7 Proven Ways to Retain Patients Through Digital Transformation

Excellent medical care undoubtedly plays an essential role in retaining patients, and it can work hand-in-hand with healthcare marketing. Assessing patient satisfaction and consistently improving the patient experience will go a long way to grow your practice.

Learn how healthcare marketing can help you retain patients and bring in new ones.

1. Enhance Your Internet Presence

A lot of healthcare professionals are valued for their knowledge and expertise within the medical field, but they can struggle for visibility in the digital space. With almost 312 million internet users in the US, the majority use online searches to choose a physician, so it is critical to magnify your online footprint.

In this competitive environment, a customized medical search engine marketing strategy can be a game-changer for you. A reputed healthcare marketing agency can help you devise a robust medical search engine marketing strategy that would increase your website and social presence to raise your online visibility and drive leads.

By using the right keywords related to your services, you can appear in the top search results of various search engines to attract new patients actively searching for a provider.

2. Use Technology to Enhance Patient Experience

Integrate technology into your practice to add comfort to your patient's online journey and enhance the patient experience. Your marketing strategies should promote all aspects of virtual care that you, as a healthcare organization, can provide to your patients.

Some examples of how technology is adding convenience to patient experiences are telehealth facilities providing virtual care to patients, mobile apps that provide patients with easily accessible healthcare information and appointment reminders. There are also platforms that help collect patient feedback, monitor online reviews, and track patient satisfaction.

3. Utilize Artificial Intelligence to Augment Personalization

Advanced analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) are the reigning trends in many industries for a reason. These techniques not only help you understand consumer behavior but also help you to strategize your next step.

Starting with simple tools such as Google Search Console and analytics to help you can gather data on your target audience. By carefully analyzing the user heat-maps, user activity, and search terms, you can optimize your website design and digital marketing campaigns over time.

Once you have a better understanding of your patients’ experiences, you can increase personalization on your website and your marketing approach. Enhancing patient experience based on your findings is a great way to retain any patients you have acquired through marketing efforts.

4. The Right Marketing Tactic to Create a Positive Impression

This is one of the simplest ways where healthcare marketing can help you in attracting and retaining patients. The right marketing tactic will help your patients’ have a positive perception of the care they will receive at your healthcare practice.

Here are three primary ways of how you can improve the patient experience they will receive at your healthcare practice for improved patient retention.

1. Provide your patients with all the information they need. Create content that patients and customers can refer to and can make an informed decision when they have a specific issue or question. Your patients should trust you beyond in-person visits.
2. Improve on your availability as a healthcare provider. Make sure your patients are seen in a timely manner for all their appointments or surgery. Also, keep the marketing team involved. For example, they shouldn’t promote an offer that doesn't exist anymore or run a campaign for a service that doesn’t have appointments available for months.
3. Promote healthcare hospitality for your patients. Use appropriate resources to create exceptional patient experiences at your healthcare facility. Simple actions like scheduling appointments in advance, addressing the patient's preferences, concerns, and anxieties, and reaching out for over-due visits not only speed up processes but build patient loyalty for your practice.

5. Manage Your Reputation to Strengthen Your Brand

Your online reputation can make or break your medical practice. That’s why you must consider taking professional help for reputation management. With the help of online reputation management tools, like RepuGen, you can evaluate patient experiences and track any negative feedback in real-time.

Gain insight into the areas that need to be worked upon and address the grievances of your unhappy patients. The quick intervention will help your rate of service recovery and patient retention. In addition, prospective patients will see how engaged and in tuned you are with patient concerns and comments.

6. Use Automated Messages to Build Good Relationships

Personal interaction with your patients can do wonders for your practice! Therefore, it's best to communicate with your patients via messages, phone calls, and emails, and keep track of how they are doing. Personalized services will always attract engagement and help build a good patient relationship. Since you may have hectic schedules, you can consider outsourcing this job to professionals who will design and send customized messages and responses on your behalf.

7. Capitalize on Patient Feedback and Referrals

Positive feedback and patient referrals can act as catalysts for your practice. To maximize your patient acquisition potential, capitalize on the positive reviews, and craft a referral program to grow your patient base.

Get professional help for creating and managing sentiment-based referral marketing programs. As a medical practitioner, you can focus on providing high-quality services and leave the rest on professionals. They will gather positive feedback and work on campaigns to build a solid referral base.

Retaining patients through healthcare marketing is not rocket science. As long as you're aware of the current market trends and implementing proven methods like the ones listed above, you can successfully retain new and current patients that come to your practice.