The world needs so many more medical clinics, and with the right marketing plan, you can let people know about yours. However, it isn’t always easy to let everybody know about your new clinic. Often, many doctors make the mistake of believing that patients are going to line up in front of their clinic from day one. It is never this easy. You must inform the customers first, so you need a marketing plan. Your business will only succeed if you position your business effectively with an awesome marketing plan.

A good plan includes everything – offline as well as digital marketing, word-of-mouth referrals, and professional promotions via medical directories and through doctors.

Why is a Strategic Marketing Plan Important for your Clinic?

A good marketing and sales plan offers many benefits. It will spread the word about your practice, improve patient flow, help you retain consumers, and also increase your ROI.

Traditional advertising and marketing by direct mail, word of mouth, and other channels still work. Many modern strategies like social media outreach and promotions on Google also work very well. So, while creating your strategic marketing plan, it’s best to have elements from both. In recent times, many clinics have adopted innovative technologies to reach a wider audience.

Step-By-Step Guide to Building a Medical Clinic Marketing Plan

Marketing for small businesses is not always difficult. Here’s a guide that explains how to effectively market step-by-step.

Step 1 – Conduct a SWOT Analysis

SWOT stands for – Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. This technique is used to make a detailed analysis of where you stand in the market. It analyses both your external and internal strengths and challenges. This helps you evaluate your current situation compared to your competitors. Be completely frank when you do the SWOT examination. Write down everything that comes to your mind.

This marketing study provides a great idea of the market, prospective clients, as well as the advantages and disadvantages of doing business in this market. All of this information will help you tune your marketing plan accordingly. You will get a much clearer picture once you have done this well.

Step 2 – Establish SMART Goals

SMART refers to – Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-Based. Establishing these goals early on can be vital to your success. Many, however, overlook this critical element and pay the price later on. Establishing SMART goals will help you analyze what you want to achieve. This will give you a clearer picture, which allows you to focus better.

Step 3 – Attracting the Right Audience

To ensure the success of your clinic, you absolutely must reach your target market. Start by identifying the people who are most likely to become your consumers. What are their motivations, and frustrations, and what goals are they looking to achieve? Focus your time and money on finding the right demographics, location of your prospective customers, and their healthcare habits. Once you’ve done this, you will have a much better idea of whom to approach and where to find them. When you define your target market, you can also decide on the medical services that best meet their requirements.

While trying to be all-inclusive, many formulate a marketing approach geared toward the general public. This doesn’t always work. Targeted marketing has a better chance of success. Restricting the audience doesn’t mean you are discriminating or being selective. You’re simply deciding on your niche and trying to identify the best place to focus your attention and energy.

Step 4 – Set Your Budget

The budget is always important for any business. How much money can you spend on opening the clinic? How much can you afford for its marketing? The most effective approach is to create a list of all the activities and then fix a budget for them individually. Don’t be very conservative while doing this. After all, with a bigger budget, it is likely that you can reach more prospects. You can always delve deep into your reserves or take a cash advance if needed.

Step 5 – Stay Ahead of Your Competitors

It’s also important to find out what your competition is doing. Competitive analysis helps you find out how they are decorating the clinic, the kind of services they are offering to the target audience, the customers they are getting, as well as their pricing strategy. A detailed market examination will help you plan a strategy to beat them. With this approach, you can also get an idea of the issues you may encounter and what you can do to solve them.

Step 6 – The Offer

It is now time to focus on what you are going to offer. What will be the unique selling proposition that will set you apart? Add a personal touch that will give your customers a reason to choose you over your competition. For instance, you may offer cash discounts or maybe free follow-up check-ups. You can also focus on preventive health.

Step 7 – Create a Modern Website

A good place to start when you’re marketing your medical clinic is designing a modern website. If you need inspiration, you can take a look at a few popular websites before you start working on yours. For example, Body Med Sculpt offers free body sculpting treatments. Not only is their website modern and fresh, but it also uses visuals to portray the services they offer as well as the results patients can expect.

Online presence is a non-negotiable in the modern-day business space. If you don’t feel like you’re up to the task, it’s best to hire a professional to get your website done. You can hire a freelancer on Fiverr, or Upwork, or hire someone you already know. Beyond looking good and being informative, your website should be optimized for mobiles. The website must have a logo, a mission statement, and good content. Provide information on the product you are offering as well. Provide the cost of procedures. Address the biggest concerns of your customers on your website.

This is your space – you have control of what you do with it. At the same time, it’s important to make sure you display the information that your potential patients are likely to be looking for prominently. Here are some content marketing tips that you can use to share important information on your website and on other platforms.

You should also invest in search engine optimization (SEO), to make sure your website is visible and accessible online. Boosting your SEO will help you achieve a better Google ranking. It will also help you maximize your digital marketing, ensuring that you draw in more patients.

Step 8 – Lead Generation & Conversion

Explore various marketing channels to generate the maximum number of leads. You can leverage Google to attract local patients. Get on Google My Business, use video content for promotions, use YouTube to advertise, send emails to patients, apply social media marketing to your advantage, and expand your reach by blogging. With an omnichannel approach, you can widen your reach and capture more leads.

Step 9 – Track Your Online Reputation

Your customers spend a lot of time online, looking for the next best medical clinic and sharing their experience with the last one they visited. Remember, no business can have 100% positive feedback, which is why you need to find out what they are saying online. Thank everyone who is praising you. Try to solve complaints. With the right brand positioning and customer engagements, you can build a positive and memorable online presence.

Step 10 – Patient Retention

Try to do everything you can to retain your customers. Deliver on your promises and offer unmatched service. Encourage existing patients to refer their friends and family to you. Remember, word-of-mouth marketing can help you reach patients beyond the other platforms you’re using. In fact, 64% of marketers have confirmed that word-of-mouth is the most effective form of marketing. This is because people trust recommendations from those close to them over advertisements from your business.

This isn’t to say that you should halt your other promotional tactics with immediate effect. Rather, the point we’re trying to make is that you should find a way to capitalize on word-of-mouth marketing and incorporate it into your marketing plan.

Strategic marketing planning is crucial to the success of any business. This is more so the case in the healthcare industry since people are pickier about where they go for medical services. You need a good marketing plan that will position you as a trusted expert in the industry and help you earn the trust of your target audience. Remember, once you’ve set up your marketing plan, you need to keep looking at key performance indicators to find out how you are doing.