Eating junk food, spending hours in front of mobiles/laptops, lack of exercise, etc are some common traits in a big segment of the population. One of the many negative outcomes of these traits is poor eyesight and other eye-related problems. There is a fairly large segment of the population requiring eye-care services. However, the market is already dominated by many big vision care chains and local-level established clinics. In order to grow your optometry practice amidst this competition, you need to stick to powerful optometry marketing ideas. With this problem-solving approach in mind, we present you some of the most influential strategies for marketing your optometry practice below:
1) Raise Your Site Conversion Rate with These Changes
The website is one of the most underrated things that is paid attention to while marketing a business/service. Slight changes in your optometry website can lead to a proportionate growth in the number of patients your optometry clinic is getting presently. So let’s have a look at the required changes:
A) Do you have a chat widget installed on your website? If not, then do it soon as interacting with visitors online is bound to get more of them converted to clients.
B) Slow-loading sites are traffic leakers. Check how much time your site takes to load fully and improve it by optimizing those factors that cause delays in site loading speed.
C) For visitors to trust and try your optometry service, highlight things like media coverage of your business, achievements, awards, testimonials, and all such similar factors.
D) Ensure that your site adjusts as per the device type of the user/visitor (mobile, laptop, tablet). If your site has a rigid resolution, it will cause a bad user experience and more traffic loss.
E) To display the core features of your optometry practice, a video will serve far better in convincing than text content. So get a quality and professional video up on your website.
F) Your website design must be efficient in looks as well as in the arrangement of various sections and categories.
2) Start Ranking for Local Optometry Keywords
The sites that appear on the first page of Google when you type keywords like “best optometrist in [city/town]”, “optometry clinic in [town/city]”, etc are the sites that enjoy a continuous supply of patients looking for optometrists. Getting similar results for your optometry practice requires knowledge and implementation of the best search engine optimization (SEO) practices. Since most business owners are not that much into handling the technical part of website or SEO, it is good if the assistance of some digital marketing agency is taken.
However, it must be noted that SEO, despite being a good source of organic traffic, requires a few months of effort to produce the expected results. So, a business must be patient enough to see the benefits of SEO for their business.
3) Issue Press Releases to Get Many Benefits
Press releases impact several dimensions of a business and are hence recurringly used by those businesses that understand its true potential of it. A business can easily convert press releases into small traffic-capturing modules that add up to cause significant traffic (visitors) for the associated business. The most significant benefit endowed by a press release is the news site publications that it provides. As press releases also tend to attract quality backlinks from news sites, the indirect SEO impact caused by press releases on the official website of a business is also powerful. Owing to these reasons, your optometry practice must consider utilizing press release marketing.
4) Let More Content Get You More Patients
To market your optometry clinic, a very simple marketing method that is often overlooked by many, is content marketing. The process involved in content marketing is just too simple to follow, yet it is less used because it requires consistency to build up enough content that can start attracting traffic passively for a long period of time. The beginning process for content marketing starts with selecting good keywords related to your niche followed by creating content (blog posts, articles, infographics, videos, etc) around them. Once you start posting content regularly on your optometry site, the visitor count will keep on increasing with time and consequently, the revenues of your business will also start growing up.
5) Benefit from GBP of Your Optometry Practice
Create a Google Business Profile (GBP) page for your optometry clinic because this profile will not only be eligible to be shown on Google Local Listings (on the first page of search results) but will also show up in Google Maps. An optimized GBP for a business/service is a potent business/customer generator. The optimization part holds the real key to ranking your GBP within the local listing. So learn GBP optimization or get it done through a specialized service provider to start generating the intended results.
6) Email Marketing Works Long Term
When promoting your optometry clinic/hospital online, it is not a good decision to rely mainly on Google search traffic because any algorithm update can crash your good rankings in Google and your site can ultimately lose traffic. Therefore as a safety net, collecting the email addresses of site visitors is a good strategy to keep in touch with all the people who have or will require your services. Further, the privilege of having direct access to the inbox of most patients and potential patients is something that is a vital property of email marketing. All you have to do for starting email marketing is to formulate a good inducement (like a free ebook on eyecare) in exchange for which you can ask the email address of the website visitors through an opt-in form placed on your optometry website.
7) Fasten Your Advertising with Paid Ad Campaigns
With paid sources of marketing a business, the results can be fastened much more effectively as compared to traditional free methods of marketing a business online. There is where running ads online for promoting a business finds its core significance. With various ad networks available online for paid advertising, the two most recommended and most popular are Google ads and Facebook advertising. With the right optimization of different factors influencing ads, one can operate and control ad rates and end results effectively. This can be done professionally by any PPC firm or by any freelance expert in this niche.
8) Use Diverse Strategies to Promote on Social Media
Your optometry practice can also effectively make use of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, etc to grow its customer base. Since the number of people having a presence on social media platforms is simply too big, your optometry business must not ignore it in your marketing strategy. You can join various local Facebook groups to start promoting your optometry practice. Other ways to make people aware of your business on social media include running contests, hashtags, collaborating with influencers, sharing interesting content, etc.
9) Grow Your Practice with Videos
Video marketing is a slow but effective way to see growth in a business/service provided you put in the required efforts to create and upload videos regularly. As it is very common to see videos ranking very well in Google search results for very low competition keywords, creating videos on such keywords is worth the effort. To get a list of such low-competition keywords, any keyword-finding tool like Ahrefs can be used or the services of any freelancer from sites like Upwork, Fiverr can be used. Apart from uploading them on YouTube for getting direct traffic from search engines, they can also be shared on social media to generate more awareness for your optometry clinic.
