When you’re running a busy practice it’s easy to fall into the role of a “jack of all trades”, from HR manager and chief financial officer to IT support and business development officer. In the days when marketing for medical practitioners and therapists meant no more than advertising in the local paper and the occasional direct mail out, this was probably one of a your responsibilities too.
Then the Internet arrived, and suddenly the concept of business marketing and advertising became a lot more complex and potentially time-consuming. If you’re like many practice owners, you’re probably struggling to keep up with the sheer deluge of information on online marketing – in fact you’re probably just wondering how you can fit in time to learn about lead generation, SEO, pay per click management, email marketing, Google Adwords and Facebook and still service your existing clients.
But think about it this way: just as you wouldn’t waste time trying to become the expert on your IT systems (in fact you’d probably outsource your IT needs), you shouldn’t try to become an expert in online marketing. Outsourcing your marketing efforts is one of the smartest, most cost-effective ways of getting all the benefits of targeted marketing while being able to focus on what you do best – looking after your clients.
Online Marketing Can Be Expensive To Get Wrong
Again, if we look at the IT example, unless you have a degree in graphic design, can program CSS and know your way around WordPress, you should probably leave the creation of a business website to the experts. The sheer cost in terms of your time and money of getting something wrong can quickly add up.
It’s the same with online marketing. Despite what some people believe, successful online marketing strategies can be tricky to implement and costly to fix if they go wrong.
For example, trying to change your business website to satisfy Google’s latest algorithmic changes (and getting it wrong) could see your site being blacklisted for a very long time. The cost of getting an expert in to fix your website could be sizeable and be a lengthy process (and imagine all the leads or bookings from the site you might be missing out on in the meantime).
The Benefits of Getting It Right Can Be Enormous
Even just a well designed website with clear calls to action can help improve your conversion rates for customer enquires and leads as well as bookings. Online marketing – in the form of well designed, mobile responsive business websites, social media, targeted email campaigns and lead generation strategies – can be highly effective as long as they are part of an overall strategic plan.
Outsourcing your online marketing to an expert will mean that they will work with you to create such a plan, one that fits with your goals and your budget. This type of plan might require more than one person to implement it, and one of the other major benefits of using outsourced marketing is that you can get the expertise of many people working for you without having to hire them as staff.
All marketing is an investment in the future of your practice and in the case of online marketing this is an even more poignant idea. Building an online marketing asset that is consistently pulling in and converting visitors into patients takes considerable skill to do well. It also requires careful management to maximize the benefits, and having a professional firm work with you to deliver this outcome is a sound strategy.
