Blog Market Your Clinic (2/3): How to Win Over Patients Online

Are you already marketing your clinic online? Great! You’re now visible to potential patients on the lookout for your services. You may have noticed that there are other clinics similarly marketing their offerings digitally. How do you encourage potential patients to click on your ad and choose your clinic over others? 

Aside from ad content, a convenient user journey can make or break your ad’s success. One of the best ways to measure ad success is through its conversion rate, which is the percentage of patients who meet your ad’s goal. For example, the goal could be booking an appointment at your clinic. To encourage a higher conversion rate, keep the user journey as simple as possible.  

What is the user journey?

The user journey comprises the steps that the lead must take to fulfil the ad’s goal. Think of the journey akin to driving a car from point A to point B. It’s always fastest to travel in a straight line. Similarly, you should get your lead to your ad’s end goal in the fewest steps possible. 

Example of a Good vs Poor User Journey

Imagine you’re the patient searching for wisdom tooth surgery on Google. What is your top concern in a wisdom tooth extraction? Since procedures are expensive, patients often think about price. Understanding your patients’ concerns helps you pinpoint and offer the right solution. If the words “Fully Claimable by Medisave” was in the Google ad, would it spur you, as the patient, to click on the ad? If yes, then this is a key detail you should include in the ad. 

After clicking through, you don’t want to be taken to an irrelevant landing page—for example, one that talks about braces. Disrupting the user journey increases the bounce rate, which is the percentage of visitors who enter your website but leave mid-way. Always aim to minimise the bounce rate. 

Choose a landing page that’s relevant to your patient’s needs. When patients search using keywords, they are telling you exactly what they want. Choose a landing page that has information about wisdom tooth surgery at your clinic. Include quality content to educate patients on the procedure. This helps calm their nerves and build trust in your practice. Patients trust online health sources with author authority, usability and simplicity (Sbaffi et al., 2017). Display price and reiterate that the sum is claimable by Medisave, so patients know what to expect and won’t be taken by surprise at payment. You don’t want to lose potentially loyal customers at the final stretch of their patient experience. Importantly, include your call to action (CTA) on the page. A CTA is any prompt that spurs the patient to take a specific action. In this case, it’s booking an appointment at your practice.      

Instead of having the patient call in, let them book an appointment conveniently online. Plato’s clinics can set up their online appointment booking calendar in five minutes. Add online appointment booking capabilities to your clinic’s website and social media pages, so patients can secure their appointment at any time of the day, from anywhere, on any device.

Want to see what a good vs bad patient journey looks like? Check out our example of booking an appointment at a dental clinic below. Instead of forcing your patient to take multiple steps in a manual booking, let your patient confirm their visit in only three easy steps by enabling online appointment booking at your practice.

After you’ve streamlined the user journey, don’t forget to track your ad results. Monitoring ad performance will help you identify effective digital channels to optimise your clinic’s digital marketing. In part three of this series, we’ll explain the importance of tracking ad performance and how clinics can measure their digital marketing results.