Most people start their search for a medical laboratory (diagnostic lab) online and they find many options to choose from. With so many options to select from, unless you have a very good marketing strategy, you will have a hard time growing your medical laboratory. This list of medical laboratory marketing ideas will certainly help you achieve the necessary growth.
1) Enhance Your Site Productivity
The main landing point of your potential customers online is your medical laboratory website. How many site visitors your website can successfully turn into your customers defines the success of your website. If you want to get more site visitors converted into customers, then apart from having a good professional design, these following factors should have their presence ensured else you will not succeed in extracting the full advantages from your website.
a) Which is more engaging? Text or Videos. Obviously, videos get a better response as they engage our senses better. So bring out a professionally made video for your medical laboratory on your site homepage and see your conversion rate increasing.
b) Having a good design but a congested look and feel of your diagnostic laboratory website will cause a drop in conversion rates. So get the categories and different sections of your website well organized and with easier navigation.
c) Make your site visitor believe in your business/service as trust is an important consideration in decision-making. For this, listing things like certifications, awards, testimonials, appearances on news sites, etc can play a great role.
d) Don’t let your site visitors press the back button (on their browser) due to the slow loading of your website. On site speed testing sites, ensure that your website scores above 95 points (i.e. site must be quick to load). For slower sites, fix the issues causing the slow load time.
e) Searching the web through mobile devices is getting more common. So make your site design flexible enough to adjust its size on mobile devices.
f) To compel the website visitor to call/contact you soon, present some exciting offer in form of discounts, free consultations, etc.
2) Attract Credibility and Traffic with Press Releases
By sending out your medical laboratory press release through a professional press release distribution service, you can spread your business-related content to some of the renowned media outlets of the world. These media outlets can be big names like the Associated Press, Market Watch, Yahoo Finance, Yahoo News, and affiliated sites of Fox news. Getting your business name on such media outlets is a big factor in increasing the reputation of your business. These sites will also give valuable backlinks to your official site which will in turn assist in your site’s “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO). These factors are some of the many benefits that your business can avail due to press release marketing.
3) Optimize the Site and Get Faster Growth
For people to discover your diagnostic laboratory website online, it is crucial that your website enjoys the top 10 rankings for keywords relevant to your business like “medical laboratory in [city/town]”. As a physical business offline benefits from a good location, so does a website with a good ranking. Those businesses that do not pay attention to their online visibility leave money on the table in the form of the loss of many potential customers. If you want your website to appear on the top page results of search engines, you will need to optimize your website through a process called as “SEO” or “Search Engine Optimization”. As most business owners do not have the time and resources to implement and maintain SEO-effecting factors, it is best to hire an SEO agency for this purpose.
4) Chunk Out More Articles, See More Customers
For sites that do not have more than a few posts on them, the number of visitors fetched by such sites are also often small. Businesses that consistently post new topics on their site get more posts of their website displayed through search engines, thereby also increasing their site traffic. For this reason, it is recommended that businesses must adopt content marketing to grow their visitors and customers. By writing blog posts that address common concerns about services offered by your business like “liver function testing in [city/town]”, you can get started with growing your site visitors. For more keyword ideas to write blog posts, any good keyword tool can be useful. Another aspect related to content marketing is writing guest posts on popular sites related to your industry.
5) Make and Optimize GMB
“Google My Business” (GMB) can be a game-changer in terms of getting local leads. Since Google displays GMB listings for local search queries, so by creating and optimizing your GMB page, your business listing and details will show up much more frequently and this will cause more leads and visits to your medical laboratory. Choose an experienced internet marketing agency that can assist with GMB optimization if you want your medical laboratory to get more leads from local listings on Google.
6) Pay and Play with Ads to Fast Track Results
Getting results with organic SEO requires patience and time and this is why paid advertising can be used to speed up your marketing efforts. Google Ads is the most reputed advertising platform available on the World Wide Web, succeeded by Facebook. Success with pay-per-click (PPC) Ads needs a strategic approach with good insights related to different aspects of ad management. Just creating and running ads without the necessary skills can cause very low or even negative returns on the money spent on advertising. So either make yourself familiar with ad management through various online courses, educational materials, free guides, etc or outsource this task to any specialized digital marketing agency.
7) Start Connecting and Growing on Social Media
Nowadays, you will hardly find people who don’t have a presence on social media. The fact that the combined user base of top social media platforms is in billions, this has led marketers and businesses alike to be active on such platforms. Though reaping the actual benefits of social media marketing takes some time unless you have a big follower size already, the efforts put towards social media marketing of your medical laboratory are justified in the long term. So start actively engaging with people on these platforms to make your medical laboratory more recognized or hire a social media marketing agency for your business.
8) Reach Out Locally Through Influencers
Even if your profile has a few followers on social media platforms, you can still broadcast your promotional messages to thousands of people from your local area by utilizing the big network of such influencers who have amassed a big following on such platforms. This is how influencer marketing works. You just have to reach out to a few influencers from your region, finalize a deal with them and then your medical laboratory business is ready to get promoted to many people from your local area. For best results, choose only those influencers whose follower base is mostly local.
9) Work on Word of Mouth Marketing
Promoting word-of-mouth advertising should be one of the important priorities for marketing your medical laboratory. This technique is very simple and can increase the customer base of your business. By the simple process of rewarding your customers to refer their friends and family to your business, this method can be executed. In order to increase the effectiveness of this method, you can get referral coupons created and distributed to your clients so that they can hand them over to people in their social circles for referring your medical laboratory. By carrying out this referral marketing method, your business revenue is bound to grow.
