The Best Functional Medicine Marketing Practices You Must Know in 2023

Functional medicine is the future of medicine available now!

Do you know the feeling when you facilitate the healing process for someone and bear witness to their recovery right from the root cause? This is exactly what functional medicine advocates.

Today, instead of relying on conventional medicine, people are increasingly shifting to non-traditional approaches like functional medicine. According to NIH, about 12% of the population in the USA today use health care approaches that are not usually part of traditional medical care.

With the increasing demand for functional medicine, it’s important to have a marketing strategy to spread your message of healing and hope to more people. Developing a marketing strategy calls for attentive research and planning, but the process can become easier if you implement some basic marketing strategies and be consistent with your functional medicine advertising efforts.

This guide will walk you through some of the best strategies to kick-start functional medicine marketing, covering some examples from:

1. Hormonal imbalances
2. Type 2 diabetes
3. Hypothyroidism
4. Autoimmune disease
5. Weight loss

Before I get on to talking about strategies and tips, let’s take a detailed look at what a functional medicine advertising plan accomplishes.

What does Functional Medicine Advertising Achieve?

Comprehensive and smart functional medicine marketing works miracles for your practice with the following benefits in place:

• Creating awareness among your patients about your vision and mission
• Prequalify the right patients
• Sort the patients whose needs do not resonate with your practice
• Get leads to your funnel
• Position your brand as an expert in the industry
• Provide you with a unique selling proposition as compared to the competitors

As an expert who has helped businesses maximize their full potential, I have seen the power of functional medicine marketing because I have witnessed it working wonders for practitioners. I will be talking more about it in the next section, which will familiarize you with how to begin and develop a sound functional medicine marketing plan.

Not sure how to start advertising your practice? Consult with us for clarity on your marketing plan.

Understanding Modern Marketing for Your Functional Medicine Practice

In the past few years, marketing, in general, has undergone a seismic shift in the digital age. And the healthcare industry has embraced this change, including the functional medicine field. Previously, marketing strategies primarily relied on traditional approaches like billboards, print ads, and word-of-mouth referrals. However, the digital revolution has reshaped the way businesses connect with their audience. Understanding modern concepts of marketing for your functional medicine marketing means recognizing the profound changes brought about by digitization and the essential role of agility and adaptation in staying ahead.

Embracing the Digital Transformation

The miraculous invention of the internet and the proliferation of smartphones have changed the way people seek and consume healthcare information. Now, patients readily and easily use online platforms to research symptoms, treatment options, and healthcare providers. Therefore, it signifies that your functional medicine marketing must prioritize a strong online presence and active participation in digital marketing. You can only make a mark when you embrace this digital transformation seamlessly and incorporate the latest digital tools and resources in your functional medicine marketing plan.

Bringing Purpose & Passion at the Forefront

While adopting digital marketing trends is crucial for your functional medicine marketing, it is equally important to understand that modern marketing is about more than indulging in transactional relationships with your patients or target audience.

Modern marketing is not merely about promoting services; it’s about building trust and credibility. Patients are now more discerning and cautious about healthcare choices. They seek providers who not only offer solutions but also demonstrate expertise and genuine care.

Patient-Centric Approach

Perhaps the most significant aspect of modern marketing for functional medicine is its patient-centricity. Patients are no longer passive recipients of healthcare; they are active participants in their well-being. Marketing strategies must reflect this shift by putting patients at the center of the narrative.

This involves listening to patient feedback, addressing their concerns, and tailoring your marketing messages to resonate with their unique needs. By understanding and empathizing with patients, modern marketing can forge deeper connections and drive patient loyalty.

The Approach You Need To Adopt For Your Functional Medicine Marketing

Okay, now that you know how functional medicine marketing can help you grow your practice and create awareness about the message of healing, you must now want to kick-start the marketing process. To start off on the right note, the very first thing you need to adopt is a strategic approach before you even start thinking about creative ways to promote your office name. When you have a clear and right approach, everything else becomes synchronized, strategic and seamless.

So, what’s the right approach for your functional medicine marketing?

The answer is simple. You must do everything with a modern marketing approach!

To boost your practice in this digital arena, marketing should modernize some capabilities and mindsets. 

By far, the most important aspect of modern marketing is the shift to agile. In today’s fast-paced, digitally revolutionized era, agility is critical to undertake all your functional medicine marketing activities with speed.

In the marketing context, agility or modernized practice means:

• Highly collaborative work
• Motivated and cross-functional teams
• Using data and analytics to spot promising opportunities
• Implementing strategies to exploit identified opportunities
• Continuous testing and learning

At large, modern marketing enables you to run and manage multiple campaigns simultaneously and multiple innovative ideas every week if not every day.

