The Ultimate Guide to Pain Management Marketing
Whether you just opened your pain clinic or you’ve been in practice for years but want to make a push for new patients, it can be daunting figuring out how to tell everyone you’re the resource to solve their chronic pain. Today, the best ROI for your marketing dollars needs to incorporate a mix of both digital and traditional marketing strategies as part of your overall pain clinic marketing plan.
Pain Management Marketing
Reading this guide is a great start. It’s full of pain clinic marketing ideas, examples, and strategies to ensure you’ll have a steady stream of returning patients and new patients coming through your office door.
This guide examines over 14 unique pain clinic marketing channels. We’ve divided it into two sections: digital marketing ideas & traditional marketing ideas. These channels work together toward the end goal of driving more patients to your pain management clinic! Here’s what we’ll cover:
Pain Clinic Marketing Strategies
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Traditional Pain Clinic Marketing Strategies
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Pain Clinic Website Design
WHY IT MATTERS
of people make judgements about a company's credibility based on its web design.
Your website is key to your practice success. It’s the place where new patients get their first experience with your clinic. What will their first impressions be? Your site needs to be a showcase for the skills, treatments provided, and attentive staff that sets you apart from other pain specialists. It’s imperative that your website works seamlessly on all devices from iPhones to laptops, clearly conveys your practice’s brand in the digital world, and makes it incredibly easy for a patient to contact your office with a question about back pain or to schedule an appointment. Great web design and website marketing for your pain clinic are all for nothing if you don’t have reliable, fast pain clinic web hosting.
We recommend working with a digital marketing company with a specialization in designing sites for pain clinics like yours. You’ll need an agency that understands different conversion strategies for the procedures you specialize in. And your pain clinic website isn’t complete without certain design features — robust content, animations of procedures, informative blogging, testimonials, and strong calls to action — to help patients move from casual education to making an appointment.
Pain Management Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
WHY IT MATTERS
of all traffic from the average Google search goes to results on page one, according to Chitika.
The goal of every search engine is the same — to provide the searcher with the most relevant results quickly. To do so, the algorithms behind search engines weigh various factors to determine if your website is relevant to the query, is trustworthy, and if it deserves to rank highly in organic search returns. The key is optimizing your pain clinic website so that you can rank highly for the procedures and treatments you specialize in.
But you need to help your digital marketing firm know what you want to be known for. To do so, create and provide original content about your key procedures to your digital marketing firm. Your firm can then optimize this content to help your pain clinic rise in search returns. The best place to start is to consider your top five procedures and the top five most common questions you get from patients. Write these down, along with the top three benefits for each procedure, and pass them on to your firm.
Local Pain Clinic Directory Listings
WHY IT MATTERS
of consumers who perform a local search ultimately visit a store within 5 miles of their current location.
Today’s directories are a far cry from the Yellow Pages of the past. There are over one hundred directories on the web. You need to ensure your practice information is correct across them all, but there’s no way you have the manpower to do so. If you don’t, the inconsistencies guaranteed to be out there confuse search engine algorithms. Their logic assumes one listing with “Suite #” and another with “Office #” are different businesses. Having consistent NAP — name, address, and phone — information ensures that search engines and patients have the correct information. This consistency across the web instills trust, helps bring patients to your pain clinic, and is crucial in your SEO marketing.
Your pain clinic needs to work with a digital marketing firm that can handle your directory listings, making sure they are consistent everywhere they appear. At MyAdvice, we have a tool that ensures those listings are the same everywhere your pain clinic is listed.
Pain Clinic Reputation Management
WHY IT MATTERS
of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations.
Today everyone reviews everything. In the medical world, reviews have become crucial for converting potential patients. Reviews often serve as the first impression when a potential patient is looking to find a source to handle any medical condition, including chronic pain. Responding and engaging with these reviews pays off in both patient loyalty and in search. Plus, it doesn’t cost a dime in media dollars. Your clinic needs to have a protocol in place to encourage your patients to submit reviews and for your staff to then respond to any reviews that have been posted. But it takes dedication: how can you know when a new review is posted?
