Digital Marketing
For Urgent Care
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Healthcare & Digital Marketing Blog Articles
Remember when CVS and Aetna announced their merger back in 2017? At the time, it was the latest blockbuster in a series of high-profile healthcare mergers, a trend that has continued into 2021. Cone Health and Sentara. Four hospitals on the south side of Chicago merge. Tenet Healthcare just announced plans to acquire up to 45 ambulatory surgery centers.
How far the world of healthcare marketing has come. Think back to 1990, when urgent care centers were originally designed to fill gaps in the health service chain. Since then, urgent care facilities have evolved into a unique niche within the healthcare industry.
So much of the external circumstances shaking things up in 2020 are inextricably tied to the world of healthcare. Here’s to hoping, first and foremost, that a lot of things get a whole lot better in 2021. As healthcare marketers look to their 2021 strategies, there’s certainly room for optimism. As we see it, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, in particular, presents a tremendous opportunity for healthcare organizations to survive the pandemic and emerge even stronger.
We Know Urgent Care Marketing
Urgent care facilities are highly competitive businesses in small towns and large cities across the country. As a full-service, urgent care marketing agency, Cardinal Digital Marketing helps your urgent care facility work smarter, not harder, in order to rise above the competition in your community.
We know how to engage and attract new urgent care patients while you sit back and enjoy greater brand awareness, growth within your community, and increased profits.
Engaging the Community
Healthcare is becoming an increasingly consumer-driven industry, and urgent care centers play a big role in that. Through our ongoing online urgent care marketing efforts and future-proof technology, we help you reach and engage your local community. This enables your healthcare center to expand its presence within the community so that you can gain a serious edge over your competitors.
Multiple Location
Community Engagement
If you’re responsible for multiple urgent care facility locations, you have a different type of challenge on your hands. By working with Cardinal Digital Marketing, you’ll realize continuity and brand-building between multiple urgent care facilities. Our innovative online urgent care marketing solutions integrate your facility locations and engage patients regardless of where they reside within your regional area.
Attracting New Patients
Of course the one thing that every urgent care facility needs is new patients walking into its doors day in and day out. We understand how critical new patients are to the growth of your facility, whether you’re looking to expand or just to remain in business.
Cardinal Digital Marketing has unique technology to not only attract new patients to your practice, but to attract patients in need of specific services your practice has to offer. We utilize highly targeted urgent care marketing efforts and online reputation management marketing strategies to attract the type of patients your urgent care practice wants most.
Today’s Consumer Driven Healthcare
The old way of advertising doesn’t work for healthcare facilities today, including urgent care centers and walk-in medical clinics. These are a relatively new breed in the healthcare arena. Healthcare today is a more consumer-driven industry than it’s ever been before.
That’s why it’s essential to work with Cardinal Digital Marketing. We understand today’s healthcare buying audience. We are experts at urgent care marketing and will help your urgent care center speak to its buying audience in its own language.
If you are an urgent care provider and are looking to increase patients, grow your market share, and improve profits, call Cardinal Digital Marketing today at (404) 948-3847. Let us work our urgent care marketing magic on your business’ website design and digital marketing plan to help you achieve all of the above and more.
“We were a bit nervous to invest so much in a digital marketing agency but our practice very quickly started generating a return on investment. We couldn’t be more thrilled!”
-Gaye P.
Digestive Healthcare of Georgia
“Cardinal’s competitors constantly try to get us to switch to them.
We are not interested in switching.”
The State of Healthcare Marketing In 2021 Survey Report
To gain a better understanding of the current state of healthcare marketing, we surveyed more than 100 healthcare marketers and executives to learn how they’re navigating the post-pandemic world.
Download the full report to learn their top marketing priorities, challenges, and investments and what you need to do to stay competitive and grow your healthcare organization.
Cardinal’s Proprietary Marketing Technology Patient Stream’s Benefits:
Double Your Patient Volume for the Same Spend
Dump the campaigns that don’t generate returns. Our AI based marketing platform automatically optimizes towards the campaigns that are driving high value patients.