Any practitioner who contemplates this change often mentions the challenge associated with overcoming business as usual. By embracing agile practices aggressively, you can transcend your office into fast-moving teams that continually drive growth for your practice.

Here is How to Get Started with Your Functional Medicine Marketing Practice

Here is the truth!

Marketing goes beyond creating the right brand aesthetic and appeal because it’s about creating long-term retention and equity in the minds of your patients. The most essential strategy is to emotionally engage the customers and steadily build connections with them.

According to a survey by Nielson, about 92% of people rely on their friend’s or family’s recommendations as compared to any other form of marketing. Some might take several months to make a decision to get a service. This is where you cannot implement hit and run-pull marketing strategy for functional medicine marketing.

The best way is to have a consistent long-term plan that uses creative techniques to cultivate lasting patient trust. The following recommendations and steps will help you get started.

Also, read: Top 10 Actionable Personal Injury Marketing Ideas For Chiropractors

Have A Marketing Plan In Place

In its truest essence, the whole purpose of marketing is to put you in a place where you can see things you can control and aspects that are out of your control. The focal purpose of this exercise is to know the following two things:

1. How to make the most of the things we can control and reduce the impact of uncontrollable factors?
2. How to improve the interaction between the two?

A well-devised, thorough, and thoughtful marketing plan helps you with that. Every advertising campaign begins with a well-designed marketing strategy, and the same applies to your functional medicine marketing process. It helps you align your content with your mission as a functional medicine practitioner.

Mapping out all the strategies, circumstances, environment, how you’d compete with other practitioners, and financial aspects and jotting down all the important factors related to your functional medicine marketing prepare you well for what to expect.

In a nutshell, a robust marketing plan also enables you to predict any potential hiccups that you might face along the way. In turn, it helps you anticipate solutions to solve such issues. Secondly, a sound marketing plan provides you with a grasp of where you spend your advertising budget. This is important if you have limited resources as it brushes aside the guesswork bringing more value to your practice.

Opt For a Full-Funnel Functional Medicine Marketing Strategy

You can say that marketing has a split personality. Its one side includes brand building, which usually takes time and produces results over the passage of time. On another side, there is performance marketing, which can show and measure results in real time through data and analytics. Performance marketers boast about their ability to drive clicks of potential patients, whereas brand builders talk in favor of the long-term benefits that brand building reaps.

Now, the big question for you is, what should you do for your functional medicine marketing? Both. Yes, you should opt for a full-funnel marketing strategy that focuses on both building the name of your clinic as well as performance marketing.

When you adopt a full-funnel marketing strategy, your office becomes more relevant to your patients, shows you a clearer and complete picture of functional medicine marketing, and yields more value without spending extra dollars. In short, this approach is not about doing more at every stage of the funnel; rather, it is about understanding how each stage impacts others to render a complete experience to your patients.

All in all, full-funnel functional medicine marketing is not just about a single campaign, but it is about bringing a 360-degree shift in how marketing works. It calls for close collaboration to harness the complete power of marketing to improve the impact of all campaigns.

Brand Building

Brand building is an important aspect of your functional medicine marketing. Branding is a lot more than your logo, name, and colors. It is about your practice’s persona, the way people perceive your practice, and the feelings and associations it evokes in patients. When you indulge in the brand-building exercise, you strive to create a trustworthy and compelling identity for your functional medicine practice, which is the heart of brand building. For your functional medicine marketing, brand building involves your clinic infrastructure, the way your staff treats your patients, the kind of facilities you provide, your updated and user-friendly website, and the way you update your social media. In short, branding is the sum total of your presence.

Performance Marketing: Driving Immediate Results

As you can infer from the names, in brand building, you build your practice’s various elements that help attract more patients. Whereas in performance marketing, you perform a few jobs that bring you immediate results. While brand building lays the foundation, performance marketing drives immediate results. It involves strategies designed to attract, engage, and convert potential patients. Performance marketing involves undertaking tasks such as running ads, sending newsletters, and publishing content to captivate potential patients’ attention and make them convert.

When you add up a full-funnel strategy in your functional medicine marketing plan, it shows that you understand that brand building and performance marketing go hand in hand and are complementary components. Brand building plays a crucial role in building trust and loyalty over time, whereas performance marketing generates leads and conversions immediately.

In essence, adopting a full-funnel approach for your functional medicine marketing means you are playing both the long game and the short game. This approach merges the art of carving out an impressive brand identity with the science of data-driven, results-oriented marketing strategies.

Invest In Developing A User-Friendly Website

According to Statista’s report from January 2021, there were 4.66 billion users active on websites worldwide out of a global population of 59.5%. This shows that having a website is not an option but an essential part of your functional medicine marketing.

