Medical Marketing Toronto

Understanding Medical Marketing in Canada

Medical marketing or healthcare marketing is a set of online and offline practices for Healthcare organizations aimed at winning more patients.

Medical marketing specialists identify ways to promote healthcare services, including a Unique Selling Proposition, marketing channels, and communications. 

They create buyer journeys for people to convert them from prospective clients to patients and then retain them as clinic clients for a longer period of time.

Healthcare marketers put much effort into building and supporting the online presence of your practice. This includes building and maintaining a website, implementing SEO strategies, conducting SMM, and creating medical content.

State of Private Healthcare in Canada

Patient dissatisfaction with public health continues to grow in Canada, spiced up by the decades-long debate over private vs. public healthcare. In the past year, the country’s private HPOs have seen a surge in patients tired of waiting in queues for state-funded medical services.

With more Canadians looking for private healthcare options, your practice has a chance to attract more patients and grow your business. It may seem that you don’t need to do anything to attain this goal. 

There’s an increasing interest in the private sector, often caused by the ongoing structural crisis in state-funded HPOs. Thus patients will be eager to come to you. Right? Not really. 

The present situation in the healthcare system is a clear signal to private clinics and practitioners that it’s time to act. With the increase in demand, there will be an increase in competition for new patients. Here’s one thing to consider. As a marketing agency, dNovo Group has seen steadily growing interest in medical marketing from private providers over the past few years.

To compete in the market of private healthcare services, you need long-term medical marketing strategies. Luckily, you’re in the right place. 

This guide was created by healthcare marketing experts from dNOVO Group. It summarises all the knowledge we’ve accumulated over the last 5 years of work with healthcare organizations. 

The guide will equip you with the necessary knowledge to plan and implement efficient healthcare marketing strategies. Make yourself a cup of your favourite hot beverage and prepare for a long read.

Goals of Marketing Strategies for Healthcare Organizations

Healthcare marketing pursues several goals:

1. Increase the “discoverability” of the clinic or healthcare provider.

Discoverability is important for any business. No matter how good your medical services are, you need to make sure that patients ready to pay for healthcare will find you. Relying on word-of-mouth in a country, where only 29% of healthcare is funded privately, isn’t the wisest marketing strategy. Advertisement and digital marketing are the best ways to help your patients find you.

2. Boost the conversions from leads to new patients.

Attracting potential patients isn’t enough. You need to persuade them to choose your clinic over many others. Modern well-informed patients know a lot about their health and healthcare options. Successful conversion will heavily depend on your ability to educate them and showcase your expertise.

3. Retain patients.

Any marketer knows that customer acquisition cost (CAC) is much higher than then customer retention is. Obviously, retention heavily depends on the specific services people will get in your clinic, their unique patient experience, and whether their patient needs are met. However, there are a few tricks a marketer can pull to make patients return, including email marketing with special offers and discounts.

4. Upsell healthcare services.

Upsell is promoting and selling more expensive medical procedures to your existing patient base. In healthcare, it is tricky and heavily depends on the type of services you provide. For example, your upsell marketing efforts are most likely to work in plastic surgery and dental marketing.

The Benefits of Medical Practices and Healthcare Marketing

Medical marketing has a number of benefits for healthcare providers:

1. Business growth.
2. More efficient resource allocation.
3. Setting clear goals and KPIs.
4. Data-driven promotion of services.
5. Brand consistency across multiple channels.
6. Effective communication with existing and new patients.

Medical Marketing Guides

This medical marketing guide is part of a series of marketing guides for healthcare. Check other guides in the series:

• Dental Marketing Guide

• Plastic Surgery Marketing Guide

Start with Building an Online Presence for Your Clinic

Most people are looking for medical practices online. That’s why you need to build your online presence to make sure your potential customers will find your clinic.

There are several platforms you will need to attain this goal:

• Website
• Directories
• Social media
• Google Business Profile

Website is the Cornerstone for Healthcare Practice Marketing

The website is the virtual office of your medical practice. In many buying journeys, it will be the first touchpoint for your potential patients. You need to make sure that you will leave a good impression. 