10) Use LinkedIn for Professional Profile and Partnership
LinkedIn is the largest network of professional profiles in the world. By making a profile on LinkedIn, you can get two major benefits. First, the appearance of your profile on LinkedIn will convey a professional approach to your business. Second, you can easily find the profiles of many local physicians and other doctors on LinkedIn whom you can contact to grow your referring sources.
11) Use a Few Authority Sites
When you type different variations of keywords (search terms) related to optometry on Google like “optometrists near me”, “optometry in [name of place]”, etc, take note of all top-ranking sites and find the open directory type sites (for example, Yelp) that show up. After you provide your optometry business details on such sites, you will easily start getting some extra patients from these sites which will be a big bonus for your one-time effort.
12) Speed Up Local Marketing Through Influencers
While creating a big following on social media sites takes time, a better way to mass promote your optometry clinic is by using local social media influencers. These influencers have already done all the required steps to grow the number of followers. You can access promotions to these followers by paying these influencers. Note that the key here is to use only local influencers who have a big percentage of local followers.
13) Start Building Your Reviews
The reviews that your optometry clinic gets online can serve as a guide for many potential patients who check online reviews before making decisions. Average reviews or negative reviews of your business online can cause a significant dent in the number of people visiting your clinic. So ensure that your optometry clinic consistently gets positive reviews online. Negative reviews, if left by someone, should be addressed soon enough.
14) Adopt Print Media Mutualism
Every media publication strives to get content written by experts and this holds true for local print media publications too. As you have the required certifications and knowledge of eye-related problems, you can pitch your proposal to contribute articles on eye care to the local print media. Every published article (written by you) in local newspapers and magazines will bring you recognition and reach a big segment of the local population.
15) Advertisements and Interviews on Local Radio Stations
Through local radio stations, you can inexpensively run advertisements for your optometry practice along with broadcasting your interviews. You can also get consent from the responsible authorities of local radio stations to be the guest for shows that would entertain live callers for addressing eye-related problems.
16) Go After Local Crowd Promotion
Every situation that can attract a local crowd can also be a good venue to market your optometry practice. Such situations can be trade fairs, local festivals, music events, etc. In most cases, you can offer to become a co-sponsor of such events which will give you more advantage in terms of promoting your business. To all the attendees of such events (or fairs, etc), you can also distribute coupons and brochures related to your optometry business for better chances of making them visit you.
17) Discover Many Patients with Free Eye Check Up Camps
Through local newspapers, banners, etc, announce free eye check-up camps to draw in local people followed by referring advanced check up and care to some patients that need greater attention. Using such free check-up camps, you can also make money from the products (like glasses) prescribed by you.
18) Get Promoted Every Time While Driving
To automatically get your optometry practice promoted every time you drive your car, get your car wrapped with the advertisement of your optometry practice. If you pitch more car and cab drivers with this concept of car wrapping (paid), you can scale this marketing method even bigger.
19) Focus on Promoting the Product Side Too
Though the main focus of your practice is on diagnosing eye problems, you can start selling eyeglasses and other related accessories on your own website so that this would add up to your overall revenues. This will also allow your customers to order new pairs of glasses directly from your website without having to go to the e-commerce interface of any big vision care chain.
20) Gain Many More Patients with Company Reachout
Identify those companies that require extensive work on computers, especially in the IT and software sector, and pitch them free presentations on eye care tips for their employees. Such free presentations can qualify many paid patients. You can also offer discounted coupons to the employees of such companies for availing glasses and eye care products at a lower price from your clinic/hospital.
21) Introduce and Get Introduced
Physicians come across many cases some of which might require expert support. Start introducing your optometry practice to other local physicians and this will, in turn, help you get introduced to new clients. The greater your network of referring physicians, the more will be the number of cases referred by them.
22) Drive Patients with Eye Care Seminars and Webinars
Free information given through seminars and webinars by an expert health professional can make many people attend them. As eye care is something that has a big appeal, conducting seminars and webinars on such topics will draw in many people and will also result in many appointments. To announce such seminars/webinars, you can advertise through newspaper ads, banners, social media, etc.
23) Set Viral Marketing in Action on Social Media
When more and more people involve in promoting your business, the effect it has is huge. This is why holding contests on social media is a great strategy to promote a business. If you make it a requirement to tag a specific number of friends to qualify for the contest, you will soon notice that the advertisement of your optometry practice will reach thousands of profiles.
24) Improve Conversion Rates with Success Stories
Stories of people who have got their eye-related problems treated by you can be powerful lead magnets to bring in more patients. By putting success stories of your patients (with prior consent) on your website, social media, etc, you can notice a big improvement in the conversion rates from these marketing channels.
25) Book More Appointments with Book Publication
Write a book on eye-related problems and get it published digitally or physically. Getting a book published digitally is far more simple and straightforward. When you get introduced as a book author along with your professional qualification, this creates a much more powerful impact and makes you stand out from other optometrists. So get a book published in your name for extra benefits.
26) Give Consultation on Telemedicine Apps
The number of people consulting doctors online is increasing and this is why giving consultation through telemedicine apps can get you extra patients and revenue. Join the top telemedicine apps in your country and you will find a new source of patients.
27) Consider Common Traditional Offline Promotion Methods Too
If the internet usage pattern is analyzed, one can easily find out that it varies with age group. This explains why your optometry clinic must not rely just on internet marketing if it wants to reach a greater number of potential clients. The two main grounds on which online marketing fares better than offline marketing are low costs and the choice to target ads to a specific group of keywords, interests, locations, etc. You can take the traditional offline marketing methods into consideration like getting your ads visible in newspapers/magazines, billboards, printing and distributing brochures/flyers, etc. These traditional advertising methods have been performing very well for many businesses and services.
To start getting more people to your optometry clinic, you just have to start implementing these optometry marketing ideas. Comments are welcomed in the comment box below. After presenting this wonderful article, all we ask from you is to share this post on your social media 😀