Regardless of your industry or business size, having a website is a must today. If you don’t have one, you are missing out on advantages like:

• Identifying what kind of content your readers like
• Having a competitive advantage in developing trust and credibility
• Creating a platform where you can grow and sustain a community
• Developing your authority as an expert in your field

Building a website should be an important component of your functional medicine marketing and the great news is that it is not difficult anymore given the availability of various handy resources and tools. While working on creating a user-friendly website, all you have to do is take care of the following things:

• Make your website mobile responsive: To make your website user-friendly, mobile responsiveness is important. When potential patients land on your website and find it difficult to navigate on their mobile devices, it ultimately puts them off and increases the bounce rate.
• Make your website easily navigable: Keep the design of your website simple, keep your pages clutter-free, and use easy-to-understand copy and language to make your website easily navigable and to improve users’ experience.
• Pay attention to the need for speed: The time it takes for a web page to load affects users’ experience greatly. Therefore, it is imperative that you should pay attention to the need for speed. Keep your software updated, optimize images and videos for quick download, and avail the services of a website host that can meet your bandwidth demands

Optimizing Your Online Presence: Functional Medicine SEO Strategies

SEO is a quintessence of modern marketing because, in this digital age, showing up on top in online search results is pivotal. Patients now rely on search engines like Google when they look out for healthcare solutions. And, an effective and robust SEO strategy for your functional medicine marketing ensures that your practice is their top choice.

Keyword Research and Targeting

The first step of SEO is to conduct thorough research on keywords. Meaning, you have to identify commonly used terms and phrases that potential patients are likely to use when searching for functional medicine services. These terms and keywords may include conditions you specialize in, treatments you offer, or common health concerns in your target demographic.

Example: If you specialize in autoimmune conditions, keywords like “functional medicine for autoimmune diseases” or “holistic autoimmune treatment” should be included in your SEO strategy.

On-Page Optimization

Once a bucket of relevant keywords is in your hands, the next step involves optimizing on-page elements. This means that you have to incorporate your keywords naturally in your content, headings, body text, and meta descriptions. 

For instance, if you regard “functional medicine for thyroid disorders” as a relevant keyword, make sure your page on thyroid-related services includes this phrase in its content, headings, and meta description. While you work on on-page optimization, also make sure that your website is structured logically with clear navigation and user-friendly URLs.

Quality Content Creation

Content forms the backbone of your SEO strategy. Strive to produce informative, engaging, and authoritative content regularly while incorporating relevant keywords. Using content in your functional medicine marketing not only improves search visibility but also educates and engages your audience.

Example: Publishing articles about the benefits of functional medicine in managing diabetes or how dietary changes can alleviate gut-related issues can attract patients seeking solutions to these specific problems.

Local SEO

Local SEO is crucial for your functional medicine marketing. It involves listing your practice on Google My Business and other relevant directories. Encourage patients to leave reviews, respond to queries promptly, and provide up-to-date location information.

Example: When potential patients search for “functional medicine near me” or “functional medicine in [your city],” local SEO optimization ensures your practice appears in the local pack and map results.

Mobile Optimization

You may not think about mobile optimization when you work on SEO, but the truth is, this is an important step to improve your SEO strategy. This is important because Google ranks mobile-responsive websites higher. Plus, with most of the internet searches happening on mobile devices, it’s imperative that your website is mobile-friendly.

Example: When potential patients search for functional medicine services on their smartphones, a mobile-optimized website ensures they have a seamless experience, which can improve your search rankings.

Technical SEO

Take your functional medicine marketing to the next level by practicing technical SEO. Undertaking this exercise ensures that your website is search engine-friendly. It involves tasks like optimizing site speed, fixing broken links, and ensuring secure and efficient website architecture.

Example: A fast-loading website not only enhances the user experience but also aligns with Google’s preference for speedy websites.

Backlinks and Authority Building

Backlinks and authority building is a sure-fire yet often overlooked aspect of SEO. If you can gain high-quality backlinks from authoritative sources within the healthcare and wellness niche, you can boost your search rankings significantly. An easy way to seek these backlinks is to invest in content outreach and partnerships. This not only earns you great backlinks but also builds your reputation as an authority in the functional medicine field.

Example: Collaborating with other healthcare professionals for guest posts or being featured in reputable health publications can lead to valuable backlinks.

Analytics and Monitoring

You can improve your functional medicine marketing efforts by constant monitoring and tracking. To make your SEO strategy effective, regularly monitor your website’s performance using analytics tools. Track your search engine rankings, organic traffic, and user behavior to make data-driven improvements to your SEO strategy.