Executive Level Reporting
Give your CMO the reporting she didn’t even know was possible. No longer do you have to report on cost per lead. With Patient Stream, you will now be able to report on Cost Per Patient.
Urgent Care Marketing
If you have an urgent care center or are working in one, likely, that marketing might not be at the top of your to-do list. However, when prospective patients require urgent care, will they be able to find your service easily? Compared to other healthcare specialties, urgent care is a different beast. This is mainly because urgent care centers don’t need appointments – more often, patients will have to find a facility at the same time they need to visit one.
So are you making it easy for patients to find your urgent care center?
To capture and stay at the forefront of your community’s attention, you need a strong digital marketing strategy. With a marketing strategy, you’ll have a strong online presence and you can answer questions your prospective patients have like your hours of operation, wait time, quality of care, and more. Digital marketing allows your urgent care facility to be seen and your brand to communicate its unique message to acquire new patients.
Whether your in-house marketer can’t handle the task or you don’t have a marketing strategy at all, you should consider working with an agency. If you need help with your urgent care marketing plan, Cardinal might just be the agency for you. Contact us to get started.
5 Challenges in Urgent Care Marketing
Not Understanding the Patient’s Journey
According to research, 73% of patients use search engines to find a healthcare provider or treatment center. There are numerous ways for a prospective patient to find your urgent care facility: direct traffic, listing sites, referrals, paid ads, and the list goes on. Without a solid marketing plan in place, it’s hard to know exactly where your prospects are coming from and their journey that leads to their first appointment.
If you don’t understand your patient’s journey, you’ll be lost as to where to allocate your marketing budget. Without a clear picture of your customer’s journey, you’ll end up wasting resources without good results.
Having a Poor Website
Using your smartphone, go to your favorite browser and pull up your urgent care website. Does your website look professional? Does it quickly load on your smartphone browser? If your urgent care website design looks poor, slow to load, and not structured properly, you’re turning away potential patients. The state of your website is important especially when it comes to the mobile side.
77% of smartphone users use their device to find local health providers, and 79% of them said that they’re likely to stay or revisit if a website is easy to use. Growing your urgent care facility starts with optimizing your website for mobile users.
Finding Time for Marketing
We’ve encountered many urgent care facilities that don’t have a digital marketing plan in place. They usually rely on traditional marketing methods like print, TV, radio, and so on. In some cases, when we talk with urgent care centers about marketing, many usually say that they “have a guy.” These days, it’s not surprising for healthcare providers to put digital marketing to the back burner.
It all comes down to not having the time to market their facilities.
If you’re not finding the time to market your urgent care center, it’s highly recommended that you partner with a digital marketing agency. Agencies like Cardinal can help you by handling your marketing campaign so you can free up some time and focus on things that matter, like running the facility’s day-to-day.
Aversion to Online Reviews
It’s understandable why many old-school health practitioners have quite an aversion to online reviews – they resent the fact that reviews have so much influence. And they are right! 84% of customers now read online reviews and 70% of them say that online reviews are one of the primary factors for visiting a site. However, one way to look at it is that healthcare practitioners have immense power to acquire reviews that will help grow the practice.
This is where urgent care centers can benefit from partnering with a marketing agency. Although you can’t control the health of the patients, you can control the overall healthcare experience. How? By reducing the confusion and ambiguity of the patient’s healthcare experience. Think of better communication, straightforward paperwork, and strong online content.
In the world of healthcare, patient care is always number one. Communicate this message as part of your brand and highlight how your center can deliver the best results. After all, satisfied patients are the best advocates for your practice.
Not Knowing the Patients and
the Community
To be successful, urgent care facilities need to position themselves as an asset to the community that they serve. This should be reflected in your marketing efforts which indicate that you need to educate the public about your center and all the services that you provide. In this case, a strong SEO and social media strategies will do wonders for your campaign.
