You can recruit all the premium healthcare professionals in your urgent care center and yet, still fail at running the business! This is because consumers may not be aware of your urgent care clinic. However, the only solution that can take you out of this web of uncertainty is an efficient urgent care digital marketing strategy.
Unfortunately, urgent care marketing is not as easy as it sounds. You will need multifaceted actions across various platforms to reap its fullest potential. You can always count on a premium marketing company in this field.
Regardless of whether you are an expert or a novice in digital marketing strategies, we have got you covered. This article will talk about the basics of urgent care marketing. It will also talk about the top urgent care marketing ideas that can boost your clinical business.
What is Urgent Care Marketing?
Picture this – A patient just got injured and needs to treat his wound immediately. A quick online search floods him with multiple links to urgent care providers. However, your clinic’s name is missing from the search results.
You might have the best doctors working for your urgent care clinic and still not get enough revenue or patient visits. This is especially a problem if your facility does not have a website or any online presence. The solution? Urgent care marketing!
This form of marketing is when online channels are used to market and promote the services of an urgent care center. These include social media, search engines and your clinic’s websites. The goal of urgent care marketing is to increase the online visibility of your facility and attract new patients who need instant medical advice which isn’t life-threatening. It is the implementation of traditional digital marketing efforts customized specifically to the urgent care industry.
Why is Digital Marketing Important for Urgent Care Centers?
More and more new patients are relying on online services for convenience and faster communication. It’s no surprise that urgent care facilities are currently working with clients who are extremely tech-savvy and looking for two-way, transparent communication from their doctors. To attract this new community of potential patients, urgent care centers must embrace digital marketing efforts.
Additionally, there are multiple reasons why digital marketing is important for urgent care clinics. Let’s have a look at some of them.
- Enhances Reputation
Digital marketing efforts are important to boost the credibility of an urgent care clinic. This is because social media and other digital platforms support constant customer engagement and trust.
- Fetch Good Reviews
Online marketing can also enable patients to provide instant but genuine reviews to clinics. Urgent care centers can post such feedback on their websites where new patients can find them.
- Increase Visibility in Search Engines
Digital tools like SEO can bring urgent care centers to the top of search results. This leads to better visibility for new patients in search of immediate medical attention.
- Public Medical Information
A well-designed website enables clinics to publicly post useful medical information online. Such information helps patients to perceive the urgent care clinic as credible and trustworthy.
- Establish Trust
Digital marketing enables urgent care centers to interact and respond promptly to patients’ queries. It also provides them with a platform to publish helpful medical content. This makes patients perceive your clinic to be reliable.
- Support Patient Engagement
Online marketing can also help patients stay in constant touch with urgent care clinics through blogs, chatbots and social media platforms. This improves patient engagement and loyalty to new patients.
- Reach a Broader Audience
Thanks to digital advertising tools, urgent care units do not limit their services only to their locality. Instant messaging applications combined with informative articles or newsletters on the website help clinics extend to a much larger client base.
6 Urgent Care Marketing Ideas for Online Success
The price of acquiring a new customer can be 5 to 25 times more as compared to retaining an existing client. Moreover, did you know that there is a 60% to 70% likelihood of selling to an existing customer as compared to 20% for a new client?
What do such numbers mean for urgent care marketing? They show that creating a loyal patient community is a long-term, cost-effective resource. To fulfil this goal for your clinic, you need effective urgent care marketing ideas that lead to patient satisfaction. Implementing the following urgent care marketing strategies can surely ensure a large patient volume returning to your services.
- SEO: Cost-Effective Way of Urgent Care Marketing
SEO for an urgent care practice includes every effort implemented to help your website gain visibility in search engine results. First, you need to create a fast, user-friendly website that will grant an excellent first impression to potential patients. Next, you can research relevant keywords or work with a credible SEO agency to optimize your website for higher search engine rankings.
Additionally, don’t forget to post educational resources on your website. Publishing important urgent care tips and medical blogs can further increase your rankings across search engines. For example, this can include a blog on “How to apply first aid and prepare your first aid kit”. Adding the right keywords will bring your blog to the top of search engine results. This will help new patients looking for urgent first-aid tips to trust your website.
- Advertise to Get More Patients
Pay-per-click (PPC) is a type of paid advertisement. Here you only need to pay for the platform when someone clicks an ad. You can rely on different types of PPC advertisements for your urgent care practice. This can include social media ads, paid ads, search ads and display ads. Google Ads is an excellent PPC platform because of its huge reach. However, you can also invest in Bing Ads and Yahoo Ads as precautions for online marketing success.