That’s where reputation management software comes in. Your digital marketing firm needs to have tools that alert you when a new review is posted. This software also needs to help you generate reviews from your satisfied patients. MyAdvice has review management software that handles your reputation expertly.
WHY IT MATTERS
of consumers will follow a brand on social media to learn about new products or services.
Social media has become a staple for businesses, including medical providers. For many potential patients, social media is a part of their process of finding a provider. When your practice is active on social media, it shows patients and potential patients another side of your practice. This builds trust and loyalty.
We recommend creating social media profiles and clearly defining a process within your clinic to post personalized content and images consistently. But it can be hard to stick with it day after day. It’s worth considering having your digital agency handle your social media profiles and regular posting to take the burden off your staff while still keeping your social media visitors engaged. It’s important for your pain clinic to have a presence on these platforms, but it needs to be an active presence.
Pain Management Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
WHY IT MATTERS
of people say paid search ads make it easier to find the information they are seeking on a website or a search engine.
Have you noticed how organic search results keep getting pushed farther down the search engine results page? That’s because Google and Bing want more pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. Pay-per-click advertising means that your pain clinic only pays when a user clicks on your ad and is directed instantly to your website. With PPC ads, you truly get what you pay for, as you’re only paying when a user hits your site.
This is where having a great website is again critical. When a visitor clicks your ad and hits the page on your site, he or she needs to be rewarded with robust, engaging content and beautiful website design so they push deeper into your site. This increases your ROI.
There are different SEM ad types, and they require different strategies to optimize your ads to generate leads. Having a pain clinic digital marketing firm will help you decide what works best. The two most common SEM ads are text ads and display ads. Text ads show up at the top of the page and look like search results; display ads look like ads and are usually on the right side of a page. Unlike text ads atop search engine results pages, display ads show up on pages of websites where the visitors match the qualifications you set up. In your case, one of your display ads could show on a page when a person is researching radiofrequency ablation for back pain.
The key here is to first choose your overall SEO strategy before setting your SEM campaign and budget. This optimizes your website to ensure your budget is efficient and your ad quality scores are high.
Pain Management Email Marketing
Pain management clinics often overlook email as a marketing tool. Actually, email presents a great way to keep in touch with patients. This is important because pain that is solved today can return. It’s also a great place to talk about your referral program. Through referrals, email can bring in new patients. If you’re going to handle your practice’s email marketing, you should choose your email marketing platform based on how easy it is to use and the price. How much you’re charged is dictated by the frequency of your emails and the size of your list.
For our pain clinics, we recommend sending out one email each month. The content can be educational and it can describe specific treatments you perform. Somewhere in each email, you need to briefly discuss your referral program. That referral program needs to offer something to a current patient who refers a new patient, something like a gift card to a spa. Your staff needs to collect these email addresses and manage your email list. To do this you should have a connected form that directly links your website to your email marketing software.
Pain Clinic Blogging
Your pain clinic website needs a blog. Regular blog posts can drive traffic and potential patients to your site, provide regular content to link to on your social media pages and in your email messages and are important for SEO for your site. Google’s (and Bing’s) web crawlers view blogs as new content, and new content helps your site rank higher in organic search.
These blogs should be informational in tone, providing value to both current and potential patients. You should be consistent, creating and posting one blog each month. What should you write about? Each post should focus on a single treatment or procedure performed at your pain clinic. This information can reinforce your credentials as a pain management resource. For instance, a blog post could detail your new kyphoplasty treatment for stabilizing a fractured vertebra.
Generating blogs can be difficult for clinics like yours — you’re an expert with overactive nerves, not a writer. Many practices farm out these duties to freelance writers, or your digital agency should be able to provide this content. By doing so, you ensure your blogging is consistent and the quality is high. And you can add a blog of your own any time if something comes up that you want to address.