The website serves several goals:

• Clinic discoverability & first impression
• Patient communication & building rapport
• Educating your potential and existing patients
• Informing visitors on the types of services they can get
• Informing on prices and payment options
• Converting visitors into leads or patients
• Appointment setting tool for your patients

You need to build your website around these goals. Check out our Guide on Medical Website Design.

Check out an example of a dental clinic website with an appointment booking functionality:

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Directories

One of the ways for a patient to find a private healthcare provider is through a directory. Many people trust these websites. The general belief is that directories check clinics before adding them to their list and thereby people can avoid scammers.

Apart from the popularity of directories and the patient’s trust, there’s another reason why you would want to use them. They give you backlinks and backlinks are important for your website SEO. 

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Social Media

Social media can become a powerful tool in your medical marketing strategies. The stats are astonishing with almost 6B social media users worldwide and long hours users spend on platforms like TikTok (34 h), YouTube (28 h) and Facebook (~20h) on a monthly basis.

In other words, social media is where your target audience spends a lot of time. You can reach out to them by building a community around your page. You can also target social media users via ads, which we discuss in detail in the section dedicated to marketing channels.

Benefits of social media for your medical marketing:

• Backlinks and traffic from authoritative websites.
• Letting potential patients know about your medical practice.
• Educating about private healthcare and its benefits.
• Retaining your patients & upselling services.
• A platform for communication & patient feedback.
• If your content is truly good, people will share it.

Check out the example of an SMM post about reading in dim light impact on eyes.

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Google Business Profile

Google enables all businesses to create a Google Business Profile and get listed for free. Once you’ve created the profile, it will be demonstrated to all the Google users who are searching for your business and will show on Google Maps. Additionally, you will be able to create Google My Business Posts to share important information with people searching for your practice.

Benefits of Google Business Profile for Healthcare marketing:

• A patient will find you on Google Maps
• Your website will appear on local search results
• Backlink to your website
• Traffic to your website
• Your clinic will appear more trustworthy
• People will see your patient reviews

Check out our client’s Google Business Profile on Google Maps along with patient reviews:

Content Marketing and Patient Engagement

A website isn’t enough for successful healthcare marketing. First, you need to create a substantial amount of valuable content for SEO purposes, i.e., for Google to begin placing your website in the top search results. Second, content is necessary to convert your website visitor to your patient.

We discuss in detail how content marketing contributes to Healthcare search engine optimization in the next section and in the Medical SEO Guide. That’s why in this section we will focus on the importance of educational content for conversions.

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In the past 30 years, we’ve seen a new patient type – the well-informed patient. Many doctors report patients who know a lot about their medical conditions. In fact, people began educating about healthcare online at the very beginning of the Internet era. This 2002 study found that 55% of people used the Internet to search for medical information.

A patient wants to be sure they are not scammed, they receive evidence-based treatment, and the doctor knows about new methods of treating their health condition. Additionally, many patients with rare diseases want to visit a doctor who will not misdiagnose them or discard their concerns like, for example, with POTS.

That’s where your medical content comes in play. You educate the potential patients on their health. It builds trust. Trust converts readers into patients. Check out the screenshot of our client’s blog:

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Its articles educate website visitors about health conditions related to injuries and how to treat them.

Tips on Writing Educational Content for Your Patients

Below is the list of requirements we at dNOVO Group have for our medical content writers. We tweaked them a bit so that you can use them as a guide.

• Write about topics relevant to your existing and potential patients

It means that your content should resonate with their concerns and pain points. There are four main ways to find the relevant content. First, look at the most frequently asked questions of your existing patients. Write the answer to them. You have a blog post that resonates.

Second, do keyword research. It will show the most searched keywords in your field. If you use short-tail keywords, you can write several articles on the same keyword. For example, back pain keyword. Write about the causes, the methods of treatment, the prevention tips, and then create a hub article that will point to all these posts.

