Pediatricians are a vital part of life for every child as they are involved in so many critical aspects of a child's health and development – from birth to adulthood. At the same time, the internet has become increasingly important to patients and their family members in their everyday lives. With today's children and their parents being digital natives, remaining relevant through patient engagement is a must for a pediatrician. Children and their parents are so accustomed to living their lives virtually, they are no longer just expecting a quick in-person visit and a prescription but also a virtual experience. Putting together an innovative medical marketing strategy for a pediatric practice can be a daunting and often downright overwhelming endeavor. However, patient engagement processes in healthcare have undergone dramatic changes in recent years with the use of mobile, social, and digital mediums. In order for you as a pediatrician to remain relevant as a trusted source of information and care, your pediatric practice will need to adapt and meet patients and families wherever they may be.

Providing the best possible patient care is paramount, but there is a lot more involved in keeping patients and their family members happy and attracting new ones. In today's ever-changing healthcare environment, and with over 60,000 pediatric clinics currently in the U.S. alone, competition is steep. Pediatricians that are able to maintain their competitive advantage with competitors while remaining compassionate clinicians will build relationships that will help them to outperform competitors. However, being able to build relationships while also customizing treatment plans to meet each of your patients’ unique needs is no easy task. It requires strategic planning, careful calculation, and a long-term vision. 

You can benefit from the right marketing strategy no matter which specialized branch of pediatric you specialize in, including:  

▸ Adolescent Medicine
▸ Neonatology
▸ Developmental-Behavioral Pediatrics
▸ Pediatric Cardiology
▸ Pediatric Emergency Medicine andCritical Care
▸ Pediatric Hematology/Oncology
▸ Pediatric Hospice and PalliativeMedicine
▸ Pediatric Infectious Diseases
▸ Pediatric Pulmonology
▸ Pediatric Surgery 

Many pediatricians fail to operate like the small service businesses that they truly are. While in the exam room, a pediatric doctor maybe in control and able to receive immediate, positive feedback about the work they are doing. However, a pediatric practice’s success requires more than just practicing medicine; it requires an in-depth marketing strategy that include shaving a keen eye on patient satisfaction, an understanding of your parent audience, and having the tools and tactics that will help your practice steadily grow. With the right marketing mix, pediatricians and other pediatrics healthcare professionals across all medical subspecialties can grow their practices to new levels and rapidly increase the number of patients they see every month. Developing a marketing strategy for your practice is not an easy task. As a result, many practices end up stuck in a rut and forgo it altogether.Nevertheless, while clinical knowledge is core to a pediatrician’s practice, it is imperative that your practice conducts a website analysis, optimizes the website for SEO, begins content marketing, amplifies with email marketing, includes paid advertising to increase appointments, establishes a social media presence, and so much more. Whether you are seeing infants, children, adolescents, and/or young adults, here are some areas of a pediatrics marketing that you need to place your focus on.

A pediatric practice needs an online presence so that a pediatrician can be easily found by both current and prospective patients and their families. Creating a captivating, yet functional website allows you to communicate exactly what you offer as a pediatrician and increase your patient engagement, from pre-visit to post-visit. Pediatric patients and their family members will engage with a website regularly if the website offers them information they do not want to miss out on.

The first step to creating an effective website marketing strategy is to audit your website. By conducting a website analysis of your current website’s design and content, you will be able to better understand what on your website is doing well and where there may be opportunities for improvement. With website design, it is important to consider user experience.Is your website easy to read and navigate? Are the font sizes and colors easy to read? Can all of the images be viewed, including on smaller devices and screens? How fast is its load times? These are just some of the questions you will need to consider when building or updating your website.

There are various ways for current and prospective patients to look for a physician online, but one of the most popular ways today is to use search engines like Google. For most searchers, the only results that they will pay any attention to are the ones that are at the top. The only way for a website to get to the top is with search engine optimization (SEO). A pediatric practice may have the most informative, functional, and visually appealing website but if no one is visiting it, the website will not be able to do its job. With Google receiving over 100 billion searches each and every month and most people not going past the first page of a search engine search result, getting your website noticed can be challenging.

If your pediatric practice does not already have an integrated website marketing strategy in place that includes an effective website and SEO strategy, then you may be missing out on valuable opportunities to reach and engage with your current and prospective patients online. By employing the right SEO techniques, you will achieve higher search engine rankings for your pediatrics practice and keep up with the ever-changing Google algorithms. With the right SEO, you will also be able to ensure that your practice's website will load quickly, is mobile friendly, has a lot of useful content, has established the proper security, and has a steady flow of traffic. With a strong website and a stronger SEO strategy, you will be able to get your website to number one for an organic search on Google and other search engines.

With 91 percent of all Americans checking their email accounts every single day (Hubspot) and 52 percent of web traffic being generated through mobile devices (Statista), by including email and text marketing, you will be able to improve your practice’s reach and visibility.Email and text marketing allow you to promote your pediatrician brand, engage with your prospective and current patients, and re-engage with previous patients. In an age when so many email and text messages are deleted without ever being read, it is critical for you to be able to break through the noise and ensure that your email and text marketing gets noticed by your prospective and current patients.

One of the most direct and effective ways of communicating with current and prospective patients and their families is through email marketing. It is a great tool to ensure that your patients are directly receiving the information you want to send them. A properly executed newsletter that is informative, consistent, regularly scheduled, and visually appealing will keep your audience interested in what you have to say and share.Additionally, when a practice's email sender reputation drops, their email communications will begin to get blocked by email providers and servers. This can prevent a practice from having its messages reach its mailing list. To ensure that you maintain a good reputation and that your email communications do not get blocked, you will have to maintain a good contact list that is free of problematic and inaccurate contacts. While this can be a time-consuming process, it is necessary to help your clinic maintain a great sender reputation. Building an email list and sending compelling emails will give your medical practice a way to retain web traffic by providing patients with an incentive to stay in touch, making email marketing an integral part of your marketing if properly executed.