Remember to also invest in brand advertising to expand your digital marketing reach. Sharing video content on YouTube, Meta or even OTT streaming platforms can massively boost patient awareness in new locations. For example, these can include videos that show the services of your clinic and introduce your staff to the viewers. Such urgent care advertising strategies helps you to introduce new patients to your practice and establish trust even before they visit you.
Here’s a quick list to effectively incorporate PPC ads in your urgent care facility:
- Look for keywords that are valid for your target industry
- Prepare ad copies that showcase attention-grabbing USPs
- Practice keyword bidding for the best ad placements
- Make a premium landing page with ad links
- Evaluate ad campaign for improved ROI
- Use Social Media Platforms
According to a recent survey, almost 70.4% of people use social media messages to make decisions about their health. Most of these consumers are young adults who may not have illnesses but are likely the first ones to respond to a family health crisis.
There’s no doubt that social media is a powerful tool that determines how you can convert potential patients to loyal ones for your facility. Create an urgent care profile across YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. You can publish blogs, reels or even announcements. For example, this can be a reel announcing a special discount like “Get 10% off on diagnostic services”.
Don’t just stop at creating a profile. Continue to organically publish educational content to your account. For example, this can be a short Facebook post titled, “Quick Tips and Tricks to Prevent Asthma Attacks”. This makes your urgent care center look valuable and engaging to your patients. Also, take time to promptly respond to any queries or negative comments on your posts to look genuine and patient-friendly.
- Local SEO
Let’s say you have an urgent care facility in London, United Kingdom. So, you cannot expect patients to fly from Manchester for emergency care support. While this applies for chronic conditions, it cannot hold for urgent care centers that receive serious conditions like asthma attacks, strokes or chest pain!
There’s no doubt that a majority of the patient community visiting urgent care centers are from the locality. This makes it very important to rank your facility in local searches. Local SEO is the perfect tool that supplements your virtual presence locally.
Like SEO, local SEO also boosts your online traffic. The difference is that local SEO brings traffic from your clinic’s vicinity. For example, integrating local keywords like “urgent care clinic in New York” in the title will help you reach patients looking for such services from the community. Here’s a quick cheatsheet to effectively integrate local SEO in your urgent care practice:
- Obtain local links and citations
- Develop premium content
- Use dialect or local keywords for your website
- Establish an accurate NAP SEO
- Create a Google Business Profile
- Partner with Influencers
Thanks to Instagram’s huge popularity, influencer marketing is your go-to digital marketing strategy to connect to the audience. It includes working with popular celebrities on social media to promote the healthcare industry. To further expand your reach, you can even take reels, videos and photos of them advertising your clinic and publish them across diverse digital channels.
Influencers have a huge following because of their familiarity with the audience. Therefore, when new patients see a popular face promoting your practice, they will likely visit you when needed. This decision can nevertheless be affected by other factors like service ratings and distance.
Regardless, influencer marketing is a worthy investment. A single reel where your practice is showcased by an influencer is great for connecting to a large number of potential patients. For example, a popular influencer can post a reel sharing her experience of visiting your urgent care service. This will help you gain more followers from the influencer’s profile. Here’s a quick checklist to follow if you consider working with influencers:
- Use offers to approach influencers
- Structure a budget
- Fix a date for shooting content
- Carefully edit the videos, reels and photos
- Post across multiple digital channels
- Use campaign metrics to check the outcomes
- Urgent Care Reputation Management
A single negative review can make or break the reputation of your urgent care clinic. Prompting patients to leave positive feedback on your website or Google is essential for credibility and acquiring new patients. You should also give timely and professional responses to all reviews. This will show your clinic’s commitment to patient satisfaction. You can always contact a renowned reputation management service if negative feedback gets too overwhelming.
Displaying patient testimonials on your social media and website can significantly attract potential patients. Remember to include diverse stories from satisfied patients. For example, one patient can share a testimonial of how friendly your staff was to them. Another testimonial can be about the quality, timeliness and cost-effectiveness of your urgent care services. For example, These experiences will give your patients the confidence to visit your clinic for urgent care needs.
Common Marketing Mistakes by Urgent Care Facilities
Healthcare providers and marketers must avoid some mistakes when implementing the above urgent care marketing ideas. Below we have talked about the major errors that can compromise patient satisfaction in urgent care services.