Traditional Pain Clinic Marketing
In today’s digital world it’s easy to overlook traditional marketing — radio and TV ads, print ads, direct mail, even billboards. Unlike the PPC ads described above, with traditional marketing, you pay for the possibility of your target audience seeing or hearing your ad. As an example, you could buy an ad in your local lifestyle magazine with a high senior readership. Your ad could discuss degenerative disc disease and how you can treat the pain it causes. Some potential patients may see and read your ad, but there’s no guarantee. That is quite different from paid search ads in your search engine marketing campaign. In that world, users click on your ads and you only pay when they do.
At MyAdvice, we believe there is a place for traditional advertising coupled with digital marketing as described above. To make these traditional media cost-effective, you need a process to track their effectiveness and ROI, which isn’t always easy. We have options for doing this by directing specific media to specific landing pages or to certain distinct phone numbers. Still, traditional media can be frustrating due to the unknowns and the cost of creative production.
Traditional marketing has been on the decline and will continue to decline for these reasons. That’s why your pain clinic needs to focus as much as possible on digital marketing options.
Pain Management Business Development
You think of your pain management clinic as a stand-alone business, and you’re probably not looking to add partners. But you can benefit from partnerships. As a pain specialist, you don’t treat varicose veins, but you know a vein clinic that does. Then when that referred vascular specialist sees a patient who’s complaining of chronic bursitis, he or she can refer that patient back to you.
You can expand these beyond purely medical practices. You could offer to partner with the local senior center to help residents with osteoarthritis pain issues. Your local newspaper is always looking for content, and you could write a free story on how to avoid developing tennis elbow. In smaller markets, the local TV stations are usually desperate to fill content, and they could be open to doing a story on the latest techniques for pain management.
These associations are endless, and they can help build a network of interrelated businesses and non-business entities. When looking to develop these, think of your typical patient, and then get your staff together and throw around ideas of associations that could reach that person.
Pain Clinic Referral Program
No matter what area of medicine, every provider knows one thing: referred patients are the best patients. They’re already heard how you solved their friend’s chronic pain that no other provider could figure out. To encourage word-of-mouth marketing your practice needs to develop a referral program. The benefits should go both ways. Maybe the existing patient who has referred the new patient will receive a gift card to a local spa (great cross-marketing possibilities) or maybe tickets to a local sporting event. A referral program is a great way to reward your best patients for spreading the word about your pain clinic.
Pain Management Events
Hosting an open house or another event is a great way to create buzz for your practice’s grand opening, for an office remodel, a new location, or just to say thanks to your loyal patients. When planning an event, think again about your typical pain clinic patient. You could focus the event on a presentation, maybe “New Treatments for Chronic Pain.” Or you could keep it as a simple open house. You’ll want to have catered food, promotional branded items with your logo and practice name on them, and office tours with staff members.
We recommend pain clinics hold an open house once each year. That way you’ll learn a bit each year about successfully hosting these events, and your patients will begin to look forward to the event each year.
Pain Clinic Community-Building Events
You want your patients to see that you’re engaged in the community; it makes them feel good about being a patient of yours. Community-building events are a way to build visibility while helping the community in some way.
You could offer free advice for back pain at a local health fair. You could sponsor the bridge tournament at the local senior center. You could sponsor a local 5k run. After all, many of those runners will one day deal with joint pain.
Community-building events show that you value being a part of the community and that you’re willing to give back.
Pain Management Speaking Engagements
You’re an expert on pain and how to alleviate it. As with all medical specialties, technology and treatment methods are continually changing. To keep up you and your staff need to attend various continuing education symposiums, seminars, and the like. You may even be asked to present at one of these meetings. New information and techniques you learn have great value as content for your website, social media platforms, and in a newsletter or monthly email. If you’re speaking, be sure to take photos and videos for posting.
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If you seek answers and help with the 14 items listed above, you’re in the right place. We can help move your pain clinic to the next level with our digital marketing, SEO, and SEM. For over 20 years, we’ve been building the healthcare industry’s most beautiful websites and optimizing them for search.
Schedule a 30-minute GROW consultation and we’ll work with you to create the roadmap – and show you how we can help you get there.
Pain Clinic Social Media Marketing