With businesses finding it difficult to catch up with ever-changing consumer behavior and digital disruption, the pressure on marketing teams is real to put companies in a position to not only interact with customers but also engage them and finally drive conversions.
While a well-established marketing department is typically present in most organizations, the same cannot be said for functional medicine practitioners who often lack expertise in marketing, let alone in the realm of digital transformation.
Fundamentally, embracing digital transformation requires a strategic approach. I have identified a few effective ways to incorporate more digital tools and platforms in your functional medicine marketing plan, which I am discussing in this post. Before I share how you can adopt digital transformation, it is important to shed light on the emerging role of digital media and how this digitalization can impact your practice.
The Emerging Role of Digital Landscape
Today healthcare practitioners have ramped up their digital marketing game owing to the revolutionary changes in the digital landscape. This signals that embracing digital transformation is inevitable for functional medicine marketing too.
Designing and executing marketing campaigns through social media, emails, and other channels is the norm. SEO, SEM, digital channel management, web platforms, and apps are the new forms of commercial disciplines.
These new channels and digitalization are producing remarkable results for businesses across sectors and industries. Therefore, embracing these new-age ways to market your services is the only way to thrive.
Also, read: Using Data to Optimize Your Chiropractic Facebook Ads
How Digitalization Can Impact Your Functional Medicine Practice
Digital transformation has impacted nearly every business, industry, and our life in general. It has also changed the way patients interact with healthcare practitioners, and you need to understand these changes to adjust your functional medicine marketing accordingly.
Historically, functional medicine patients used to make decisions based on word-of-mouth or perhaps through a more conventional form of advertising like a TVC or a print advert. In today’s era of the digital revolution, prospective patients have more avenues to learn about your services. They read widely, conduct in-depth research, and form their opinion based on reviews.
Meaning, previously, patients who used to drop by physically or max called you to gain information now have access to web pages, apps, blogs, social media platforms, and other resources. There are more channels to acquire leads, hence extensive advertising to run on multiple platforms.
In short, as a result of digital transformation, your systems to acquire new leads have changed, functional medicine marketing mediums have changed, and processes to manage relationships with them have changed. All in all, it’s a 360° change in your operations and in the way you used to run your practice.
Embracing this change and transit into the digital era is not easy. It requires shifting your approaches, strategies, and methods. So, here I am sharing a few tactics that can make a difference and help you embrace digitalization smoothly.
Embracing Digital Transformation Calls For Adopting a Customer-Centric Approach
To ace your functional medicine marketing in this digital era, adopting a customer-centric approach is a must. Keeping a pulse on patients’ behavior, analyzing their patterns, and interpreting their attitudes should be an ongoing if not a moment-to-moment activity. This, in turn, facilitates precise and accurate targeting as well as shaping and tweaking content.
This means that your functional medicine marketing team or agency should have the tools and resources to map your ideal patient’s behavior across digital channels and analyze that data to finally feed into your marketing campaigns.
If you don’t want to fluctuate from your core medical field to embrace digitalization through trial and error, avail services of a professional agency. Think Bullish has ample experience, and we can help you by partnering up with you and taking control of your marketing game. Schedule a discovery call with us here to learn more about our services.
The Only Way To Thrive In Digital Dominance Is To Exceed Your Patient’s Expectations
What happens when patients are not satisfied with your services? Of course, they stop engaging with you. But now that we’re out of the pre-digital era, the damage can be much greater.
Now, when a patient is not satisfied, he not only stops doing business with you but also influences other prospects who are on the verge of conversion by sharing his reviews, feedback, and ratings on digital mediums. Meaning, getting the overall experience right for patients should also be a top priority for your functional medicine marketing team.
From marketing messages rotating around social media to interacting with your office staff and finally availing your services, everything counts in shaping a seamless experience. Not only that but there should also be a system to get patients’ feedback after they have availed of your services.
This two-way communication between patients and practitioners is a quintessential part of modern marketing. This feedback loop greatly helps in improving patients’ experience as well as in adjusting marketing materials and spending.
Unify & Synchronize Marketing Operations
To adapt to digital transformation and catch up with trends, it’s common to see practitioners rely on several agencies, media partners, and production houses to create content for their websites, social media, blogs, YouTube, apps, and customer relationship management.
When there is no synchronization or a cohesive system, these practitioners incur high costs, remain unable to reuse resources, and track ROI. This is why it is imperative to have a center of excellence to embrace a wide array of digital tools for your functional medicine marketing.
Having a center of excellence or a unified strategy creates transparency, promotes good governance, and improves processes. Plus, it also keeps the cost in check and cuts down the time to create marketing materials. As a result, you embrace digitalization smoothly, and your functional medicine marketing return on investment improves.
Incorporate Right Marketing Technologies Or Agency
The many facets of digital marketing and all the strategies that I have discussed above are not easy to execute. The best bet is to use the right tools or opt for a professional agency for your functional medicine marketing. Because everything changes in this digitally superior arena so fast, the idea of using the latest tools and technologies is to support and automate functions so that you stay up-to-date with fads.
In case you feel overwhelmed by all these innovations, you can consider working with an experienced and professional agency. Partnering up with an agency for your functional medicine marketing will bring you to the fore of digital transformation. These agencies have experts who keep hooking into current and emerging innovations and trends.
Also, read: The Power Of Video Marketing: How To Use It To Grow Your Neuropathy Practice
Tracking Metrics Are Part & Parcel Of Digital Revolution
Digital transformation serves the holy grail of marketing in the best way possible, which is tracking and managing the effectiveness of marketing. You can modernize your functional medicine marketing by tracking, analyzing, and managing your efforts and investments.
In this digitally advanced arena, you no longer rely on a narrow set of metrics to gauge your performance. Rather, you need to have metrics and a tracking system that not only tells you how many prospects convert into patients, but it should also informs you how fast they convert.
Moreover, your metrics should deliver insights quickly – often in real-time – so that your functional medicine marketing tactics can be adjusted timely to save you from lagging behind. Also, you can use tour metrics to get an edge over competitors. If your metrics are forward-looking rather than telling you about what has happened, you can easily spot lucrative opportunities and make the most of them.
Concluding Thoughts
Amid this digital transformation, devising a strong functional medicine marketing plan takes considerable time and a serious amount of effort. How effective this digital revolution will be as a driver to boost practice depends on how quickly – and how well your functional medicine marketing adopts this change.
My agency, Think Bullish, is a full fledge agency with highly skilled, expert team members. We have helped many medical practitioners transform their practice digitally and produce noteworthy results for them. If the idea of availing services of an agency crosses your mind, schedule a discovery call with us here, and we will guide you through all the incredible things we can do for you.
Also, if you found this post useful and think that it served you well, you can check out my other posts covering various facets of digital marketing. Here, I am listing down a few more of my posts that you can check out on my blog.
Zack Siegel
Founder/CEO
Zack is a conversion rate lover and PPC ad man spending most of his time optimizing.
He’s an avid bookworm, Chipotle’s most valued customer, and pursuant stand-up comedian…
We give him reality checks every day.