What makes your healthcare practice different? Why should patients choose you over one of the big guys?

You likely can recite an answer to that question immediately. In fact, it may be ingrained in your entire team. The answer is probably one you’re very proud of.

How about when it comes to your healthcare marketing? Do your marketing messages correlate with your practice’s values? Are you taking ownership of what sets you apart, or are you trying to be something you’re not in order to compete with larger practices?

Use Your Marketing to Celebrate Your Practice’s Strengths

When it comes to healthcare marketing for smaller practices, you must leverage your own strengths in your messaging. Don’t try to beat the large practices with their enormous marketing budgets, state-of-the-art video equipment, and sizable marketing team.

Instead, make the competition irrelevant by focusing on everything your practice is rather than what it isn’t.

Try This Exercise

Ask yourself the following questions:

• What is our practice?
• What makes us different?
• What are the positives happening here?

Grab a pen and jot down your answers. If you’re at a small, local practice, your list may look something like this:

• We are a household name in our city.
• We support community growth and events.
• We have an active, organic social media following.
• Our doctors recognize and greet their patients at the grocery store.
• We pursue lower costs for our patients while still offering quality care.

Now, underline the things on your list that your competition can’t offer. This is your market space — and it’s uncontested.

Capture Your Own “Blue Ocean”

Have you ever heard of the “red vs. blue ocean” strategy?

The blue ocean strategy is the “simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low cost to open up a new market space and create new demand.”

When you capture an uncontested market space — a “blue ocean” — you create a new demand, allowing profitable and rapid opportunity for growth.

Your medical practice has the opportunity to dive into a “blue ocean” by focusing on what sets you apart from the competition and creating a demand in that space using your marketing efforts.

How Do I Create a “Blue Ocean” with My Medical Marketing?

How do you create your “blue ocean”? What does it look like to align your healthcare marketing strategy with your practice’s values? How do you actually execute this?

Here are a few ideas of how you can maximize what your medical practice already has going for you.

1. Use the Power of Testimony

Guess what? There are a whole bunch of patients out there in your community already doing your marketing for you for free.

Testimonials are powerful. People trust their friends’ and families’ reviews far more than a brand’s claims about its services.

Ask your patients to be advocates for your practice by providing a testimonial. These testimonials can be direct quotes to use on Facebook ads, in your organic social media strategy, or in your healthcare email marketing.

When potential patients see local faces they recognize speaking about your practice, they will start to gain a familiarity and confidence in you — one that even the large practices can’t buy.

How a Limited Budget Can Go a Long Way for Your Healthcare Marketing

2. Start Creating Videos

You may think marketing videos are complicated and require a large budget. While that can be true, it certainly doesn’t have to be.

Anyone can create videos. Yes, even your small marketing team!

Remember those patient testimonials we talked about? When you create video testimonials, you’re likely to both strike an emotional chord with your audience and show them something they’ll actually remember.

In fact, people will remember only 10% of the marketing information they hear, but they will retain 65% of it when paired with a relevant visual.

Whether you can hire a local videographer to help you out or you’re on your own creating videos with your iPhone or DSLR, you can’t afford to miss out on making and leveraging video testimonials.

For example, here’s a video testimonial from one of our healthcare clients describing her experience with 9 Clouds. How could you create something like this for your own brand?

3. Repurpose Your Content

You may not be able to pay for a huge TV spot during the game, but that doesn’t mean you can’t get your healthcare message out there.

Once you begin creating good content, make a plan to create a web of exposure within your own marketing channels, recycling your content as much as possible.

Say you have a great video testimonial from a local patient. Of course, you can post that organically on your social media accounts. But then, take your video content further:

1. Run a Facebook campaign using the video to reach a new (yet still qualified) audience.
2. Transcribe the video, and turn it into a blog post. This will help with your SEO strategy.
3. Use a photo of the patient who offered a testimonial alongside a quote in your next email newsletter.
4. Create an ad in your local newspaper or magazine using the image and quote.

Those are just a few ideas using a video testimonial as an example. Learn even more ways to repurpose your healthcare marketing budget.

Therapist Increases Web Traffic 540% for a Niche Service

Get Started!

When you align your healthcare marketing to focus on what your practice excels at, you create a new demand for something that you — and not the competition — already offer.

If you need help knowing where to begin, or if you don’t have the manpower to execute these marketing ideas, we’re here to help.

Start by taking a look at one of our healthcare marketing success stories — or request a free digital marketing assessment for your medical practice, and we’ll offer some recommendations for your website, ads, and other marketing practices.

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