Advanced Lead Generation Strategies for Doctors

For the physicians of today, local billboards, offline directories, or mere word of mouth can never be enough when it comes to getting more patients.

Building a strong online presence is a must, as that can attract more prospects to your website and may also help convert them into paying patients. When you get the contact of an interested prospect or lead, you can pursue them further to earn an appointment for your clinic.

But to achieve the desired patient count, you’ll need to ensure your lead generation efforts are on point. That’s why we’ve curated this comprehensive guide on what lead generation entails for physicians. Without further ado, let’s jump in!

The Significance of Lead Generation for Doctors

To make potential patients opt for your service, you’ll need to engage them effectively first. That’s why you should approach lead generation for doctors with the aim to initiate a conversation with them. In today’s medical scenario, online engagement with healthcare service providers starts at an unlikely place- social media channels.

The ever-increasing reach of social media channels has led more and more healthcare providers to publish posts and updates regularly across multiple platforms. For instance, Facebook alone recorded a whopping 2.96 billion monthly active users in October 2022(Statista).

Moreover, an increasing number of patients are looking up online reviews to zero in on a reliable physician.

The significance of online reviews combined with the growing preference towards locally available medical practices has equipped more potential patients to choose high-quality service providers with ease. So, it’s evident that lead-generation strategies are essential to optimize your digital presence across all channels including social media.

Some Strategies to Get Started

Some Strategies for Doctors lead generation

If you’re new to applying lead generation for your clinic or practice, here are some useful marketing tips to draw more leads:

1. Ensure Your Website Has a Clear CTA

A call-to-action or CTA refers to a prompt that inspires or motivates users to act in a particular way while viewing your ad, website, or any other promotional material. Generally, a copy of the CTA takes the form of a purchase or contact request.

While designing your online profiles or website, you need to have a clear CTA that prompts patients to take an actionable step. The unavailability of a clear step that will fit your user intent might lead your healthcare provider to move over to other options.

With a clear and truly effective CTA donning your website, its click-through rate (CTR) is sure to increase considerably. This will even encourage patients to take the most appropriate step. They may either choose to learn about your practice beforehand or book a service directly.

Since the CTA will be critical to the audience engagement of a website, you must create one with a proper idea of the purpose in mind. Determine whether you want people to join your newsletter, take a short survey for an email subscription, or directly make an appointment.

2. Apply a Multi-Channel Approach

To target your leads efficiently, you need a comprehensive digital marketing strategy hinging on multiple channels including email and social media. Social media can help you appeal to the target audience at a low cost to generate exceptional results. Email marketing is a fairly profitable strategy too, considering that it generated an ROI of $36 for every 1$ spent.

While using such marketing strategies, you should keep in mind that internet users on smartphones have a much shorter attention span. The copy you create for your marketing emails or social media posts should be hard-hitting enough to keep them hooked.

Do note that the former reaches out to potential patients to ensure they’re engaging with the brand throughout. On the other hand, the latter keeps educating and supporting customers who’re already in the know of your practice and have trust in your diagnosis/treatment procedures.

3. Make a User-Friendly Website

The time you devote to creating quality content for your website won’t count in case potential customers don’t locate the required information with ease.

Do note that the ideal website design for effective healthcare lead generation should easily lead visitors wherever they want to go. Also, it should have a clearly designated path to find all information they’ll need.

4. Add Conversion-Worthy Content

Merely adding the practicing hours, rates, and description of the physicians won’t rank your website higher or attract more traffic in the long run. After all, these are references and not lead generators for a business.

An efficiently designed website is likely to make customers reach the homepage, while great content will make them go beyond that. So, the better the quality of content posted on your site, the more will be its likelihood of emerging as an expert or thought leader.

Try to create blogs, landing pages, newsletters, and articles that are useful, well-written, and relevant for prospective and current patients. Many prospective patients of today tend to search online for a remedy to any pressing health problem. So, a way you can boost leads for healthcare is by showcasing high-quality content that helps answer the queries of patients.

Showcasing conversion-worthy content pieces on a regular basis may lead you to become established as a reliable advisor on health and nutritional issues. Moreover, it can drive patients to opt for your practice for an elective procedure, also increasing your website traffic in the process. Together, these can help you attract more high-quality leads in the process.

5. Prioritize SEO

Adding high-quality content to your site or enhancing its user-friendliness are just a few aspects of earning a good rank on SERPs. You’ll need to optimize several other elements of the site to make it rank higher and drive more site traffic, and that can be achievable by implementing effective search engine optimization strategies.

Do note that SEO doesn’t merely involve packing keywords onto a site but requires improving site performance by introducing several types of changes. Implementing the best SEO strategies can enhance the accessibility of the site and help people find it easily.

Search engines continuously crawl the web for updated and new content. When an internet user searches on a subject like physicians, the crawlers scan all the visible information and assign a rank to the page according to their relevance to the search query. While some queries are general and produce results in millions, there are ones that are more specific and are likely to show just a thousand search results.