Without a marketing team, it will be difficult for your company to determine your potential patients’ sentiments about the healthcare industry. Furthermore, knowing the community also means knowing your local competition. A reliable marketing team can help you develop motivated audience segments and other elements that drive qualified traffic to your website.
Social media also allows your company to engage with members of the community. Plus, social media platforms allow you to keep a finger on the pulse of the community which helps in increasing brand awareness and gaining an edge over the competition.
7 Ways an Urgent Care Marketing Agency Can Help Your Facility
Why should your facility consider partnering with a digital marketing agency? Here are the top benefits that you can expect.
A Healthcare Website That You Can Be Proud of
An overwhelming of your prospective patients will look into your website before deciding whether your facility deserves a visit or not. Having said that, the last thing you want for your visitors to see is a poorly-made website that loads slowly.
A digital marketing agency can help develop a website that will serve as the face of your urgent care center – one that you’ll be proud of. Aside from good web design, your website will be developed as a useful resource for your prospective patients. When visitors come to your website to find answers to their questions, your site should be more than happy to oblige.
An urgent care marketing agency will help you develop and manage a cutting-edge website that’s search-optimized and conversion-focused.
An Effective Content Marketing Plan
A successful urgent care center attracts new patients and helps them on a regular basis. However, the healthcare digital marketing space has become a lot more competitive that it became harder to get the patients’ attention. These days, one of the best ways to attract an audience and stay ahead of the competition is content marketing.
An effective content strategy is important because 89% of online users rely on the internet to answer their health-related questions. Therefore, it’s highly recommended that you host a blog on your web However, the healthcare content is a very different animal and needs to be approached with great care and attention. Otherwise, you’ll end up spreading misinformation which can permanently damage your brand. Content is designed to establish your brand as an authority which results in more trust and credibility.
An agency partner can help you with content generation and management. If you already have a content marketing strategy in place, they can adapt the effective elements and add their own spin to it for better results.
SEO for Generating Patient Leads
If a user searches for keywords like “urgent care near me” or “walk-in clinic” on a local level, will your website appear on the first page results of Google or Bing? If not, then you’re likely losing a lot of potential patients. About 75% of online users don’t bother scrolling through the second page of search engine results. When your practice is not found on the first page of the search engines, you might as well not rank at all.
This is why a strong SEO strategy is important for urgent care facilities. On top of having good content, you shouldn’t overlook your website’s SEO, both on-page and off-page. The goal is to have your website appear on the first page of the search engines.
An agency will conduct a full website audit to determine which elements of your SEO strategy are working or need improvement. After the audit, your marketing team will develop an optimized SEO campaign that best fits your organization and will get the best ROI.
Leverage Social Media to Build a Community
How is your care facility’s social media presence? If you think having a Facebook page is enough, that’s a mistake. Social media is an excellent platform to engage and influence your patients.
As mentioned, you should always strive to position your brand as an authority and that’s best done on your social media accounts. Through networks like Facebook and Twitter, you can raise public awareness about new and emerging health trends and concerns. Sometimes, raising awareness is as simple as reminding your members about common health practices. Social media is also great for reminding patients about their upcoming appointments and for answering common patient questions.
If you wish to make the most out of social media, you may also consider paid advertising like Facebook Ads. Facebook’s paid advertising platform is quite robust and highly-targeted, especially for local health care businesses. A digital marketing agency like Cardinal can help manage and grow your social media accounts, and oversee your Facebook Ads campaign.
Attract New Patients With PPC Marketing
Pay-per-click advertising or PPC is a top strategy for targeting your most qualified leads. Like SEO, paid search allows you to reach patients while they’re already searching for an urgent care center. Basically, your center is placed in the front of the customers who are actively searching for the services you provide.
However, PPC can be unwieldy especially when you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s just easy to blow your monthly PPC budget with little to no results. In the health care industry, the cost per click (CPC) is not cheap, so it’s best to tread lightly.
