How Patient Journey Mapping Strengthens Healthcare Marketing
- Understand Each Stage: Awareness, consideration, access, service delivery, and ongoing care all play a role in how patients choose providers.
- Boost Online Visibility: Use SEO, Google Business Profile, and content marketing to make your practice easy to find at every step.
- Retain & Grow Patients: Leverage reviews, social media, email, and text marketing to build long-term patient relationships and referrals.
Healthcare practices such as chiropractors, optometrists, med spas, and dermatologists can open their doors and wait for clients to book appointments. That does not build your practice. You have to be found by your prospective patients. One way to do this is to map your patient journey, or find out how people in your specific industry sector find the practitioner they need.
By understanding the patient journey, you can then optimize your healthcare services marketing strategies to be more “present” within that journey. This encourages consumers to become your patients, building your brand, and making it easier for them to make the decision to work with you.
Let’s talk about how to map the patient journey and then use that to increase our healthcare service’s online presence.
How to Map the Patient Journey for Healthcare Services
Chiropractors, med spas, dermatologists, optometrists, and related fields have a very different process for building their practice compared to a traditional doctor. But how do customers find you?
Patient journey mapping is the process of understanding and improving patient experiences as they interact with your practice online.
The patient journey is a sequence of interactions that begins when a person first determines they need professional care. This process looks at all of the touchpoints that occur in that patient’s experience from locating the healthcare provider they need to scheduling appointments, and ultimately receiving care. For healthcare service marketing, our focus is not only on the patient’s experience once at your office, but also on their experience in finding you.
Mapping the patient journey requires an evaluation of the following:
- Awareness: This is the first phase when the patient identifies a need for care and then starts searching for providers. At this point in the process, your marketing needs to focus heavily on search engine optimization (SEO), which creates a way for the patient to find you within your local community.
- Consideration: In the second stage, the patient has options, but now they need to choose someone to work with out of those options. They may consider factors like coverage and benefits, but also the reviews the service receives from other patients.
- Decision: At this phase, the customer has made the decision to get care and from whom they wish to do so. However, they need to find it easy to book an appointment and then receive follow-up calls and services to remind them.
- Appointment: At this stage, from a marketing standpoint, you’re still working to create authentic experiences and build your reputation. You want to make sure their visit goes well and that they get the care they expected and need.
- Ongoing care: In this component of the patient journey, the focus is on maintaining that communication with your customers, often done through email marketing, text message marketing, follow-up support, and continuing to build their understanding of you and your business.
Understanding how people search for and engage with your healthcare practice online allows you to make the journey as straight and simple as possible. That increases the likelihood of a prospective searcher becoming your patient.
How to Increase Visibility of Your Healthcare Practice in Each Area of the Patient Journey
Now that you have an idea of what the patient needs to book and maintain services from you, let’s explore the actual ways to put in place those tools they need to use to reach you. Here is what healthcare practices can do from a marketing standpoint to build their online presence in a way that attracts new patients and gets them to choose you over a competitor.
Building Awareness with SEO
The first step is to make it possible for prospective clients to find you. Building awareness requires careful consideration of who your target audience is, understanding what they are looking for and need, and then creating campaigns that optimize the keywords they are using. To build awareness, you will need to develop the following:
- SEO: Incorporate keywords people are using into your website, blogs, and social media posts. Ensure they are the same words locals are using to find your services.
- Ads: Use paid marketing to get in front of people who are searching for the healthcare services you offer.
- Content: Create content for your website, blog, and social media campaigns that incorporates SEO strategies with a highly local focus.
SEO is a critical process, but not a simplistic one. Utilizing the right tools and resources ensures you are considering competition, current local marketing strategies, and the right keywords.
Demonstrating You Are the Ideal Choice
The consideration phase is where your patient needs to recognize that you are the right choice for them. This means they found you, but they also have competitors to choose from and must decide. To focus on this stage of the patient journey, work on these areas of your healthcare services marketing:
- Google Business Profile: Your Google Business Profile must be optimized to ensure you appear in the Map Pack, but also to demonstrate the specific services you offer, what makes you qualified, and reviews from customers. This is the first consideration factor the patient has when finding you in the search results.
- Website content: Ensure your website content is clearly representative of your business and communicates a patient-first approach. When the client gets to your website, you want to make sure they know they are in the right place. Outline services and ensure clear navigation through the website.
- Use visuals: Provide clear photos of your practice location, practitioners, and services on your website as well as in your Google Business Profile. These visuals help consumers determine if they should interact with you. They build trust.
In the consideration phase, avoid any type of hard selling. In healthcare service marketing, your customer needs to know you’re there for them, to solve their problem because you are an expert. Your content needs to communicate what makes you different from others. Now is the time to refresh your website and work on building reviews.
Create a Simplistic Strategy for Accessing You
Many of the steps you’ve taken have helped improve access. That includes having a clearly outlined Google Business Profile that provides your location address, phone number, and website. Without more than a click, they must be able to connect with you. Consider the following steps to take now:
- Implement email marketing: Once that client gets to your website, give them a reason to provide you with their email. It may be for booking an appointment, or to gain a discount, updates, or a free download. This allows you to continue to market to them over time.
- Put in place text marketing: Getting the client to book a service is critical, but making sure they show up is more challenging. Using your text marketing services, you can send SMS messages to your clients over time to remain in contact and send appointment reminders.
- Provide information: Good content at this point helps to demonstrate your industry expertise and gives people a reason to continue to visit you and even be excited to come in for a consultation.
In this stage of the customer’s experience, you’re providing them with the reason to contact and work with you now. Ensure you have processes in place to measure their satisfaction with the services you offer.
Implement an Ongoing Support Strategy
Once you provide great service, your goal is to keep those patients coming back and referring you. To do this, you need a strategy in place that makes sure you remain their top choice and most frequently thought of provider when there is a need. Consider these strategies:
- Ask for the Review: After providing great service to your patient, send them a text message or email and ask for a review. Provide a direct link to your Google Business Profile where they can leave a review.
- Invite to social media: Ensure that you send email messages that provide a link to your social media pages. That way, they follow you and continue to see your content.
- Create content to educate: Provide emails and blogs that help educate your client relationships and continue to encourage them to come back to you for additional services.
This is also when implementing an email marketing campaign for previous patients can help you to get more from them. Offer complimentary services or supportive resources that push them further towards your business over time.
Utilize a Tool That Makes Communication Easier
There are numerous steps to mapping the customer journey and implementing your plan. Having an all-in-one platform to do the work for you is an excellent strategy. Check out the resources Surefire Local has to offer. With this all-in-one platform, you can create ongoing relationships with your patients. Sign up for a demo now.