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Digital Marketing for Physical Therapy
Essential Digital Marketing Tips To Ensure Long-Term Growth For Your Physical Therapy Practice
The need to harness digital marketing for physical therapy practices is becoming more important as competition in the future is set to become quite stiff.
According to studies from APTA (American Physical Therapy Association), the supply of physical therapists in the USA is greater than the growth in demand for services demanded by that part of the US population with health insurance.
Online marketing for physical therapy will become an integral part of growing a physical therapy practice as the competition strengthens and word-of-mouth becomes less effective.
How to improve digital marketing for physical therapy practices?
This article provides a glimpse of certain areas in digital marketing that physical therapy practices should focus on to grow the business sustainably with a long-term mindset.
Before implementing any new digital marketing strategy, it is important to remember three vital pillars of digital marketing implementation.
- Long-term benefits
- Return on investment
- Ongoing monitoring, assessment, and improvement
But more about that later. Let’s first get a better understanding of the areas of digital marketing for physical therapy that should be in scope.
A professional website for your practice is one of the cornerstones of your online marketing efforts. Aesthetics play a key role in attracting and keeping visitors on your page for longer, but it is certainly not the main factor.
In the era of instant gratification, you want your website to be firing on all cylinders. Pages that take time to load, contain errors, or are not mobile responsive are some of the main reasons why visitors quickly retrace their steps to the search results to find another option.
On the other hand, you might have a stunning website, with all the parts functioning better than that of a Rolex watch, but still, find yourself on page three or four of search engine results. Moving up the rankings relies on twitching certain elements of your website, and this process is called search engine optimization (SEO).
In many ways, SEO is similar to what physical therapists do. Something is causing a problem in a certain part of the body, and through your years of study and experience in the field, you know where to look and what to do to fix it. The same applies to SEO experts when it comes to optimizing websites.
SEO is a tricky beast to master, and what works to get your site ranking better today is not guaranteed to work tomorrow. The reason is because search engine algorithms evolve over time.
That is why you are better off getting experts, like Practice Tech Solutions, in the field that have their fingers on the pulse of the technological changes and know what to do and how to do it.
When blogs started in the 90s, they were considered online diaries or personal pages. It became a new platform for sharing and discussing ideas. Today, blogs may fundamentally hold true to their origin, but they carry so much more value for businesses than they did at inception.
Creating articles on your website has many benefits. The first one ties in with the section above- search engine optimization. Blogs that are written according to certain parameters and contain certain technical elements, have the capability of pulling a website up the search results page.
Due to the technicalities involved, it is better to get an experienced writer to write or at least polish your articles so that they are SEO-ready.
Apart from helping your site rank better, blogs also help build your credibility. Creating articles with relative information, written in such a way that it is easily digestible by the average reader, creates trust in your brand. It is an opportunity to showcase your expertise in certain fields.
Then there is also the chance that some readers might share the articles with their acquaintances, which helps to spread the word about your practice. While we are on the topic of sharing, let’s look at social media.
Social Media Management or just Social Media in general, can be a vital asset to digital marketing for physical therapy practices if applied correctly. However, it takes more than just creating a profile and posting content regularly to create interest in your business.
Coming back to SEO once more, it is essential to note that with more social media platforms in your portfolio and links from your website to these portfolios, you automatically boost your SEO.
It can do wonders for the growth of your business if managed correctly, but that again requires a certain level of expertise in the field. Planning, scheduling, creating, and posting relevant, engaging content regularly is essential but monitoring to see what works and what doesn’t is of equal value.
Being responsive to comments, queries and complaints is crucial, which brings us to our next point.
We mentioned right in the beginning that medical practices should not continue to rely on referrals alone. According to recent studies, over 80% of adults in the USA go online to read reviews about medical providers, even after being referred by a physician.
Your online reputation will continue to play a more significant role in the success of your practice going forward. A good point of departure is to ask your patients to post reviews online after receiving care from your practice.
Even if you are the best in the business, you are bound to get some negative reviews. Responding to negative reviews professionally is critical as it indicates that you show interest in your patients and are determined to improve your service.
Video marketing has been one of the most significant emerging marketing trends during the past decade. Recent studies showed that 86% of businesses use video as a marketing tool and 87% of video marketers claimed that it provided a positive return on investment.
Video marketing is certainly here to stay, and it is vital to include in digital marketing for physical therapy practices too. Try to post videos on different platforms instead of just using YouTube. Videos on your website, for instance, about your practice and people, instill a feeling of familiarity and trust in prospective patients.