If you choose to partner with a digital marketing agency, they can create a custom PPC campaign that will help increase both conversions and revenue for your facility. You’ll be assigned an account manager who will ensure that your PPC campaign is optimized for the best ROI. Paid search campaigns can be managed in real-time, so you must have someone monitoring your account for any development.
Make the Best First Impression with Reputation Management
As previously mentioned, 82% of consumers read online reviews for local businesses. Furthermore, only 53% of users would consider dealing with a business with fewer than 4 stars. Finally, a 5-star establishment receives 39% more clicks from Google Local than a 1-star business. As you can see, the importance of online reviews can’t be understated, especially when it comes to the healthcare business.
With good reviews, you’ll be winning over patients and will get a glimpse at your center’s quality of care. Unfortunately, getting negative reviews isn’t something that you can control. However, how you deal with unfavorable reviews is what matters. You should know that when healthcare practices address a patient’s negative feedback, the satisfaction of the patient doubles.
This is where online reputation management comes in handy. The agency will highlight your urgent care’s best qualities and your ability to help people with their health problems quickly and efficiently. Also, the team will emphasize your positive reviews and testimonials through PPC, content marketing, and web design.
Measure Your Success With In-Depth Reporting
Unlike traditional advertising methods like TV, print, radio, etc., the beauty of digital marketing is that it’s specific, deliberate, and measurable. The ability to measure results is the difference between wishful thinking and actual ROI.
Using the right tracking tools and software, marketers can monitor various metrics that will give you insight into your marketing efforts and customer behavior. Here are some important key performance indicators (KPIs) that you should track:
– Total site visits
– Traffic sources or channels
– Number of new or returning visitors
– Bounce rate
– Exit rate
– Mobile traffic
– Cost/Revenue per visitor
– Total conversions
– Click through rates
– Cost per conversion
– ROI (real and projected)
– Conversion funnel rates
Every marketer is required to demonstrate that every step they do has value. The primary way to do this is by reporting – the process of tracking progress, demonstrating value, and identifying actionable steps for improving marketing performance and fulfilling your goals.
Why Should You Partner with Cardinal for Your Urgent Care Marketing Needs?
If you’re looking for an industry leader in urgent care marketing, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve helped many healthcare facilities and medical practitioners with their marketing goals. Here’s what our clients can expect when they work with us:
Website Design and Development
When prospective patients visit your website, you have to make sure that they like what they see. Cardinal Digital Marketing will not only build your facility a good-looking website but one that’s also conversion-focused. Also, your website will be built on a solid foundation of a user-friendly content management system (CMS).
Content Marketing
An urgent care center should build trust and credibility with its community. At Cardinal, we believe that high-quality content is how you earn the trust of your community. We have a team of content specialists that will write engaging and eye-catching for your website or blog. Strong content will not only position your organization as an authority but you’ll also be on the good side of Google.
Search Engine Optimization
Cardinal is a full-featured digital marketing agency but we are most proud of our team of SEO experts. Even if you have the best-looking website, it doesn’t mean much if patients can’t find your website. Cardinal’s brand of SEO is all about trimming the fat that comes with search optimization.
Pay Per Click Marketing
If you want to target users that are more likely to become patients, PPC is your best bet. While organic search optimization has its advantages, paid search has the upper hand because of targeting and instantaneous results. As our partner, we’ll assign an in-house manager to monitor and optimize your PPC campaign.
Reputation Management
For any healthcare company, reputation is everything and we understand that. At Cardinal, our reputation management services are twofold. First, we highlight the best qualities of your practice, community services, and positive feedback. On the flip side, we’ll deal with negative feedback by strategically responding to them and identify the problem so it can be addressed in the future.
Executive Level Reporting
At Cardinal, we highly value transparency above everything. We make sure that every step we take gives you value and we’ll let you know through in-depth reporting. With our proprietary tracking and reporting technology, we’ll take out the guesswork about your campaign’s success.