Example: If you notice that a particular blog post about holistic approaches to managing stress garners significant organic traffic, you can create more content on similar topics to cater to your audience’s interests.

Create A Personal Connection With Patients Via Email Marketing

Let me start this with a fun fact.

Did you know that the first email was sent in 1971, and it completely revolutionized how we communicate? Businesses started to use this medium of communication to connect with their audience, raise awareness, and cultivate a strong and personal connection. With the digital revolution, direct messages on social platforms and other instant communication mediums emerged and made people believe that email marketing may be about to fade away. 

Regardless of some people considering email as an obsolete mode of communication, statistics showcase an entirely opposite trend. The recent numbers suggest that email marketing is still practical and relevant. 

To help you understand the significance of email marketing for your functional medicine marketing, here are a few email marketing statistics:

• 49% of the users are interested in receiving advertising material via emails
• About 293 billion emails are sent every day 
• 81% of the small and medium-sized enterprises make the most of email marketing to attract new customers

That speaks quite a lot about why your functional medicine marketing needs to consider emails to get to the top in your field! If you are trying your hands for the first time in email marketing, I am listing down all the important details about it:

Various strategies and techniques can help you improve the effectiveness of your email campaigns. A/B testing, following a regular schedule to send emails, and offering double opt-ins are some of the strategies that can work like a charm for your functional medicine marketing.

Leverage data about your email subscribers to create more personalized and highly targeted campaigns. You can also opt for personalization which can show you serious results such as adding the first name of a subscriber to your emails. Research suggests that using the first name of the subscriber in the subject line improves the open rate by 26%.

Opt for automation to save time and money. Once you set up your list in your email marketing software, all you have to do is create campaigns, and it sends to all your patients automatically.

Adopt a mixed strategy to provide value through your emails as well as drive them to your clinic to avail of your services. For instance, if you send out two emails, you can keep one about valuable content that can be of immense use to your patients, and for the second email, you can be a little pushy and offer them some discount to try out a treatment.

Engage In Local Functional Medicine Marketing

Using the internet for your functional medicine marketing to attract local patients within the geographical vicinity of your clinic only makes absolute sense. When you spend your money on advertisements, you’d want your message to patients who can actually show up at your office to avail of your service and not some far-flung user who can never be your actual patient. That is why it is imperative that you engage in local functional medicine marketing activities.

All thanks to digital transformation, there are channels and mediums that can help you conduct local marketing to attract new patients in your proximity. So, let’s delve into this and talk about all the channels that you can use for local marketing.

• The search engine is the holy grail of local marketing: As of 2022, 266.7 million Americans shop online. The whole purchase journey usually starts with a search engine query. That is why search engine marketing is important to attract nearby patients. For search engine marketing, you have to enrich your website and its content with keywords that your ideal patients may be using in their search so that your clinic’s name appears in the results.
• Run highly targeted ads on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. Facebook, in particular, is exclusively known for its targeting capabilities. You can accurately define your geographical location in your ads to spread your message to potential patients in that area.
• Text message marketing can also be a great way to reach out to local patients. Pew research shows that you can reach 97% of US adults through a text message. This stat only shows how truly powerful text message campaigns can be for your functional medicine marketing.
• Another incredible tool that you can use to gain the attention of potential patients in your area is online listings. All you have to do is list your clinic in various online directories and list websites that people refer to find the product or service they need. 

All in all, with the help of local marketing, you don’t really have to step outside your clinic to find new patients. Instead, with the help of these channels, you can acquire new patients.

Use Social Media To Engage With Patients and Provide Supreme Patient Care Service

According to Hootsuite statistics, about 70% of users expect brands to respond to their social media queries and concerns. If your brand is not on social media, you are missing out on a good chunk of engagement and leads that your functional medicine practice might receive from there.

There is immense pressure on businesses to be present, updated, and responsive on social channels. Meeting this demand may be quite daunting for practitioners like you, but the good news is that with the help of empowered and collaborative teams, the right strategy, and effective processes, your functional medicine marketing can make the most of social media to improve patient engagement and drive positive brand experience.

Indeed, social media platforms have high visibility, which means that getting it right is not only about ensuring positive patient engagement, but it can also boost your clinic’s reputation.

Your functional medicine marketing strategy to engage with current and potential patients is no mean feat. But when you have the right strategy in place and staunch determination, you can realize the true potential and value of social media forums: creating awareness about the treatments you offer and positive engagement with your clinic, supporting patients to self-service through educational content and campaigns, and even converting potential detractors into promotors.