1. Lack of Patient Focus
This is when your urgent care practice does not consider the ethics needed to interact with patients. For example, this can happen when a primary care physician or marketer from your clinic consistently pushes patients to avail of their services without generating patient awareness. This can affect the mental health of the patient leading to poor reputation and negative reviews.
For this reason, the marketing strategy of urgent care clinics must focus on “change” rather than simply “sales”. Change is when the patient is given the power to make medical decisions for themselves rather than being forced to. Urgent care marketing efforts should focus more on educating the patient instead of persuading them.
An urgent care practice that prioritises too much on conversions will be perceived as unethical. To correct this mistake, the marketing plan must educate the patient, build knowledge and establish a transparent relationship with them.
2. Poor Communication
Local businesses providing urgent care services cater to patients from diverse backgrounds. However, all patients have one thing in common – they want to be treated well. Additionally, because of their acute health conditions, they have extremely high expectations from providers. Not empathizing or communicating clearly with patients can give off the wrong impression about your clinic.
To make sure that patients’ voices are heard, urgent care centers must first understand how they communicate. For example, patients may not be aware of complex healthcare terms and scientific terminologies. So it’s better to remove any medical jargon and use simple language when talking to them. Here is a quick guide to remember when communicating with your urgent care patients:
- Avoid adding too many acronyms or complex terms in documents. Not explaining these terms to the patient will only cause confusion and frustration.
- Publish relevant, high quality and optimized medical blogs to your website. A blog is the voice or spokesperson of a brand. Posting engaging and interactive blogs and videos will position your urgent care practice as a leader in the industry.
- Don’t ignore patient reviews! Replying to feedback shows your concern and strengthens the reputation of your brand.
3. Poor Use of Digital Platform
Often patients seeking urgent medical attention are extremely anxious and frightened. Finding answers to their queries on common online platforms undoubtedly gives them relief and builds trust. Therefore, not utilising social media platforms for marketing your clinic can grossly harm your brand image. Taking care of the following points, however, can help digital marketers prevent this mistake:
- Improve the mobile-friendliness of your website.
- Ensure that the content across different channels is coherent and consistent.
- Create channels that patients can navigate easily.
4. Misaligned Communication
Successful urgent care marketing ideas need the participation of multiple professionals who are aware of up-to-date branding guidelines. However, the internal communication between departments can often be disrupted or misaligned. This can greatly affect the external messages promoted by the clinic leading to confusion among patients.
To prevent this mistake, every department of the emergency care clinic must be aligned with the marketing guidelines. Otherwise, the overall message of the brand will become disconnected and affect the patient experience. Therefore, marketing guidelines must consistently mention the kind of messaging platforms, media presence and visual identity to be followed by everybody in the clinic.
This mistake can be omitted by using digital tools that promote shared communication between departments. Some of these include:
- Personalized and interactive videos that provide marketing training to urgent healthcare providers
- Updated internal content to inform marketing needs to every employee
- Automated resources to improve communication between different urgent care units.
5. Not Prioritizing Marketing
Lastly, the biggest mistake which urgent care facilities can make is to treat digital marketing as a secondary option. Maintaining consistent patient communication and brand differentiation is essential to ensure a steady flow of patient visits. These can be achieved with the help of a strategic marketing plan with adequate investments at every step.
The objective of urgent care marketing is to capture potential patients, establish a connection and build a relationship of transparency. This connection is sure to grant the best experience to patients in their healthcare journey. However, this is not enough – the marketing plan must give patients the power to make a decision, choose their healthcare provider and consult with physicians for long-term loyalty.
Poor usage of digital channels and inappropriate internal communication can lead to a negative patient experience. Preventing these mistakes can improve the quality of life of patients and also help urgent care clinics meet their marketing goals.
Conclusion
Creating comprehensive urgent care marketing ideas will help you stand apart from your competitors. Every healthcare organization must have an interactive urgent care website. The landing page should contain essential details like email, address, contact details and emergency phone number. This will help you build trust by promptly responding to patient calls.
We have explained some of the most updated digital marketing tips and tricks for your urgent care facility. Following these steps will surely give your clinic a competitive edge while also building patient trust and loyalty. After all, every healthcare organization isn’t driven by its best practitioners, but rather by its patients. In today’s virtual landscape, digital marketing provides a stepping stone for every urgent care service to foster organic relationships with its patients.
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