Below is an example of two articles related to orthotics:

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Third, look at your direct competitors and medical practices from other regions. What are they writing about? You will find inspiration there. Fourth, check the Internet forums where people ask questions about their medical conditions and seek answers from a fellow patient and medical professionals. Check out this post with a set of concerns on the dripping nose after the rhinoplasty posted on Reddit:

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Fifth, there are several ongoing issues in Canadian healthcare forcing people to seek private services. Write about it. It will resonate and convert. Check out an example of such content:

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• Make sure your content is informative and evidence-based

The goal of your content is to educate people on their health condition and the ways to cure it (or at least alleviate the symptoms). People might not understand certain things when they talk to a doctor and are too shy to ask. People might have a condition and be unaware of which doctor to turn to in the first place.

The general rules here will be as follows. Inform and be frank about the condition, possible outcomes, and prognosis. Where necessary, make sure to add a disclaimer warning against self-diagnosis. Prompt to see the real doctor (because it’s better for your patients and beneficial for your clinic). Use evidence-based information.

Below is an example of how to understand your eyeglasses prescription:

• Make it simple

While it’s important to educate your patients, don’t overwhelm them with things you put so much effort into learning in medical school. Einstein’s famous quote says: “If you can’t explain it to a six-year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.”

Make this quote your guiding principle when creating medical content. On a more practical side, here are some medical content writing tips. Refrain from using “bird language” (forget words like nucleus gracilis, sutura lambdoidea, posterior/dorsalis, etc.). Use short sentences. Use simple and short words that most people understand.

• Create video content

This is one of the latest healthcare marketing trends, and a tip we often give to our clients. Medical video content engages with your target audience and helps convert. It can be used across multiple platforms and repurposed many times.

Writing in a simple approachable way about health issues requires skills and experience. It might take years to learn how to do medical content right. Instead, you can hire a healthcare marketing agency. They have medical writers, who fact-check the content and make sure it’s engaging and informative.

SEO for Medical Practices

Healthcare SEO is a set of practices to ensure your website’s discoverability, user experience and conversions. We have a great long-read on how to strategize and implement Medical SEO. For the purposes of this article, we will only list the basic elements of SEO for healthcare practitioners and a brief explanation of each:

1. Website optimization
2. On-page SEO
3. Link Building
4. Keyword research
5. Local SEO

Website optimization

Website optimization is the process of making your website more user-friendly. Google and other search engines assess the quality of your website from the standpoint of a user and can raise or lower your SERP position based on their findings.

Before they do it, you need to do it yourself. You need to conduct an SEO Audit and Technical SEO to check your medical website for the following issues:

• Incoherent and chaotic website architecture
• Inconsistent URL structure
• Broken links, links to&from shady websites
• No optimization for mobile devices
• Low Page speed

Tools like SemRush can help you crawl your website for these issues. Check out a performance test for a private medical facility:

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Keyword research

Keywords are the essence of your medical SEO and healthcare marketing. These are single words, phrases or even sentences that people type in search engines to find certain medical services. You need to carefully pick these keywords and build your content around them. 

The main characteristics of keywords are:

• Volume – the number of monthly searches
• Difficulty (in %) – what it takes to be in the top of the SERP (e.g., the number of backlinks you will need).
• Intent – what users usually expect to find (e.g., the educational post).

You can check keywords using tools like SemRush or Ahrefs.

There are two main types of keywords:

• Short-tail keywords

Short-tail keywords consist of one or several words. They usually have a high volume and a high keyword difficulty. Use them for service pages and the main page.

For example: dental care, medical imaging, optometrist.

Check out the service page of sonohysterography service:

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• Long-tail keywords

A long-tail keyword is a sentence or a question that people ask when they want an answer to a more specific question. They have a smaller volume but also a low difficulty. The great thing about these keywords is that you don’t need to come up with a topic. Just answer the question or elaborate on a statement.

Check out an example of a long-tail keyword:

On-page SEO

Google ranks pages based on the keywords they have in the content and in meta-data. On-page SEO makes sure that your website has the necessary keywords in the necessary places.

Each time you create a new page or blog post, you need to create a meta title and meta description, add keywords to your content and place them in the headers, metadata, and alt text in the images.

If you haven’t done it previously, you need to check your website for it. One of the ways to do it is to use tools to automate this job. Here’s an example of a missing meta description for a page:

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Link Building

Links help users to navigate through your website. Medical marketing specialists use them to guide potential patients from the first touchpoint on the website to the conversion. Google pays special attention to links. By calculating the number of links pointing to a certain site, Google understands what websites on the Internet and web pages of the website are the most authoritative.