To have a best-practice social media approach, your office can consider the following guidelines:

• Devise an overarching plan that clearly outlines your clinic’s presence on a platform and service windows, considering the platform’s features and user expectations.
• Clearly define your response time while ensuring that all posts on all your main platforms are acknowledged within 15 minutes.
• Set target resolution time frames according to the complexity of the post. Any basic query should be resolved within 30 to 60 minutes, whereas serious complaints can take 24 to 48 hours.
• Decide and set a reasonable tone of voice to be used across different channels, giving clear guidance for social media servicing teams and using appropriate templates for automated responses.
• You can also leverage various supporting technology, including AI, to undertake many automatable tasks like filtering high-priority or sensitive posts and monitoring customer responses.

Devise A Thoughtful Lead Generation Strategy

Generating quality leads should be an integral part of your functional medicine marketing. Your sales team should have a good pool of leads to work on them and convert them into patients. A good pool of leads keeps the business coming your way.

While devising your lead generation strategy, you need to describe everything in detail. From the information you want to acquire from your prospects to the types of lead magnets you want to use and ways you want to adopt to nurture your leads.

An effective lead-generation strategy starts with a sound lead-capturing system. This is the nub of your lead generation mechanism and needs your serious attention. Here, you must brainstorm and decide the type of information you want to seek from prospects. There are a number of tools that you can use to capture leads that may include but are not limited to popups, chatbots, quizzes, surveys, demonstrations, and free trials.

Lead magnets can also be a game-changer for your lead generation strategy. When you generate leads, you basically seek information from prospects (contact details and other demographic factors). Asking for this information from a first-time website visitor may be a lot, so you offer them something of value to lure the visitor to give you that information. That something of value acts as a magnet to attract prospects, and it can be a tutorial, an educational video, or a visit to your state-of-the-art clinic.

Once you have captured the leads and have a handful of information about them, the next logical step that makes your lead generation strategy a firm step towards gaining more patients is to score your leads. In order to score your leads, you set parameters that qualify leads as high-quality leads so that you can direct all your efforts to them and convert them into your actual patients.

The lead generation process does not end here; your functional medicine marketing should also have the capability to nurture these leads. Once you have high-quality leads in your hands, you need to have a proper, professional, and skilled sales team to persuade these leads through offers, highlighting USPs and benefits for their health.

All these steps are part of a well-defined lead generation strategy. It all may seem daunting, but working on them with thoroughness is imperative if you really want to achieve your functional medicine marketing goals.

Also, read: The Future of Functional Medicine Marketing: Embracing Digital Transformation

Nurturing Your Leads: A Vital Step in Functional Medicine Marketing

In your functional medicine marketing, securing quality leads is just the first step toward building a thriving practice. To effectively convert these leads into loyal patients, you have to nurture your leads. Rendering this service to many health practitioners over the years enriched me with some handy yet effective strategies to nurture your leads and send them down the sales funnel. And, I am sharing these strategies briefly with you all here.

Leveraging Lead Management Software

Without the right tools, managing a growing database of leads can be quite daunting. Utilize lead management software to organize, track, and segment your leads efficiently. These platforms allow you to categorize leads based on various criteria, such as their health concerns, preferences, or progress through the sales funnel.

Consistent Follow-Up

Effective lead nurturing involves consistent follow-up. This might include phone calls, follow-up emails, or even text messages. Timely and considerate communication keeps your practice on the radar of potential patients, and your practice’s name remains on top of their minds.

Professional Sales Agents

Having a professional team of sales agents dedicated to lead nurturing can be a game-changer for your functional medicine marketing. Having a dedicated team of sales agents is important because they are skilled in communication, understanding patient needs, and guiding leads through the decision-making process.

Bilingual Agents

Having a team of sales agents is incredibly great for your functional medicine marketing, but having bilingual sales agents can be a significant advantage. They can effectively communicate with patients whose primary language may not be English, making them feel more comfortable and understood. This inclusivity can broaden your patient base.

Connect With More Patients Through Paid Advertisement

For many functional medicine practices, paid advertisements still remain a territory not very well explored, especially when it comes to digital marketing campaigns. The reason might be the notion that paid marketing can break your marketing budget. However, the truth is that paid ads are absolutely handy, especially when you are at the start of building and marketing your practice.

The great thing about digital advertising is that there are a variety of options available to you. You can choose from different online marketing models such as pay per impression, pay per click or pay per call or run ads on TikTok and maintain a YouTube channel. These mediums of digital advertisement are great and powerful tools for new patient acquisition as well as for retaining the ones you already have.

I am talking about a few of my favorite digital mediums to run paid advertisements.

Pay-Per-Click Ads: In today’s digitally advanced era, your functional medicine marketing plan would be weak if you don’t opt for pay-per-click or PPC ads. PPC ads play a crucial role in acquiring new patients. To maximize ROI on your PPC campaigns, you need to rely on sound and time-tested strategies.

