As a provider, taking on a new product or service line can be both exciting and daunting at the same time. If you’ve got a great marketing plan, and know that you have patients lined up, you can literally see the success you’re about to have. However, if you don’t have a marketing plan, and really aren’t sure if people will be interested in your area, the fear of the unknown can quickly cause panic. Our biggest piece of advice: don’t stress and make hasty decisions, or you’ll be in a bigger mess than when you started.
Instead of jumping at the first opportunity and going with “that online marketing company that said they could get me patients,” step back and look at the big picture. As we mentioned previously, working with too many companies can really get you into a jumbled mess and end up costing you WAY more than you ever anticipated.
Is My Current Marketing Working?
When you signed on with your current online marketing campaign you probably had one goal in mind, which was to get to number one on search result pages (SERPs) and have patients find you. If you’re using a great, ethical marketing company, they hopefully explained that online marketing is a process and not a product. It will take some time to show it’s full results. This already should put your mind at ease because they aren’t promising you anything from the great unknown. Rather, they are telling you that they will be a partner for you, and supply you with data on your results, which will ultimately be impressive.
Your current marketing isn’t JUST working because of your results, it’s working because of your relationship.
How Can I Market For Multiple Things on ONE Site?
So you’ve determined that your marketing company is awesome, and you love working with them. The hard part is now over!
Past this point, your dedicated rep (if you have one) will lead you down the path to success and warn you of any bumps that might come up along the way. Unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet when it comes to online marketing, but since you’ve got an honest, trustworthy person dealing with your campaign, you’ll know exactly what you need to do to meet your goals.
Start with Rich Content
As with any SEO campaign, starting with rich, robust content is key. That doesn’t mean just stuffing your site with keywords and expecting it to rank. It means developing a unique story around the brand you are trying to push.
- Who is going to be looking for this service or procedure?
- What are they going to search for to find answers?
- Why are they going to choose you over another provider?
Once you’ve outlined how you want to promote yourself, you’re able to use this to help your other avenues of engagement. For instance, developing content on a service line allows you to build service areas on your Facebook page that match directly to your website.
Streamlined content equals an easier user interface!
Build Out Your Pages
Now that you have content, you need a place to put it all. Because you’re a practice that does more than one service, don’t pigeonhole yourself into promoting JUST that specific procedure. One of the most detrimental things you can do to your presence it remove all of your authority because you want to promote something new.
Keep focusing on those same initial goals that you had, but use them to segue into your new service. By building out a page and linking to it within your existing page content, you’re allowing Google to pick up on the fact that you’re adding something and not completely redoing your business. Plus, you can use this page on any sort of promotional material you may have as a direct link.
Focus on Off Page
Sometimes you’ll hear that adding a new site on your new procedure will help you rank faster because it’s specific. Well, that’s far from the truth. In reality, search engines LOVE to see your off page adjustments, because it shows that you are really attempting to add this to your business as opposed to building something new.
- Listings. If the category for your new service is available, make sure it is added to any potential citation. In the healthcare space, chances are other people are doing the same procedure, which means it has authority. By adding the service to your listings, you are already placed into a category with other competitors. The longer your listing is there, the more seniority you gain. If the category is not available, build it into your descriptions. Any searchable content should be optimized properly.
- Social Media. What can’t you do with social media!? Not only are you going to be able to build it into the content in certain areas, but you can share articles and stats directly from the parent company. This is huge for engagement, and can place you in the upper echelon of relevant advertisers. In addition, what better way to announce your new service line than to people who are already interested in your business?
- Backlinks. If content is king, then backlinks are certainly queen in the kingdom of SEO. Make sure that you are connecting to any source possible that has relevant information on your new service. If you have a dedicated marketing rep, he or she will most likely take the time to manually source these out for you. Without relevant traffic coming to your site from backlinks, you’re just delaying your site’s relevance, and can ultimately get lost in the shuffle.
Historical Reporting Gives Helpful Data
If you’re sticking with your current online marketing company, they’ve probably given you months, or even years, worth of reporting. Because of this, they will be able to see just how well your new service line is doing and help you brainstorm a plan of attack for the upcoming months. Unfortunately, if you start fresh, that new company will not have any historical data and will just provide you with data from their starting point. How great does a 100% increase in traffic sound? Pretty great, unless it’s from a starting point of ZERO. Make sure to check where you’re starting from regardless of the situation, as you’ll want to have an honest source of data or you’ll get yourself stuck in some not-so-great situations.
If you’re actively planning on adding a new service line or procedure, Practis can help. Contact us today to learn more about our online marketing services, and our areas of expertise. We’d love to help you stand out from the competition while keeping a clean, organic presence!
