Are you the Medical Marketing Manager at a multi-location clinic? Then you know that managing marketing across several clinics – and maybe several brands – isn’t easy! Plus, the stakes are high. If your marketing is inconsistent, then one clinic or brand might underperform, which could lead to a decrease in new patients and revenue! You’re stressed. New patients are down. And your CEO or Clinic Director is wondering why you aren’t hitting targets.
Thankfully, there are a few simple things you can do to coordinate your medical marketing across brands and locations.
Here are a few quick medical marketing ideas to help you stay consistent across locations:
1. Create a brand style guideline.
Most medical clinics have a single “brand” – a single logo, color scheme, website, etc. If that’s you, your primary job is to determine how your logo / colors are used, and stick to that closely!
However, some medical practices have multiple brands, usually because you’ve acquired multiple clinics but want to run each clinic under their original name. If that’s what you’ve chosen to do, that’s fine. But that means you’ll have to create a brand style guide for each individual clinic brand, as well as your “overall” company brand.
Whether you have one brand that is used across multiple locations OR multiple brands, the best way to keep your brand consistent is to create a Brand Style Guide. A brand style guideline states…
- What your logo is, and when / how / where to use it
- What your “brand colors” are exactly in digital / print format
- The types of images, fonts, icons, and photographs you use
- The “tone” of your business writing. Are you informal and fun? Professional? Sporty?
- How not to use your logo / brand colors
Creating a guide will help you be consistent across your clinic website, company apparel / swag, social media, direct mail, email, and digital marketing.
At Practice Promotions, we create a Brand Style Guide for our clients as part of our Patient Engagement System. If you want to create your own, we highly recommend HubSpot’s free booklet on how to create brand style guidelines.
Once you’ve created a Brand Style Guide, make sure everyone in your company knows what’s in it and where it is. As the Marketing Director, you’ll be in charge of enforcing it!
2. Create social media and email templates.
Staying consistent with your medical marketing is difficult! That’s why we recommend you create templates on your website, email, and social media that already incorporate your logo / brand colors in the approved way. You shouldn’t have to start from scratch every time you create a piece of content.
At Practice Promotions, we create Social Media templates for all our clients with the Patient Engagement System, so it’s easy to create beautiful, custom-branded posts with just a few clicks. We also post 5x / month on our clients’ behalf.
Similarly, we build email templates in our ENGAGE Email System for our clients. That makes it easy to send branded emails to different groups of patients to get them back in for care!
If you want to create your own Brand Templates for social media or email, here are some great resources:
3. Make sure your websites are cohesive and linked.
Even if you’re running your different clinic locations as separate brands, it’s best if your websites are 1) visually cohesive and 2) linked on the back end.
Check out our client, Main Street Therapy Partners. “Main Street Partners” is their overall company brand, but they also have 9 sub-brands across 4 states. Check out their “about” page where they incorporate all 9 of their sub-brands.
Now, click on each sub-brand. It should lead you to each separate brand site. They each have their own logo, specialities, and unique clinic information; however, they also look similar, which creates a united feel.
Crucially, Main Street Therapy Partners have also linked their Google Business Profiles. That way, Practice Promotions can run Google Ads for all their locations and brands simultaneously!
4. Keep your patient lists clean.
Make sure you keep your patient lists separated by location – especially if you have different brands like Main Street does! Remember to split your…
- Email lists
- Direct mail lists
- If different brands: social media accounts
That way, each patient gets medical marketing that is specific to them, their city, and the clinic they attend.
5. Split your online advertising campaigns.
Similarly, you will need to run different online advertising campaigns for each location. “Physical therapy in bethesda” will not be a relevant keyphrase for your clinic locations in Ohio!
At Practice Promotions, we set up and run Google Ads for 100+ of our clients. We set up each location as a “campaign” under your company Google Account. Each location has its own dedicated ad spend, but we can easily move money from location to location, depending on our clients’ priorities.
6. Be consistent.
Do the same consistent marketing actions every month for each clinic location or brand.
Nothing will make your job harder than trying to reinvent the wheel every month. So don’t! Create a list of consistent marketing actions that you’ll do every month, and then…do it! Measure the results.
At Practice Promotions, here are just a few of the monthly marketing actions we do for our clients:
- Write, post, and email out 2 blogs / month
- Create 5x custom branded social media posts & send for you
- Manage Google Ads campaigns
- Report on new patient results
- Improve your website SEO (for EACH clinic location) so your Google rank gets higher
- Optimize your website so it runs fast and looks great
7. Create your medical marketing content in batches.
Finally, now that you’re creating marketing content consistently…do it the smart way. Create your content in batches! For example…
- Dedicate one day a month for social media across all your clinics / brands. Create a lot of content and then pre-schedule it to go out across the month.
- If you’re writing blogs – sit down and write 4 blogs in one day, and then schedule those to release over time.
- Dedicate one day to pursuing local partnerships for each clinic location
You get the idea!
Consistency is the Key to Medical Marketing
The key to marketing a multi-location medical practice WITHOUT a headache is consistency. In this blog, we recommended you…
- Create a brand style guideline (and stick to it!)
- Create brand templates
- Make sure your website and Google Business Profiles are linked
- Keep your patient lists clean
- Split up your online advertising campaigns
- Be consistent
- Create content in batches
If you do that, you are WELL on your way to ending your marketing frustrations. In fact, you’re ahead of the game! I bet you’re doing better than 90% of Marketing Directors out there.
At Practice Promotions, we help medical clinics attract more new patients online with powerful website design, SEO, Google Ads, and patient engagement marketing services. If you’d like to boost your marketing results, schedule a demo of our services today!