The first thing you can do to make the most of your PPC ads is to adopt the approach of intent marketing. Meaning, you have to conceive, ideate, design, and execute your campaigns from your patient’s point of view. Through this approach, you make your campaigns more relevant to your patient’s queries.

The next important thing to make your PPC campaigns effective is keyword planning. For that, you have to have a list of keywords that describes the treatments you offer, yield a high click-through rate, be used by prospects to search for your services and give low cost-per-click.

Furthermore, you can make your PPC campaigns more relevant and result-driven by combining them with your SEO strategy. A website enriched with SEO-laden content and a blog stands a fair chance of appearing in the search result.

Facebook & Instagram Ads: Facebook and Instagram ads should be on top of your functional medicine marketing plan. These social mediums are so powerful and driving immense growth for businesses around the globe, and they can do the same for your practice. Facebook, especially, is a great option for running your ads because of its targeting capabilities. As mentioned above, you can target patients in the area where your clinic is located by selecting your geographical location in your ad settings. Instagram, on the other hand, is known for its video-based content and aesthetics. It’s a great medium to boost your lead magnets like educational videos or maybe a virtual tour of your clinic.

Contextual Advertising: With third-party cookies on their way out and tech companies imposing a limit on personal-level targeting online, contextual advertising is coming to the fore as a savior. Advertisers are vouching for this type of ad because technological advancements are improving the precision of contextual classification and ad matching. For instance, contextual advertising has always been dependent on keywords, but the dilemma with this approach was that keywords alone couldn’t predict the full context of a website. Now, there are new contextual targeting tools that make use of image recognition and natural language processing, enabling algorithms to understand the sentiments of a website with unmatched speed and reliability. This contextual advertising can be a game changer for your functional medicine marketing as it allows you to show your ad in an environment that is relevant for your potential patients and safe for your clinic’s brand.

Make The Most Of Video Marketing

A great way for functional medicine advertising is video marketing. Over the last few years, video marketing has evolved into one of the most effective marketing strategies. It gets the message across faster and efficiently prompts instant shares and likes. Statistics show that video marketing is useful in improving your conversion rate by 80% —which is an absolutely encouraging percentage!

Posting on social media and keeping your accounts updated is great, but video content takes your functional medicine marketing a few notches up. 

The great thing about this strategy is that it not only gives you notable results but it is also easy to implement. If you are just starting out on this, it is not that complex. If you are just testing your water, you can start with stories, which are short and informal clips. Even producing high-quality video content is not that difficult and does not require you to be the next Martin Scorsese. All you need is a good phone, reasonable lighting, clean background, and thoughtful content.

If you are planning to tap into video marketing, but are not sure how to begin, follow these tips:

• Have a content calendar ready and include topics that help patients explore how functional medicine works
• Be consistent with your posting schedule
• Make your videos aesthetically appealing
• Make use of helpful editing tools and other resources to produce more captivating video content
• Inculcate the element of storytelling in your videos
• Try out different variations of video content such as social media stories, live streaming, Boomerangs, animated clips, and more
• Always include a call to action at the end of your message and a video description
• Keep analyzing your video marketing analytics to tweak the content and frequency if required.

Track And Evaluate Your Functional Medicine Marketing Performance

Keeping track of marketing spending and measuring its effectiveness is notoriously difficult. However, digital transformation has enabled business owners and marketers to keep track of their marketing activities. Tracking and evaluating the performance of your functional medicine marketing is also very important. Of course, the whole purpose of implementing marketing strategies is to bring more patients to improve revenue while keeping the cost minimum. 

Marketers usually use the phenomenon of “attribution” to elaborate the procedure with which they gauge the effect of their marketing efforts and to measure the rate at which they convert patients to attain desired outcomes. Consumer outcomes are not merely the sole reflection of ROI; the ultimate aim is to improve patient experience and improved health outcomes. But, of course, attribution can act as an important highlighter in your functional medicine marketing. For instance, analyzing your click-through rate for a newsletter campaign is a great indicator to know what type of messaging or content is effective. Attribution analysis is indeed a key factor for gauging the financial ROI of spending on digital campaigns in your functional medicine marketing.

Also, tracking your performance and attribution analysis is important because you need a continuous flow of feedback for your functional medicine marketing to work well, not only between your patients and practice but also between your sales and marketing strategies. If you see something is not working, ask yourself why!

• Are you generating the right leads?
• Is your message to your patients clear?
• Do you need to highlight the educational aspect of your campaign to help patients know what you offer?
• Is there some sort of weakness in the funnel?

Successful functional medicine marketing is not one rule for all. You need to constantly check and adapt depending on the feedback and analytics. A/B test your campaigns and optimize them whenever necessary.

