How to Grow Your Practice in An Acquisition-Driven Market

Acquisitions in the healthcare market slowed down during the pandemic, but as the world is recovering, the healthcare acquisition landscape has seen increased activity as well. Some argue that acquisitions help reduce hospital costs, and others critique PE investments due to their short-term nature that doesn’t allow for the overall advancement of public health. While the industry remains divided when it comes to these critical issues and the impact of acquisitions on the quality of care provided to patients, healthcare practices must choose their business direction and align their strategies with their goals.

Whether you want to grow an independent practice on your own, try to get your practice acquired, or grow your investment back as a PE-owned practice, chances are your goal might remain a simple aspiration without a strong marketing strategy in place.

In a saturated, fast-paced healthcare environment, working on your visibility and brand reputation has never been more critical. While major healthcare companies are expanding, their smaller competitors are left with less and less space to maneuver, and the crippling financial crisis further averts decision-makers from investing more in marketing, leaving little to no resources for scalable growth.

But—regardless of the size, it seems that the entire healthcare industry is lagging 15 years behind the latest marketing trends and strategies that help attract modern consumers who have by now become accustomed to seamless and tailored experiences, whether they’re buying a new coat or paying for healthcare services.

Whatever your business goal is, adapting to the ongoing industry transformation and implementing a well-thought-out marketing strategy powered by contemporary tools will put you in the driver’s seat and give you the competitive edge. So let’s dive straight into the most lucrative healthcare marketing strategies that you can easily apply to your practice regardless of the abundance of available resources.

Increase Your Online Visibility

In an already competitive healthcare market, large systems thrive on the amount of space their position allows them to take up both online and offline: strong domain authority, a significantly bigger advertising budget, and a dedicated marketing team all play in their favor. However—the success of your marketing efforts is defined by quality, not quantity, and to ensure a spotlight in such a competitive environment, you must improve your visibility first.

Whether your priority is to attract patients, investments, or both—you want to showcase a well-managed image that implies your expertise and your growth potential.

Since over 90% of consumer journeys start with a Google search, you’ll want to make sure you show up there. Start by creating and optimizing a Google Business Profile for your practice. Don’t skip any information—both consumers and algorithms favor a detailed profile, as it enhances reliability. It is also helpful to create a separate GBP for each of your practitioners alongside your main practice profile, as this will help you stand out in local search and allow you to rank multiple times for a single search, ensuring more visibility for your practice.

Google Business Profile is an extremely powerful tool in healthcare marketing, but your efforts shouldn’t end there. Is your website up to date and in line with consumers’ expectations? Are you present on social media that your target audience spends time on? Do you interact with your potential customers on a regular basis? If the answer to any of these questions is—no, then that’s where you need to direct more of your marketing efforts.

A strong online presence is the cornerstone of your marketing strategy and without it, any other efforts will yield mediocre results.

Strengthen Your Brand Reputation

The most important step in managing your online reputation is getting your reviews in shape. We’ve already covered the importance of Google Business Profile, and that’s where you’ll want to start with reviews. Along with your GBP, don’t shy away from review websites that specialize in healthcare, such as HealthGrades. Once you’ve set up your profiles, entice your patients to leave a review after their visit. You can do this by asking them for a review on their way out, but the most efficient technique is to use software that automatically sends review requests with a link via email or text. That way, your patients won’t forget about it and you’ll provide them with an easy way to share their experience online. A simple user experience yields more reviews—and that’s exactly what you need in order to showcase your expertise and credibility.

Once the reviews start pouring in, you need to manage them. Interacting with your patients this way will help you strengthen your online visibility, but it will also provide you with a chance to manage negative reviews and prove to your current and prospective patients that you are willing to discuss any issues that might deteriorate their experience.

To further reinforce your brand reputation, leverage your current position to build a strong narrative on your website. Simply put, marketing is effective storytelling, and you want to tell a story that appeals to your target audience. Want to grow your independent practice in an acquisition-driven environment? Craft a story around the intimate experience in a familiar environment a small practice provides during a treatment. Want to grow your PE investment back? Rely on the possibilities and rapid growth that PE investments bring to the table. Want to grow your practice with the goal of having it acquired? Demonstrate how essential your practice is to the community it serves. Whichever angle you’re coming from has a good story—it’s up to you to identify it.

A strong reputation will strengthen your practice and your business goals—it will help you attract and retain more patients and give you more leverage in business negotiations.

Use Your Advertising Budget Wisely

Advertising helps shine a light on your organic marketing efforts, and that makes it an indispensable marketing tool in a highly competitive, acquisition-driven healthcare market. And while independent practices may feel like they’re just wasting money by trying to compete with industry giants and their hefty budgets, even a small budget can go a long way with a strategically crafted advertising strategy. Here are some of the strategies that are well-deserving of your attention:

Introduce Predictive Targeting to Your Advertising Efforts

If predictive targeting sounds too fancy to you, we’ll have you know that fancy tools aren’t reserved only for big companies or dedicated marketing experts. With a little effort, a small practice can reap all the benefits of technological advancements. So, what is it?

Predictive targeting allows you to advertise to a certain group of people—the one that’s of high value to your practice. This allows you to include (or exclude) different variables when deciding on your ad placement, such as age, gender, or location. If you want to promote a service that’s aimed at patients that live within a 3-mile radius of your practice and are likely to be in need of a knee replacement, predictive targeting can allow you to advertise to that exact group of people. That way, your advertising budget will not spill everywhere—instead, you will concentrate it where you can yield the highest ROI.

Strengthen Your Organic Performance with Active Search Ads

Did you know that the top 3 results of any search query on Google are always paid ads? This means that even though you may organically rank first for a query in question, your competitors can beat you with ads. To prevent that from happening, and regardless of current promotions, you should always have an active branded search ad set that ensures you get a prime spot on search results. Not only does this help you attract more prospective patients, but it also helps you increase your website rankings by driving more traffic to it.

Use Online Data to Better Advertise in Offline Space

Most marketing experts would tell you that flyers and billboards aren’t a great idea—and they would be (mostly) right. Over the years, we’ve all developed banner blindness and these evergreen advertising tools simply don’t yield the results they used to. Chances are that the same budget spent on online advertising will bring you much more ROI. However, if you still want to maintain your visibility in the offline space, not all is lost. Using data gathered online can help direct your efforts—this information can direct you to ZIP code areas where your offline ads will have the best performance.

Grow Your Practice at Scale

Growing your practice in an acquisition-driven environment that’s trying to make its recovery from a major healthcare crisis is challenging enough. It doesn’t help that a lot of healthcare providers feel limited by HIPAA regulations and neglect the vast marketing potential because they don’t know how to navigate this landscape.

But you can still take advantage of modern, data-driven marketing solutions and maintain HIPAA compliance, all while staying on a budget. As we’ve determined already, marketing doesn’t thrive on quantity, but on quality—one smart marketing strategy might get you to your next milestone.

SocialClimb offers you an easy way into the contemporary healthcare marketing landscape—we help you automate your marketing processes, increase your visibility, improve your reputation, and increase your advertising ROI by using a smart, intuitive platform that allows you to manage all your marketing efforts in one place, and supports your business goals in an acquisition-driven healthcare landscape.