There are 3 types of links:

• Internal

Internal links connect various pages of your website with each other. They are critical for your website navigation. Your navigation menu is the main tool for your interlinking. However, don’t forget to place other links inside your pages.

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• External

External links on your website help visitors find more relative information on other websites as well as serve as the fact-checking for your data. It helps increase the trustworthiness of your content.

• Backlinks

Backlinks are links from other websites that point to your web pages. They help Google establish the authority of your website.

Local SEO

Local SEO is the optimization process that helps you target patients in certain regions of the world. For example, if your medical practice is located in Toronto, you will hardly want clients from Asia or even Victoria, unless it provides some very unique treatment procedures.

Using keywords with the name of your location (e.g., medical imaging Alberta) and having a Google Business Profile are the pillars of your local SEO.

Multichannel Approach for Medical Practices

A multichannel approach works great for medical marketing strategies as it can strengthen your SEO and content efforts. The idea behind the multichannel approach is to increase the number of touchpoints with potential and existing patients across various channels. 

If you are only starting medical marketing for your healthcare practice, we suggest focusing your efforts on three channels in addition to your website and social media presence:

• Paid Advertising
• Email marketing
• Appointment reminders

If you want to go full-fledge, here’s an infographic explaining the best channels for medical marketing:

Paid Advertising and Promotion for Medical Practices

Gitnux Market Data Report 2024 states that Google Ads reach 90% of Internet users. We suggest trying paid advertisements provided by Google and by Meta.

The Google Ads will show on Google SERP, on websites that allow ads, in mobile apps, and on YouTube videos. Meta ads will show on Facebook or other platforms belonging to the corporation as well as the videos published on Facebook. 

The benefits of paid advertisement are:

• 200% ROI.
• Ability to set target audience by specific demographics (e.g., gender, age, location).
• The traffic to your website.

We suggest creating an ad that will lead to a specific service you provide. This approach has multiple advantages. First, you will be able in certain cases to limit the audience. For example, if you provide mammography, you will hardly target men. Second, people are more likely to react to an ad that features the particular medical service they need rather than a more general ad for a clinic.

Email Marketing for Health Provider Organizations

Email marketing is great for lead generation and client retention. It is especially effective when doing medical marketing for healthcare organizations that provide rehabilitation, aesthetic medicine, and non-urgent dental care. 

Usually, patient buyer journeys for this type of service are longer and may require many touch points to warm up and convert a lead.

Email marketing can help you persuade your potential patient to start therapy. You can use it to inform about new content relative to their initial interest, new discounts, or new services.

We also suggest using email marketing to communicate with existing patients. Re

Appointment Reminders

One of the reasons a patient churns is because they fail to show up for appointments and follow-up appointments. This is especially critical for physiotherapy, dental clinics, and aesthetic medicine practices.

In other words, when it’s not critical, a patient is more reluctant to visit a doctor, especially a paid doctor. Appointment reminders can help them be more responsible in regard to their healthcare.

How to Start with Medical Marketing

Building medical marketing strategies from scratch can be tricky for many medical practitioners. In the final section of our guide, we talk about the ways to start with your healthcare marketing.

1. Conduct your marketing strategy for your medical practice

Learn marketing fundamentals, and create and implement your own healthcare marketing strategies. This is a very long and time-consuming process. You will have to perform the roles of several marketing professionals from CMO to SEO specialist to medical content writer.

2. Build an in-house marketing team

An in-house healthcare marketing team can help you by bringing their experience and expertise. The drawback of the in-house team is the amount of money and time you will have to spend to build a good marketing team. From our own experience in different marketing departments, a team built from scratch requires at least 6 months to find all the necessary people, start working as a whole, and perform at its full potential.

3. Hire a medical marketing agency

A healthcare marketing agency brings their expertise and experience to the table. It costs less than an in-house team, however, in most cases, it works more efficiently as they have several people for the same role to replace each other in cases of emergency. 

You won’t have to spend time learning medical marketing practices in-depth. You won’t be spending time on managing the team.

Ready to start your medical marketing strategy run by professionals?

Book a free one-hour consultation