So, when it comes to SEO for doctors, you’ll need to consider different search intents to understand what your audience wants. Do note that your search intent may either be transactional or informational, implying that the user is either ready to take an actionable step or wants to learn about a specific topic. To get the desired results for your SEO efforts, it’s best to target keywords across different search intents. This can help you reach potential patients in all stages of the marketing funnel, from research to finally booking an appointment.

How to Boost Your Lead Generation Efforts?

While the above techniques can be good to start with, you’ll need a stronger lead generation plan as your practice expands with time. Here are the best rules to follow if you want to scale up your practice within the next few months:

1. Encourage People to Leave Reviews

Reviews are among the biggest facilitators of lead generation and may even be successful in convincing patients to choose your practice. Studies have revealed that 3/4th of the American population reads online patient reviews before scheduling an appointment.

For specialized medical treatments such as plastic surgery, including before and after photographs in the reviews can prove to be more effective. This allows potential patients to see the skills of the plastic surgeon at work and decide accordingly.

Hence, one of the best strategies to boost qualified leads for your business is to urge existing satisfied patients to add reviews. Make sure to also train your staff on when and how to seek reviews from your clients.Some of the common online platforms where patients can leave reviews include:

Vitals
Healthgrades
Yelp
Facebook
Google Business
ZocDoc
CareDash
U.S. News Doctor Rankings

The simplest yet most effective method to boost reviews and testimonials is asking patients. You can call them, ask them in person, or simply send a text message for this purpose. This approach is also applicable to your SEO efforts.

2. Respond Quickly to Clients

To ensure prospects enquiring about your services ultimately convert to clients, you need to follow up with them quickly. Do note that they’re likely to reach out to more than one provider at the same time. Thus, responding quickly to an inbound lead can make them more likely to choose your practice. It will also set the tone for your interaction with the lead.

Text messaging is a convenient and quick way to follow up with leads while keeping communication personal. In fact, surveys have revealed the average response time for text messages to be 90 seconds.

3. Local SEO

A large section of the target audience for your practice may be residing in and around your area. As such, you’ll need to put just as much effort into local SEO as other lead-generation strategies.

Optimizing your healthcare site in this regard will help you to:

Ensure your website is well-designed to make a positive first impression
Boost your site rankings in local search
Reach more local patients by enhancing site visibility to crawlers
Improve how local patients perceive your practice
Improve site UX for patients

Optimizing your site for local SEO will also ensure it appears higher in local searches with the term “near me”. This will help Google understand the intent of a user to find the desired location in their vicinity- for instance, search terms like “heart specialist near me”, and “orthopedic surgeon near me”.

Apart from your website, your Google business Profile needs to be optimized and updated regularly to maximize your reach among local patients. Around four to five businesses appear above every organic search result, and on smartphones, that’s the only part users can view before scrolling down.

Since search engines primarily take the information for such listings from Google Business profiles, you’ll need to ensure the following information is available:

Your primary mobile number
The business categories
The operational hours
Your reviews on Google
Your service area or address
The business description

Making citations is another key factor for optimizing your business for local search. These include the online mentions of businesses that display the NAP information (name, address, and phone). A local citation can be sourced from blog posts, newspaper websites, social media profiles, and other platforms.

4. Manage Your Online Presence

The healthcare industry might be relying on face-to-face interactions, but the search for a provider generally starts online. In fact, more than 60% of consumers run a search before they schedule an appointment using a provider. That’s why it’s a must for doctors to consolidate their digital presence.

An efficient practice is to optimize your website regularly apart from review pages and business accounts. Make sure you don’t ignore creating accounts for any of these pages as that can help build trust and create a positive impression. Plus, you are projected as a modern provider of healthcare that attaches equal importance to your online reputation.

Effective promotion through social media marketing requires identifying the most commonly used platforms by patients. For instance, Facebook Groups are popular among patients when it comes to discussing medical conditions on social media. On the other hand, Instagram is predominantly used to showcase the culture at the clinic/practice or share patient testimonials. You’ll also find posts targeted towards spreading awareness on various health

The majority of healthcare providers of today leverage Instagram to showcase their credibility. Here’s an Instagram post by Cleveland Clinic that cites a symptom of obstructive sleep apnea and narcolepsy, sleep disorders affecting adults across the world. Such a post is likely to draw the attention of a person facing such issues, and they might even head over to your website to explore the associated treatments/ therapies that your clinic offers.

5. Use Digital Advertisements

Advertising still remains one of the most popular marketing strategies, with digital ads taking the lead in terms of total worldwide spending in the recent few years. Thus, leveraging digital advertisements effectively is a must for all medical practices too.

a) Google Ads

Most patients begin their online search with Google, which is why utilizing paid Google search ads can prove to be a strong step toward boosting visibility. This is likely to lead visitors to your site and in the process, boost lead generation.

In addition, you can customize your ads to raise or lower the volume of leads based on the budget and capacity of your clinic. Here’s a pro tip for using Google ads- make sure to choose the most-searched phrases or words for your ads. They might be related to the physicians at your clinic, the medical practice you’re focusing on, or the treatments/ services you offer.