If you are unable to figure it out, revert to the basics. Assess your ideal client and their needs. Once you have answers to these questions, you will be in a better position to address your patients’ pain points that ultimately attract leads for you.

Miscellaneous Strategies That Don’t Involve Rocket Science

I totally understand that as a practitioner, you may find it overwhelming to understand all these concepts, let alone implement them. When you don’t have marketing as your forte and not a mammoth amount of money to hire a full-fledged marketing team, promoting your practice may seem very challenging. But you don’t need to worry about it because, in this section, I am sharing some easy-peasy strategies that you can easily add to your functional medicine marketing plan and reap great results.

Create Some Content

I know I have mentioned SEO quite a few times in this article, but if the concept seems beyond your compression, the simplest way to put it is to create some content. 

Every functional medicine practitioner has his own story to tell. And your passion for serving people and utmost dedication towards evidence-based and holistic treatment can be a core part of your functional medicine marketing. All you have to do is curate the right content following this theme and share it with the right people to grow your practice.

If you have a blog, keep it updated by publishing some sort of content. If you maintain social accounts, keep them updated with images and videos. Create some sort of content every day that fits into your schedule and upload it online.

Get And Promote Testimonials And Reviews

Although I am talking about miscellaneous marketing strategies, they should be an important part of your overall functional medicine marketing. Testimonials and reviews are a great source to win prospective patients’ trust and turn them into actual patients. This is not something I am saying in the air, but the research proves that 90% of people choose which business to use based on reviews.

In order to get reviews, you can simply ask your satisfied patients to rate or review your services on Google, on your website, and on social platforms. You can even record a video testimonial and roll it over on your social media accounts and feature them on your website.

Influencer Marketing & Collaboration

If concepts like click-through rate, conversions, and ROI seem alienated to you, opt for a rather simple yet effective and trendy stance – influencer marketing or brand collaboration. According to a survey conducted in 2022, 80% of brands use influencer marketing. This stat is enough to make you understand the importance of this strategy.

If you use social media, I am pretty sure that you must have a rough idea about how it works. You basically partner up with an influencer or any other brand that complements your service to promote your own brand. I am recommending this strategy for your functional medicine marketing because this option is nothing but a win-win because it will work for everyone: for your practice, for your patients as well as for the influencer.

The most famous platforms for influencer marketing are Instagram and TikTok, but you should not limit your sight only to these forums. If you have a reputable influencer in mind who is on YouTube, you can totally opt for it.

Network

Whether you are just starting out or have carved out a reputable name for yourself, there’s still the need to network. Networking can help you in promoting your practice in unexpected ways. Plus, networking has never been easier than it is today. With virtual meetups, webinars, and online communities, you can easily forge strong connections with fellow practitioners, medical staff, pharmacists, and other stakeholders.

Examples From Several Functional Medicine Practices

On the basis of what we discussed above, here are examples of how you can drive your functional medicine marketing:

Diabetes Marketing: A good example of setting up a website and keeping it interactive is that for diabetes marketing, a practitioner can design a customized diet plan and put this on the website for patients to refer to. That way, the practitioner will be directing the patients from their social media handles to the website to encourage conversion and position themselves as an authority in the field.

Autoimmune marketing: Most autoimmune diseases are not entirely curable, but a functional medicine practitioner can help patients manage their symptoms through regular resources and guides sent to them via newsletters. This will place you as an expert in your niche as well as make you look like a practitioner that cares about the long-term well-being of the patients. This example describes how you can cultivate a strong connection with your patients through email marketing.

Hypothyroidism marketing: While discussing strategies for your functional medicine marketing, I mentioned how paid advertisements could enable you to target specific groups. Although hypothyroidism can occur to anyone, it mostly affects older or middle-aged women. You can target your functional medicine campaign to this specific age group to narrow down your marketing efforts and budget to the right patient group.

Weight loss marketing:

Collaboration with a gym or any other wellness institute is good for reaching more people in the community and introducing your practice to them. Arrange awareness sessions with these institutes or run digital campaigns keeping in view your budget and resources in hand. You can also partner up with an influencer who has an inspiring story of weight loss, or even you can start a journey of weight loss with a social media sensation to promote your practice name. 

Hormonal imbalance marketing: Launch virtual consultations and work closely with physicians, psychologists, nurse practitioners, and other healthcare professionals to facilitate their patient’s treat hormone imbalance safely. This is another great example of collaboration and partnering up with other brands in the industry.

Things To Remember For Your Functional Medicine Marketing To Be Successful

Sure, the functional medicine marketing strategies that are shared above can help you boost your practice, but when you implement these strategies, you need to remember a few of the key principles that can make or break the game for you.

