Why Should You Hire a Healthcare Marketing Consultant?

Healthcare marketing consultants play a big role in helping medical practices attract new patients and retain existing ones. They generally achieve this by combining traditional and online strategies to create an effective marketing plan with long-lasting results. With nearly 70,000 health-related searches each minute on Google, it’s crucial to use digital healthcare marketing techniques to achieve your practice’s long-term growth goals.

A healthcare marketing consultant can help you develop the right online strategy to get new patients through local SEO, patient referrals, and more. By engaging a marketer who employs the right methods for your medical specialty, you can increase your healthcare marketing ROI while saving money on each campaign. This way, you can focus more on providing quality care instead of worrying about how to increase patient acquisition.

What Do Healthcare Marketing Consultants Do?

Medical marketing consultants offer a wide range of services to spark patient-base and revenue growth for healthcare businesses. These often include:

#1. Auditing your current marketing efforts

Before a marketer can recommend the right approach to boost your practice’s growth, they must analyze your current patient acquisition and retention efforts. They can pinpoint strategies that are working (or not) by performing a thorough audit of your marketing campaigns and identify weaknesses by looking through past insights from Google Analytics or online reviews. Your current marketing strategies can also reveal a lot about what might not be working well with your current or previous efforts to get new patients and keep them for longer.

#2. Uncovering new ways to grow your online presence

These days, medical practices don’t have the luxury to have an online presence without also having a digital marketing strategy for it. It’s like having a doctor’s office that only a few local people know exists. That’s why a medical practice marketing consultant should help you identify ways to reach more prospective patients online, even if you’re already doing well with traditional methods like print advertising or referrals.

The strategist can assess what local competitors are doing to excel online and show you how to beat them in their own game. They may also assess the state and ROI of your digital assets, such as a medical practice website, blog, social media, or even online directory listings.

#3. Assembling and implementing an effective healthcare marketing plan

The ultimate objective of analyzing your healthcare marketing needs is to identify and create a custom solution to attract more patients and boost your practice’s profits. A consultant can help you put together multiple strategies and the required marketing activities to get results.

Better yet, these experts can provide a dedicated team to help you efficiently implement your growth plan if need be.

#4. Providing regular, timely performance report

You must be able to measure the difference your investment in digital healthcare marketing is making at any time. For this, you need regular access to campaign reports or dashboards where you can pull insights for specific activities over a specified period of time. Your medical marketing consultants should be able to provide extensive data.

When Should You Hire a Healthcare Marketing Consultant?

Here are five scenarios where engaging medical marketing consultants makes sense:

#1. To close any skill gap in your marketing department

Temporarily hiring a medical practice marketer is a cost-effective way to launch and run a growth-driven campaign without overwhelming your in-house team. Consider hiring one if your current employees don't have the prerequisite skills. It can help you avoid inefficient results from neglecting key success factors in healthcare marketing.

#2. To develop a high ROI marketing plan

Not acquiring and retaining enough patients isn’t the only potential marketing problem for a healthcare provider. Identifying the reason for the bleak numbers and low ROI is often a significant challenge, too. Sometimes, what a practice needs to kickstart sales growth is for a consultant to help them develop a custom marketing strategy fitted to their unique goals.

#3. To better manage your online reputation

With 81% of patients checking online reviews for doctors before choosing one for their healthcare needs, every practice must maintain a stellar online reputation. A medical marketing consultant can help with that aspect of reputation management and other offline efforts for improving patient experience and active brand building.

#4. To outperform your competitors

A healthcare marketing strategist can help you become and retain your status as one of the most preferred local providers by outshining your competition. They can perform a thorough competitor analysis to help develop strategies to outdo them.

What to Look for When Hiring a Healthcare Marketing Consultant?

Qualities of the best and most effective medical marketing consultants include:

#1. Relevant market experience

Ask prospective marketers to describe the relatable marketing and branding approaches they intend to use for maximum impact on your target audience. A strategist who is knowledgeable with the consumer preferences of your community or location is a good fit for the medical marketing assignment.

#2. A stellar portfolio of happy healthcare clients

Any medical marketer worth your time and budget must show proof of success in the industry. Insist on a solid track record of results for clients with a budget similar to yours. Client testimonials and case studies with campaign performance data can help you make a more informed choice.

#3. Metrics-focused

Not only should a good consultant provide timely updates on completed tasks and progress, but they must also send you performance reports on an ongoing basis and measure success with data.

#4. Stellar reputation

Check the potential consultant’s website for client testimonials to be sure they’re as reliable and professional as they claim to be. Third-party review platforms can also provide a glimpse of their reputation.

#5. Tools/automation

Automating routine tasks like review generation and patient engagements can help you increase your practice's patient acquisition and retention rates. Ask prospective consultants about the availability of software with these capabilities and more (and the cost of subscription).

Supercharge Your Practice’s Growth with Medical Marketing Consultants

A lot may be at stake for your clinic, hospital, or physician’s office if you don’t have a proper strategy to maximize patient acquisitions and loyalty. Your practice’s reputation, long-term revenue generation capacity, and much more will suffer if your in-house marketing staff consistently struggles in key aspects of offline and online campaigns.

This burden doesn’t have to be yours to bear alone–not when you can engage our experienced healthcare marketing consultants at GMR Web Team. Our digital marketing strategists can provide the complementary expertise and resource reinforcements your medical practice needs to get more patients and grow profits much faster.

Get in touch with us today for a complete audit of your healthcare marketing requirements!