive SEO solution would use a combination of analytics tools to identify on-page action (actions on your website) and off-page (actions across other websites) actions that should be carried out to gradually create visibility and rank your website on top search results for select keywords relevant to the medical services you provide.

We recommend following a sustainable approach that ensures results are achieved without the risk of penalties from Google and other search engines that might occur when people try to cut corners to achieve a high ranking on search engine results.

Our recommended approach is summarized below;

• Keyword Search
• On-Page Optimization
• Off-Page Optimization
• Progress Monitoring
• Evidence Based Refinement

An indicative SEO plan for the first 3 months is provided below covering the steps that will help you see your clinics’ website gradually rank on page one for the core services your offer.

3. Google Search & Display Campaigns:

Running a well-executed Search and Display Campaign on Google Ads network is an absolute must to help you generate high-quality leads with a high conversion ratio that will ultimately see your clinic buzzing with activity. 

An effective Google Search and Display campaign will help your clinic generate relevant leads for specific medical services offered at your clinic. A strategy that combines both Display and Search campaigns as an upper funnel (Awareness & Discovery) and lower funnel (Consideration & Action) activities respectively will have you getting calls from prospective customers that are looking for the medical services you offer.

In the section below, we describe the different types of audience targeting tools and ad formats you can use to get the best out of your Google ads campaigns.

Display Campaigns

This campaign type is an upper funnel strategy to reach a broad audience and maximize brand exposure for the services offered at your clinic. The following audience targeting will be deployed to optimize the reach of these campaigns.

• Demographic Targeting: this will enable you to show ads to users based on a combination of declared and inferred data. Indicators like age, gender, and parental status can be used to target profiles for the different medical services offered at your clinic.

• Affinity Audience: With this targeting, you can reach TV-like audiences based on a holistic picture of their lifestyles, interests, and passions. There are over 100 segments based on online behaviour and their relevance for specific services you offer that you can choose from on the Google ads platform.

• Custom Affinity: In addition to off-the-shelf Affinity audiences available on Google platform, you can also create unique Custom Affinity audiences specific to the services you offer at your clinic to ensure the ads are focused on the right audience. This feature allows you to define and target custom-made audiences thus giving you substantive reach across niche groups of users.

Search Campaigns

This is an ideal lower funnel tool to target prospective patients who have significantly advanced on their journey toward finding a clinic for their medical needs. The following audience targeting options can be deployed to maximize reach and conversion for the search campaigns for your clinic.

• In-market audience: these are customers that are actively researching or searching for the types of services you offer. For example, we can target an in-market audience searching topics like “Eye Clinics near me”.

• Affinity Audience: these are audiences with very specific interests, lifestyles, or habits. For example, you can target an affinity audience for “Dental Care” as they are most likely to be interested in dental care services offered by your clinic if you run a Dental Clinic.

• Remarketing: this tool lets you target ads at audiences that have visited your website. It allows you to position your ad before such an audience as they browse or visit different websites. This is an important tool to improve conversion for customers who indicated an interest in your product or service before and did not complete a transaction.

• Similar audience: Similar audiences find users that are similar to an original remarketing list or other uploaded lists. It finds users that are similar in profile based on their recent browsing and interests around different topics. With this tool, we can target similar profiles we already know have shown interest in the medical services offered at your clinic.

Video Ads

With the real-time data available on YouTube, this is a powerful channel to deploy an effective campaign to drive brand awareness, re-call, and specific action for lead generation.

YouTube offers a high-impact channel to engage your target audience and enhance conversion by complimenting Google Search and Display campaigns. Depending on your type of practice, we would recommend the inclusion of YouTube Video ads as part of the overall campaign strategy.

There are several ad formats available on YouTube that might be suitable for the different offerings at your clinic and would help engage leads and drive CTA at different touch points on their customer journey some of the common ad formats are.

• Bumper Ads: these are 6 seconds non-skippable ads suitable for driving reach, frequency and brand awareness. Ideally one central idea per 6 secs ad should be focused on to deliver the highest impact.

• True View Ads: these are skippable in-stream ad formats that allow users to choose to engage with the ad. They come in several variants like Trueview for Reach, Trueview in-stream, Trueview Discovery, and Trueview for Action. Key benefits of these formats include extending reach, creating impact by telling your brand’s story, and delivering results via a call to action.

• Masthead Ads: these ads run on YouTube homepage and home feed. This format is very effective for driving awareness, focusing on high impact, and reaching a massive audience within a short period.

• Non-skippable in-stream Ads: these are non-skippable in-stream ads suitable for driving awareness and reach across your target audience usually available as 15 secs ads or less. They are available on YouTube and Google Video partners. We recommend this for delivering specific CTA to target offering at your clinic.

4. Social Media Marketing

Social media is an essential tool for creating awareness, brand recall, and generating leads for clinics. Depending on your area of practice, it can be a powerful tool for lead generation and conversion to drive more clinic visits.

A content marketing strategy should be created to generate targeted content in different formats; text, posters, videos, etc. to target the different demographics that your clinics cater to.

Ad Management modules of these social media platforms offer several tools to help you define and target specific audiences across each social media platform in order to maximize return on ad spend.

Depending on your type of practice, you could explore the following social media platforms; Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Tik Tok, etc.

Content Strategy

It is crucial that the frame of analysis for the implementation of the content strategy for social media engagement and campaigns follows a holistic approach that looks at the customer journey to enhance the brand experience from the initial engagement with the clinic to lead qualification and eventual medical care.  With this approach in mind, it is important to explore the following key considerations while defining the content strategy.

• Define Archetypes
• Develop language and tone of voice
• Develop a core message Framework
• Curate the content for each post, and
• Deliver in the optimized format for each platform.

Following articulation of a clear content strategy, a content calendar should be created, and engaging copies written for deployment in different formats; posters, videos, microblogs, interstitial and rich format videos, etc. based on the content calendar.

The content should be both entertaining and informative to inform the audience. Specific creatives and content should be designed for the different demographics to deliver a clear CTA that will drive engagement and CTA for organic posts and paid campaigns.

Audience Targeting

To ensure social media campaigns target the right audience to drive traffic to your clinic, advanced audience targeting tools should be utilized across each social media platform to maximize ROI on ad spend. This can be accomplished by using audience-targeting parameters like

• Location-based targeting
• Demographic targeting
• Device targeting
• Appographic targeting
• Retargeting
• Lookalikeke audience
• Negative targeting

As a final note, if your clinic is based in UAE, keep in mind that you need to obtain a permit for medical advertisement content before you can proceed with you’re your marketing activities online.

Did you make it all the way down here? Congrats! Glad you found this article helpful.

If you need help implementing any of the steps we have laid out in this guide please get in touch with us at [email protected] or call +971 4 244 1163.