Keep Your Focus On Your Purpose

Your purpose as a functional medicine practitioner is to heal and comfort as many lives as possible. No matter what strategy you implement and how much money you spend, never forget the reason for which you are in the field. Your purpose is like a North Star that gives you overall direction as you make important decisions that drive long-term growth.

Attaching your purpose with creativity and further backing it up with analytics can help you spot opportunities that your patients deeply resonate with.

Infuse Creativity In Your Functional Medicine Marketing Plan

Creativity begins when you dare to think and dream big by broadening your horizons to embrace new ideas and approaches to satisfy your patients. Infusing creativity in your functional medicine marketing is important because it brings forth new campaigns, new ways to serve patients, new avenues to make patients satisfied, and more. 

Deploy Analytics In Each Of Your Functional Medicine Marketing Strategy

Creating a meaningful experience for your patients needs analytical horsepower and precision to identify the unmet needs, intentions, and interests of your patients. When you have data in hand in all its granularity, and you analyze it, you get a 360 view of your patients. This helps in devising strategies that can appeal to your ideal patients most. That is why deploying analytics in each of your functional medicine marketing strategies is not even a choice but an inevitable exercise.

Promote Your Expertise

You are an expert in your field- Don’t forget that!

Patients are not attracted to practitioners who are not sure of their expertise. Exude confidence through your advertising efforts and content strategy so that your patients know their health is in good hands. Your confidence in your practice translates into patients’ assurance about their healing journey.

Stick To Your Signature Process

What is it that you do differently than other functional medicine practitioners? This will define your secret sauce for your patients, so you have to embrace and master it and showcase it in your marketing efforts.

Develop A Funnel That Can Self Optimize

Your marketing funnel not only educates but nurtures and converts leads into loyal customers. Functional medicine marketing practitioners who follow manual funnels end up overworked and burned out as compared to having a self-optimized funnel that does the work for them.

With an optimized funnel, you direct your patients to avail of your services without ever sounding “salesy.” It doesn’t require any extra work or hours, but it continuously keeps converting customers to your patients.

Pick One Platform To Engage And Build Patient Relationships

If you find it overwhelming to be active on more than one social media platform, pick one that you find most engaging for your business and stick to it. This will help you create a rewarding and long-term relationship with your target audience.

Virtual Healthcare Is The Talk Of The Town – And It’s Good News For You

I know it might appear like technology complicates things, but you can actually make it work for you. I talked about smart marketing for health practitioners here, and I can’t stress enough the importance of adapting to technology as your practice grows.

It’s unbelievably easy once you know how to implement technology into your marketing mix, which is perhaps the reason why virtual healthcare is the talk of the town now!

Utilize Technology: Transforming Functional Medicine Marketing

In the field of functional medicine marketing, utilization of technology isn’t just a choice; rather, it’s a necessity. Modern marketing practices are a symphony of digital tools and resources that empower healthcare practitioners to reach and engage with their audience more efficiently. Whether it’s email marketing platforms for personalized patient communication, lead management software for efficient tracking, or telemedicine tools for virtual consultations, technology plays a pivotal role. Social media management tools, analytics and data-driven decision-making, content management systems, marketing automation, SEO optimization, and AI-powered chatbots collectively elevate your marketing strategy to new heights. Embracing these resources is akin to having a trusted team of digital assistants, ensuring your marketing efforts are agile, data-savvy, and patient-focused.

Practice Patient Persistence

Your ability to be patient is like a gold coin while you indulge in modern functional medicine marketing. Although these contemporary strategies are supposed to deliver quick results, it’s important to remember that achieving long-term success requires a good dose of patience. Building a strong online presence, optimizing your website for search engines, and nurturing leads through comprehensive campaigns take time. Instant gratification may be appealing, but it’s often short-lived. To ensure your competitive advantage is sustained over the long haul, practicing patience is key. It allows you to make informed decisions, adapt to changing trends, and continually refine your marketing efforts, leading to lasting success. In the fast-paced world of modern marketing, patience truly is a powerful ally.

Want To Get A Head Start On All Of This?

The above ideas are your framework to kick-start a successful and long-term functional medicine practice. 

We live and breathe these ideas and are committed to helping practitioners reach out to a larger audience to aid their treatment and healing process. If this is what you are looking for, reach out by phone or by scheduling a demo call with us. We would love to chat with you to see if these tips and suggestions are the right fit for you.

If you found this guide useful, check out our other resources created to facilitate your practice.

1. The ONE Secret Ingredient to Attracting New Patients
2. Is brand consistency actually important? 
3. How To Explode Your Chiropractic Practice Through Attorney Referral Marketing

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