Marketing medical services and treatments requires a good general understanding of who your ideal or most common patient is and taking them on a journey that allows them to discover the benefits of your practice over their alternatives. This means marking checkpoints, destinations, and understanding how people want to pace their trip through your brand and marketing materials. So where to start? How do you know who you’re hoping to join you on the journey? With a medical marketing partner like DLM, we’ll help you answer those questions and grow your practice.

Understand the Customer Journey

The first rule you should come to grips with is that customer journeys are not linear. They don’t all enter at the same point, follow the exact same steps, and come to the same conclusion. They also certainly don’t follow a predetermined timeline, especially when it comes to elective medical procedures. Therefore, your journey roadmap for your ideal patients must be flexible and consistent whether a patient first interacts with your website or with a front desk worker who answers their phone call.

With the myriad entry points to your practice thanks to digital tools, you need a robust tracking system to consolidate your disparate information into a single place where your team can act on it. DLM’s Insight tool was built to be fully customizable for your ambitions with an enterprise-level technology stack that keeps everything in one place.

Establish Clear Goals (More Than One)

Just as there are multiple on-ramps for people to start a journey with your practice, there should be multiple off-ramps that satisfy certain goals for your practice. Obviously converting leads into paying patients will be a key goal for most physicians, but there are other ways people might gain or share value through your efforts, making them more likely to refer or return when they ultimately make a decision.

For example, an off-ramp might exist at the end of a drip campaign of say, 5 introductory emails. If the person hasn’t opened or clicked on any of them, the final email could be an invitation for a free consultation or other offer to help entice them to make a definite step. Otherwise, you’ll know that the lead is likely not interested and you could take steps to archive their information so you don’t continue muddying your efforts with people who don’t take action.

Solicit Feedback

Understanding your customers’ unique journeys means understanding both what they enjoyed and disliked about the process from start to finish. Identify the most common obstacles or pain points and remove them so people who follow a similar path don’t encounter them. This might be anything from a broken hyperlink on a web page to a lack or video content that would have meant a lot for a specific person’s decision making.

Review and Iterate Touchpoints

As you hear feedback and gain insight into what paths, marketing efforts, and procedures are making the biggest difference for your practice, don’t be afraid to go back to the drawing board a little. Re-emphasize the commitment to the things that are working well and decide how to address those that aren’t.

In an ever-advancing digital marketing world, the trends of last year may not carry through as people’s preferences change and novel campaigns generate more attention. By reviewing your materials and strategy regularly, you can reflect on whether they need to be updated to match the times or stick with what you have to save the effort of creating new journeys.

Translate the Journey For Everyone

Finally, patients don’t make the journey on their own – they have the help of your front office staff, website materials, and marketing channels to inform them on the way and encourage them to choose your practice. This means everyone who contributes to a touchpoint on the customer journey needs to know where that person might have come from and where they need to go. This means that everyone from creative asset development to website hosts should understand how their contribution creates value for the practice. As the leader, it’s your job to ensure this overarching strategy is correctly communicated in the way each team will understand best.

Full-Journey Digital Marketing Services by DLM

As a medical practice, you aren’t fixated on the trends, emerging technologies, or best practices of today’s marketing, but rightly on the medical techniques that provide the best results. With us as your healthcare marketing partner, you’ll save valuable time and effort outsourcing the day-to-day tasks of your efforts while maintaining a key role in strategy for what works best for your ideal patients. Learn how our technology and specially-designed software can put your team on the same page and leverage automations to give you a scalable marketing ROI. Call or contact us online to start a conversation.