Like most medical specialists, urology practices are heavily reliant on referrals from physicians. While physician referrals are still important, they shouldn’t be the sole source for all of your patients. Instead, you should work to supplement referrals by directly acquiring patients. To achieve this, you will need to invest in digital marketing strategies that truly work.
What are the two sides of urology marketing?
Marketing for urologists entails a combination of physician referral marketing and patient-directed marketing. It’s important to understand the differences between these two and how they work for a urology practice.
Physician Referral Marketing
Referral marketing for physicians involves practitioners or businesses making medical referrals or direct recommendations for a physician in another practice. Physicians often rely on word-of-mouth marketing to drive referrals, but hiring a physician liaison can also help with this. A physician liaison is either a part-time contractor or full-time employee who work for a physician to encourage referrals from practices or businesses that aren’t making referrals. In the process, the liaison helps attract new referral sources and maintains communication with them. They’ll understand how to build and improve relationships with these sources.
Patient-Directed Marketing
Another way to attract new patients is to market directly to these prospects. This will require you to invest in attracting visitors to your practice’s website. Once you bring those visitors to your website, you’ll want to convert them into leads. From there, you can begin converting those leads into patients as you lead them along the patient journey.
Why should urologists invest in digital marketing?
Digital healthcare marketing is integral for urology specialists because of the reach and specific benefits it offers. Today, people do most of their research online when considering certain products or services, and medical services are no exception. People want to know what they’ll be getting with these services before entrusting a specific physician. In fact, one recent study found that 89% of U.S. citizens turn to Google before their doctor.
Digital marketing gets you in front of prospects who know they have a problem but may not even have a primary care physician at the moment. If you can gain these prospects’ trust early on as they research their problem, you’ll increase your chances of converting them into patients.
7 Urology Marketing Services to Attract New Patients
If you’re wondering how to use digital marketing to your advantage as a urologist, the following are some effective digital marketing strategies to implement. These can work with other offline marketing efforts to help improve patient acquisition and retention.
Web Design for Urologists
Your website functions as your primary online representative for your practice, which is why it needs to look and function its best. You must have a responsive site that people can easily access and navigate. A well-designed website will help convert visitors into leads and leads into patients.
You should build your website on a HIPAA-compliant web server. You’ll also need a budget for an initial redesign along with a monthly management budget. DoctorLogic can help with this through our medical website management solution.
Urology Search Engine Optimization
To appear at the top of search engine results for relevant terms in your industry, you need good search engine optimization (SEO). SEO practices entail targeting specific keywords in content to help increase rankings. A good SEO strategy will attract new visitors who are more likely to convert to patients. For example, some SEO-optimized content could include blog posts that cover topics around “urinary tract infections,” “kidney stones,” “erectile dysfunction,” or other similar health issues. This would reach people at the top of the marketing funnel when they’re conducting initial research. You can then bring them down along the funnel to build their trust and offer a solution that turns them into patients.
To get the results you want from your SEO efforts, it’s best to use modern tools such as DoctorLogic’s A.I.-driven SEO search amplifier. This way you can target thousands of relevant keywords, whereas many SEO agencies can only rank for a handful at a time.
Local Urology Directories Listings
Your urology practice should also appear online in the form of local listings. With the help of external citations featuring your practice’s name, address, and phone number (NAP), you’ll be able to drive even more traffic and boost local SEO performance.
Reputation Management for Urologists
Medical practices of all types need to have a stellar online reputation to earn the trust of prospective patients. Because of this, urology practices also need reliable reputation management to secure their online reputability. A few of the main tasks involved in reputation management include soliciting, collecting, and responding to online reviews. Without a sufficient number of positive reviews, urology practices will likely have a difficult time attracting visitors and converting leads.
With DoctorLogic’s patient acquisition platform for reputation management, you can automate the collection and republishing of reviews and testimonials across the web.
Urology Search Engine Marketing
Like SEO, search engine marketing (SEM) helps increase visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs), including Google’s. However, unlike SEO, SEM relies on paid pay-per-click (PPC) advertisements that target certain keywords. Working in conjunction, SEO and SEM can help you dominate search engine rankings. For example, when people search for terms around topics like kidney cancer, prostate cancer, urinary incontinence, vasectomy procedures, or other relevant concepts, you can ensure people find you through organic search results and paid text ads. These ads appear above organic results and closely resemble their organic counterparts, encouraging clicks.
DoctorLogic’s medical paid advertising solution will help create ads, optimize them, and adjust bidding strategies to maximize their return on investment (ROI).
Urology Content Marketing
Content marketing is equally critical for urology practices. Without plenty of rich, helpful content, the rest of your marketing efforts will suffer. For instance, you won’t be able to rank well organically in search engines if you don’t have ample content that’s well-optimized. You need content that connects with prospective and existing patients, regardless of where they are in the patient journey.
The content on your website should include blog posts covering everything from general urological issues, including symptoms and potential causes, to more specific conditions such as pelvic organic prolapse and benign prostatic hyperplasia. Content should also include webpages that cover the services you provide, details about your practice and its history, doctor and staff bios, and other pertinent information.
If you’re in need of high-quality healthcare content for your website, DoctorLogic can help create it with our healthcare content marketing. You’ll then be able to attract more visitors and increase conversions with compelling, informative content of all types.
How much should urologists spend on marketing?
The amount you need to spend on urology practice marketing will depend on your circumstances. Specifically, the total amount you need to set aside will be based on the number of competitors in your area and potential revenue opportunities. You can easily gauge competitiveness in your area with a simple online search. All you need to do is perform a quick Google search for “urologists near me” in your area, and you’ll see what competition looks like.
To identify existing revenue opportunities for your practice, you will also need to conduct a local market analysis. There are a couple of different approaches you can take to local market analysis. The first is to extract demographic data from census.gov and extrapolate keyword trends and search volumes. This method can be time-consuming and detract focus from growing your practice. If you would like to save more time and avoid doing this yourself, you can get a free local market analysis from DoctorLogic. This will allow you to jump on some lucrative opportunities you might otherwise miss.