If your marketing seems to have come to a stall and you’re seeing fewer new patients walk through your doors, you’re probably looking for every tip that can turn the tide. You’ve read every article possible on upcoming online marketing trends, and while you have a strong online marketing plan developed, you aren’t sure if it’s exactly what you need. Fortunately, you can do several small things to give your organization the boost it needs.
7 Marketing Tips for Business Growth
1. Increase Website Speed
If your website doesn’t load on desktop and mobile platforms within two seconds, you won’t be able to compete online. That’s because visitors are not always patient when getting the information they need.
Think about the last time you searched for a product or service online. When you clicked on a website link, how long did you wait when the information you expected to appear, didn’t? Odds are not long. You moved to another website that gave you what you were looking for in less time.
To find out how your website performs, visit Google’s Page Speed Tool. This free resource scores your website from one to 100 to see how Google is currently evaluating your site’s speed. If your site scores below 60, it’s time to evaluate options for decreasing your site’s load speed.
Unfortunately, website speed isn’t a simple plugin update. Site speed is heavily dependent on backend development and code optimization. If load speed wasn’t something your website design team talked to you about when it was built, odds are, it wasn’t built for speed. If your site wasn’t built for speed initially, it’s often more cost-efficient to rebuild than trying to optimize slow code.
2. Establish Crosslink Authority
Your online marketing plan should incorporate a robust link-building campaign encouraging other websites to link to your site. Implementing a national PR campaign is one of the best ways to secure high-quality links to build your site’s authority.
When you secure media coverage through a targeted PR campaign, news and media outlets share content featuring your organization online, even if it doesn’t make it to print. Not only that, but they often include a link back to your website to provide their readers with more information about your organization.
Take a minute and imagine what it could do for your organization’s reputation if Oprah published a blog about how amazing your practice was on her website. That massive authority recognition is how search engines see these media outlet links — ultimately improving your search engine results and attracting more prospects and patients to your practice online.
3. Plan for Conversion Rate Optimization
It’s no secret that driving traffic to your website is a critical foundational element of any successful online marketing campaign, but then what? That’s where conversion rate optimization (CRO) takes the stage.
CRO is the practice of analyzing how visitors use and explore your website to discover opportunities to improve their experience and increase the percentage of visitors that convert into patients or take a specific action on your site.
Too many marketing executives spend huge budgets driving traffic to their company’s site — completely forgetting to follow through with CRO tactics. If CRO is the key to decreasing wasted marketing expenses and increasing online marketing ROI, this optimization tactic must be incorporated into your plan.
4. Leverage SEO
Search engine optimization helps direct organic traffic to your website. Search engines — like Google, Yahoo, and Bing — use SEO to understand how relevant your page is to what the user is looking for. If your page is highly relevant, it will appear higher on the search engine results page (SERP).
There are several easy ways to improve the SEO for your website. It begins with keywords and spreads to on-page optimization and backend optimization — think redirects and sitemaps. Understanding the basics of SEO is your first step to improving your SERP. But, having a team of SEO experts can sometimes be easier than managing it alone.
5. Budget for Paid Advertising
Paid advertising is one of the best ways to generate revenue for your practice — with some campaigns seeing a 1,000% return on investment. Unlike organic, paid advertising is exactly how it sounds: advertisements you pay for. You can pay for ad space on search engines and social platforms, but a pay-per-click (PPC) model prices most ads.
With PPC, you only pay for what the user clicks. This means the person clicking on your ad is likely already interested in your product or services. If they aren’t, they don’t (usually) click, and you aren’t charged for the view. But, how it’s determined if your ad will be what users view depends on four things: quality, the relevance of keywords, ad text, and bid price. If you’re beginning to try paid advertising, you may need some trial and error to get this equation right, but paid advertising experts have this down to a science.
6. Create an Email Campaign
Email campaigns are not new to the marketing world but consistently remain reliable for generating a high return on investment. Unlike your website — which may or may not bring in people interested in your services or products — you can use the emails you already have to send information to the people who have already shown interest in your practice.
By creating an entire email campaign, you can reach out to your patients and other qualified leads and provide information about your services, establish yourself as an expert in the industry, and provide users with valuable resources without seeing them in person. Your campaign may consist of one topic that stretches several months or a monthly newsletter that provides your patients with up-to-date information relevant to their health. Just make sure that your email is on-brand and has a primary goal—whether educational, generating revenue, or improving brand awareness.
7. Align Your Team
Perhaps the best thing you can do to ensure business growth is to get your team on the same page about where you’re going and how you want to get there. The most famous example is a rower team trying to go in different directions. If the person in the back of your canoe wants to go right, but you’re trying to lead your team to the left, you’ll constantly feel resistance, and it will take you longer to get where you want to go.
A Growth Workshop can help your team come together to focus on your organization’s goal — even if that goal wasn’t previously known. Together, you can plan for the next steps and determine how you want your future to look. Do you want to expand your practice in the next five years? Do you want to add new services? Are you looking to refresh your brand and take your practice to the next level? It all begins with aligning your team so that you can row towards the same goal.