Your website can be a powerful tool for promoting your practice in your community. Without a whole lot of time and effort, you can make it a font of valuable information for patients, not just a way to communicate your location, hours, and check-in procedure.
And if patients — and potential patients — see that you add new, good content to your website regularly, they will keep coming back. It’s a great way to engage with patients and the public, and to position yourself as a thought leader who stays up to date in your medical specialty.
You don’t necessarily have to write the content yourself. Instead, become a content curator: Pick and choose patient-friendly articles, blog posts, videos, and the like that you find online and that reflect your own ideas and philosophy about medical care. Then post them on your website, maybe with an introductory comment or two of your own. (Don’t plagiarize; don’t copy and paste the entire article you want to share. The headline, a link, and the name of the original source should suffice.)
The marketing communication website MarketingProfs says to consider three interrelated factors when you look for content. We’ve added some introductory comments of our own for physician practices.
1. Audience interest. For physicians, this is the easy part. You are already a recognized, respected expert in your specialty, and you deal every day with people — your patients — who have a personal interest in your medical knowledge. You know what questions they commonly ask, what behavior changes likely would benefit them, and what information would help them make good decisions about their health. You understand their fears, hurdles, and misconceptions. You have a ready-made audience.
2. Competitive environment. Where online do your patients go to get information about their condition or health concerns? You could ask them. Some may rely on respected sites like WebMD or the Mayo Clinic for general information, or on credible sites devoted to a chronic condition like the Rheumatoid Arthritis Support Network. What can you offer that these sites cannot? For one, a local perspective. For another, your perspective, tailored to your patient base. Some of your patients may seek health information through social media. For those patients, we have a starter content suggestion for you, from TMA’s blog, Me and My Doctor: “Bias in Social Media: A Warning Against Crowdsourcing Your Medical Care.”
3. Content landscape. This takes us to: Where do you find good content to share? You can start by googling a topic and passing on to your readers the articles that have merit. Me and My Doctor and other blogs are good sources; see a list of health care blogs in TMA’s Social Media Resource Center. Your national specialty society may be a good source of articles, but avoid posting any that are too clinical or technical for your audience. Information from websites your patients already visit also can be worth passing on; your patients will be interested to know what items from those sites you recommend. Consider passing on relevant articles from the news, including items from your local paper about places or events where readers can get exercise, eat healthy, and the like.
MarketingProfs recommends sharing about four posts per day. “As you continue your curation, you will discover new sources that expand your source list, giving you and your audience additional variety and perspective,” the website notes.
If you need a new or better practice website, check out TMA’s on-demand webinar, The Digital Practice: Building a Stronger Online Presence. Or, consider hiring TMA endorsed vendor Officite to build your website. Look for insights into building patient loyalty in the TMA webinar, 10 Ways to Turn Satisfied Patients Into Loyal Patients.
Published April 14, 2016
TMA Practice E-Tips main page
Last Updated On
December 07, 2016
Originally Published On
April 13, 2016