A first-year medical student can expect to spend $60k or more for their initial year in healthcare education. If you’re paying that for ten years, that’s $600k. Medical Doctors, or MDs, commonly spend a decade learning their trade. So $600k to even $1,000,000 in education costs are totally within the realm of possibility during that time.
When an MD finally opens their healthcare facility, they’ve got rental costs, staff costs, equipment costs, legal costs, marketing costs, insurance costs, and incidentals to contend with. There’s a reason medicine in America is exceptionally costly; such endless expenses are a big part of it.
When 2020 hit and legal mandates shut down even larger hospitals, it threw a wrench in the plans of many MDs. It’s worth noting not only traditional healthcare professionals were impacted, but across the board medical businesses took a hit. From dentists to plastic surgeons, 2020 was a toxic year for healthcare; and what caused that in 2020 is carrying over to 2021.
So what’s to be done? You already spent hundreds of thousands on your degree, and you’ve got exceptional costs elsewhere forcing you to tread water financially; how do you get past all that? Well, start by getting rid of responsibilities that would be better to outsource anyway; like marketing. That’s what we’re going to cover here. Specifically, modern digital medical options.
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Securing A Specialist
Just because you’re an MD doesn’t mean you’re a specialist in brain surgery. It also doesn’t mean you’re a podiatry expert. Of course, you could be both; but given how long and difficult it is to sustain one degree, the majority of practitioners tend to secure their specialty and stick with it. If you’ve done that, what time do you have to learn best practices in marketing as well?
Certainly, marketing isn’t nearly as complicated as the human body. It is, however, designed and defined by conscious humans looking to get past the conscious safeguards of other conscious humans. Accordingly, it has its own level of complexity that’s both direct and indirect. Unless you’re a specialist in this field, you might want to outsource.
A great example in terms of medical marketing acumen may be this specialist in marketing plastic surgeons. Cosmetic specialists have many chief considerations to figure out. For one thing, marketing specialists are more likely to use terms like “cosmetic surgeon” over “plastic surgeon” owing to the vanity connotation.
Little tricks like vocabulary specificity can do much to reach target markets in cost-effective ways which ultimately provide your clinic with profit offsetting marketing expenses.
Learning Or Securing SEO Solutions
Another specific area where medical marketing benefits from outsourcing is as regards SEO. Search Engine Optimization in the medical field must take into account realities like those involved in certain politically correct thinking as regards healthcare procedures. Beyond that, statistical realities regarding SEO on-page or off-page must be considered.
SEO incorporates websites, URLs, hashtags, blogs, HTML-tagging, keywords of the short and long-tail variety, sentence size, paragraph size, associated imagery, and more. Plus, the goal posts of those which are effective shift day by day, partially in response to technological trends. Getting a professional for your clinic will save hassle and should increase profit.
Expanding Profits Through Better Marketing
Profit expansion is necessary for any business. It’s going to be hard for healthcare professionals in 2021 owing to the pandemic panic of 2020. That said, seeing gains even over 2019 isn’t something impossible; it will just require more “lean”, or “muscular”, or “effective” marketing. SEO, and marketing professionals specializing in medical outreach, helps.