When your prospects conduct searches for the keyword you’re using and you win the bid, the ads appear on the first Google SERP. The chances of attracting leads are naturally higher for such clinics/services. Do note that your competitors might win the traffic in case you don’t implement Google Ads campaigns for the clinic/hospital/practice.

An example of a popular Google ad is a campaign launched by Einstein Healthcare Network, a non-profit healthcare service based in Philadelphia region. The organization aimed to increase its brand awareness and promote a patient-first approach through Google ads. After all, twenty other hospitals in the region were striving to boost their leads, which had made the competition quite intense.

The campaign sought to resolve the queries of patients at different stages of their association with the healthcare network. For this purpose, the organization implemented strategies such as campaign restructuring, improvement in landing page UX, and revision of ad copies.

b) Facebook Ads

Another useful advertising platform physicians can leverage effectively is Facebook. Facebook ads are generally visual, so they’re the perfect way to catch a patient’s eye and depict a compelling and interesting story even though they’re not familiar with your brand. Such a push method of advertising helps you show up in the search results by new potential patients.

To design a truly conversion-worthy Facebook ad, here’s how you should proceed:

Step 1: Set an objective for your ad based on what you want potential patients to know, how well you can cater to their needs, and how you want them to respond.

Step 2: Leverage the right demographic information while creating an ad. You’ll need to target people who are likely to need your services.

Step 3: Choose ad placement options carefully to ensure maximum viewership for your ads. Based on the browsing patterns of your target audience, you can use the ads in video feeds, Facebook stories, the Facebook marketplace, or the explore pages on the platform.

Step 4: Consider making ad videos as they can help expand your reach faster and ensure more effective lead generation for Doctors.

Step 5: Appeal to the audience’s emotions through positive visuals. Do note that your ad will talk to a person, so they’re likely to click on it only if they can relate to your message.

Step 6: Gauge your competitors in the same field to understand how they’re approaching a similar theme through their advertisements. This will help enhance your capability to target your ads effectively.

Step 7: Make sure your ads are concise as no one would want to read an entire paragraph on an ad. On the whole, you’ll need to provide just the information that they require.

Step 8: Keep track of all the ads you’re posting on Facebook to be informed about how they’re performing. Only then can you understand how to update them if needed.

6. Provide A Free Tool for Your Patients

A novel way to boost lead generation for Doctors is to provide prospects with a free tool. Such resources will not only help boost the lead capture process but can also make patients more committed to opting for your services. A few popular tools being used by healthcare services include health insurance verifiers, symptom checkers, and pricing estimators.

7. Connect with Local Stakeholders

doctors can connect with Local Stakeholders

For clinics/ practices looking to enhance their popularity in and around their area, it’s essential to build a closely-knit community of industry leaders within the region. This can take the form of cocktail parties, lunches, or other meet-and-greets with advocates in the community. You should also make efforts to connect with important stakeholders such as local business leaders and new physicians.

When you build trust with other physicians in the same community, it may in more patients opting for your practice. A study from Medscape revealed that less than 10 percent of physicians refer patients to another physician’s unknown to them.

8. Follow Up through Multiple Modes of Communication

After you generate leads, you’ll need to follow up with each of them to ensure they go on to become clients and trust your service for real. This basically implies you’ll need to understand their likelihood of becoming a patient. Apart from that, you’ll also need to make it clear as to why they should go for your practice.

Data reveals that only 2% of prospects convert into clients at the first point of contact with a lead. Thus, it’s always beneficial to have multiple touchpoints between your sales team and prospects to get the best results.

By utilizing multiple communication channels, you can nurture and follow up on a lead more effectively. It will help you close more deals, meet clients where they’re available, and communicate as per their convenience.

A popular technique in this regard is to combine different communication channels right from the first interaction with a patient. For instance, you can text new leads to know more about what they might be looking for in a service or product. Thereafter, you can speak to them about your offerings over the phone, and finally, send an email containing a few relevant physician profiles from your clinic.

9. Participate in or Organize Webinars

Most of you will agree that you’ve received several webinar invitations in your inbox from the subscribed email marketing channels. In fact, 95% of businesses regard webinars as a significant part of their lead generation strategy.

A webinar is, indeed, a useful resource for arousing the interest of your audience and ultimately nurturing a strong bond with them. Moreover, they are budget-friendly marketing tools and provide you with the opportunity to collaborate with distinguished healthcare experts.

Final Words

That was all about the best lead-generation strategies to drive the performance of your clinic/practice.

Apart from implementing proper strategies, it’s important to monitor your efforts regularly and introduce necessary changes to sustain positive business growth. So, take note of the strategies that your prospects are resonating with, and focus on driving more leads on those channels.

We’d suggest you start identifying the most profitable digital channels for your practice before devising a marketing strategy.

Additional Resources:

Advanced Lead Generation Strategies for Doctors and Healthcare Providers