10) Do Use Merchandise Marketing
Everyone likes free gifts as it makes people feel special. You can therefore buy low-cost items in bulk with the name of your medical laboratory printed on them so that these items can be given as a token of gift and appreciation to your customers. This process will, in turn, help to generate a good bonding with your customers along with increasing the chances of them coming back for other tests and also referring your business to their near ones.
11) Improve Your Business Further with Email Marketing
A targeted email list maintained by your medical laboratory can become a long-term income-generating source for your business. This is because, by having an email list, you can sell your services or can announce new offers/discounts on clinical tests anytime with convenience. To begin the process of building your email list, all you have to do is to stick your email signup form on any visible part of your website along with giving some sort of incentive to your site visitors to leave their email addresses. The better your incentive will be, the faster will be your email collection rate.
12) List on Other High-Traffic Sources
Sometimes back, directories used to find a prominent place in Google search results due to which many businesses used to list their details on such sites. Things have changed drastically and it has nearly wiped off the ranking power of most directories. However, Yelp, HomeAdvisor, Docstoc, etc, are a few handful of the directories that are not only strongly ranking but are also sending leads and customers to the businesses listed on such platforms. So, make a list of good directories ranking currently (on Google) and start leaving your business details on them.
13) Explore Video Marketing Potential
No other content form engages human senses as powerfully as videos do. It is due to the higher engagement rate of videos that you will find even Google displays many videos on its search results, especially for low-competition keywords. The same data is corroborated by social media too where videos perform way better than text and images in terms of getting likes and shares. So by distributing your business-oriented videos across many platforms, including YouTube and social media, will help you to drive more attention and customers for your business along with increasing the trust of your business brand.
14) Make More Customers with Indirect and Reputed Advertising
You can either yourself or in collaboration with any specialized doctor get articles published in local newspapers related to the early detection of various diseases through pathology tests. All it will take to get this going is making contacts with newspaper editors followed by getting consent to contribute content. This process will provide subtle advertising of your medical laboratory/pathology along with giving you a brand image.
15) Host Free Disease Detection Camps
You can hold free disease detection camps for a select number of people for common diseases that require regular tests like diabetes, blood pressure, etc. Using these camps, you must collect the details like mobile number, and email address so that you can give one-time free service and make them your customer for forthcoming tests.
16) Grow Using Referrals from Associated Partners
To send more people to your pathology laboratory, you can connect with local doctors and hospitals and can give them a certain referral fee for each patient. The more doctors and hospitals you tie up with, the more will be referrals and growth of your medical laboratory.
17) Inform and Grow Revenues
Occasionally host free seminars and webinars on topics like the benefits of detection of diseases through lab tests, etc. Utilizing the contact details of the seminar/webinar attendees, you can bring them for periodic tests and can get more revenues through this method. To announce such free seminars/webinars, you can make use of your website as well as local newspaper ads.
18) Sponsor Health Programs
You can sponsor health programs like yoga classes, dietician speeches, fitness counselors, etc to bring a heath-aware population to such programs. Once you get people to such programs, the next thing is just the promotion of your diagnostic lab/medical laboratory. Here too, you collect communication data like email and phone numbers of participants to start promoting your medical laboratory to them.
19) Make Use of Improved Technology
When it comes to health, people want the most precise and accurate data. You can adopt the latest testing techniques and can announce these features on all of your marketing materials. This will give you one major advantage over your competitors.
20) Set Automated Reminders for Repeat Business
All those tests that require periodic checks must not be missed or shifted to any other competitor of yours. For this, you can take the help of technology and can send reminders to your customers for their next upcoming checkup. This will help in preventing the transfer of many of your customers to any other medical laboratory.
21) Get More Customers by Making the Process Smooth
People like to get things done easily and if you help people in easing the process of taking their tests, you will get more customers. For this, provide the option of free pickup of samples + home collection and delivery of reports to your customers. You must pre inform them of the necessary things they need to keep in mind before giving samples.
22) Start Targeting Specific Groups
You will find clubs and unions of various kinds of people locally. You can target these clubs and unions to promote your medical laboratory to many people at once. You can also make contacts with the heads of such clubs and unions to market your diagnostic lab more effectively.
23) Get Hands on These Traditional Promotional Methods
Compared to all businesses, there are very few businesses that rely solely on online marketing. To get good reach, the preferred marketing strategy is to use both online and offline marketing together. A good advantage of offline marketing is that ads seen offline have more trust factor than online ads and promotions. To start offline marketing of your medical laboratory, the various methods you can utilize are getting ads on billboards, distributing flyers, newspaper and local magazine ads, organizing seminars, etc.
24) Let Reviews Favor Your Business Growth
The online reputation of your medical laboratory rests on reviews left by your previous customers and this is why more and more businesses are now seeking ways to actively grow their ratings and reviews online. As people nowadays have more choices than ever, it just takes a few minutes to make a decision about selecting or rejecting a business online based on the reviews it has obtained online. For accelerating the process of accumulating good reviews, your business can send a text or email communication with the link to your business profile where the customer can leave his/her review.
So, this was a great write-up on medical laboratory marketing ideas. If you feel something missed out or have any doubts, get us a note using the comment form below.