With SMS being the most used mobile device feature, it is vital that you use text message marketing for promotional purposes. You will be able to use SMS to advertise, engage, announce, and promote directly to your patients’ and their family members’ mobile devices. Through text message marketing, you have the ability to communicate any new specials you may be running, changes to your practice’s office hours during the holidays, last minute appointment openings for your current and prospective patients, and other messages that you would like to send to your patients instantly.  

As one of the most preferred channels of communication, social media has become one of the largest growing and most effective digital marketing strategies available today. It is ripe with opportunities for patient engagement and spreading word of mouth about your pediatric clinic. Although almost 80 percent of Americans use social media to connect with one another (Statista), only 24 percent of doctors use social media at least once per day (Allied Health World). Due to privacy and liability concerns, many physicians are too hesitant to use social media and find it very intimidating. However, with the right strategy in place, you will have the most to gain by properly using social media to market your pediatrics practice. Social media allows for real-time conversations with prospective patients and current patients alike.Through social media channels like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, andYouTube, you can build relationships and achieve a steady flow of patient visits. Whether you are just starting a new pediatric practice or simply looking to expand your patient base, social media should be part of your practice’s marketing strategy.

Video continues to be one of the most effective elements in a digital marketing strategy in 2020, especially for pediatrics practices. They are considered to be much more engaging, memorable, and popular than other channels of marketing. More than 50 percent of all consumers expressed that they want to see videos from brands, while a staggering 90 percent of customers stated that video helps them make buying decisions (Hubspot). Additionally, landing pages that include videos on them are capable of increasing conversion rates by over 80 percent, while just mentioning the word “video” in an email subject line increases the open rate by 19 percent (Hubspot). Furthermore, 78percent of people watch online videos every week, and 55 percent view online videos every day (Hubspot). Needless to say, video marketing is a must-have revolutionary means of connecting, converting, and maintaining patients. It is an opportunity for your pediatrics practice to provide office tours, staff introductions, support video calls, special offers, testimonials, specialty education and knowledge-based videos, pre and post treatment instructions, procedure videos, frequently asked questions videos, and more. Additionally, you will be able to improve your website’s ranking on search engines dramatically by including video content. Video marketing can be a powerful and versatile tool for your pediatric practice.

As a pediatrician, you need to be able to reach prospective patients and their families whenever they need you. Therefore, you should make it as easy as possible for them to find information about you as a pediatric doctor, your pediatric clinic’s location and hours, and any other essential details. Having an effective pay-per-click (PPC) marketing strategy can help you accomplish this goal. PPC is an advertising method that requires you to pay only when a person clicks on one of your ads. PPC marketing allows you to use keywords to target your ads directly to those who seek the services you offer.With PPC advertising, you have the opportunity to also appear above typical search results, helping prospective patients and their family members to determine right away if you are the right choice for their needs. To create an effectivePPC campaign, some careful planning and a good understanding of the various platforms that offer PPC advertising, such as Google and Facebook, is required.Having keywords that are specific as possible, optimizing your landing pages, and driving traffic to high converting pages are just some of the steps that you are required to take in order to have a successful PPC marketing strategy.

In just the past year, 93.6 percent of children had some form of contact with a healthcare professional (National Health InterviewSurvey). Consequently, it is no surprise that one of the leading causes of parents having to miss time from work is a child’s visit to the pediatrics office. In a pediatric environment, the innovative approach of telehealth and telemedicine has multiple benefits for both children and their family members –time away from work is minimized, transportation costs are eliminated, and long-term health management is accomplished without significant disruption of daily living. By having your pediatric practice be willing to adopt telehealth services, you will help to eliminate the need for many of these visits to be in-person and, as a result, help save parents the headache and cost of absenteeism from their work while also helping to reduce the time that a child is away from their school. Additionally, every time a child visits the pediatrician, they risk exposure to the various illnesses that other patients may be suffering from. Although this cannot always be avoided, children who have virtual visits are prevented from spreading germs to each other. The types of visits pediatricians can conduct with telemedicine include exams for routine conditions like colds and other viruses, medication management, mental health treatment, and more. Telehealth services allow patients and their families to overcome the barriers of time and distance by making access to care both more convenient and cost effective.

As a primary care physician who specializes in caring for babies, children, adolescents, and teens, you may be facing the challenge of distinguishing yourself from family practitioners and general primary care physicians. The average healthcare consumer may not be aware of the difference between the specialties and that a pediatrician is much more qualified to care for their children than other specialists. This is where reputation management for pediatricians like you comes in. Online reputation management is an effective way to generate more buzz about your practice and positive patient reviews, helping you to attract new patients to your practice and get your current patients and their families to spread the good word about you. Positive online reviews regarding you and your pediatric practice are a mirror that shows how your practice is truly perceived. Additionally, if you happen to receive a negative patient review on Google, Yelp, Facebook, Healthgrades, or another channel, online reputation management will help you reduce its impact on your pediatric practice. Reputation management is also an opportunity to gain valuable feedback from your patients and their family members about your office, staff performance, procedures, bedside manner, and patients' perception. Not developing a strong reputation management strategy may leave your reputation and your practice’s reputation at risk. By proactively monitoring, protecting, and progressing your practice's online reputation, you will gain more positive reviews and ratings, mitigate any negative ones, and continue to grow your practice.

Branding may not seem as important for doctors as it is for other types of professionals and businesses. However, branding is the best tool a pediatrician has to distinguish themselves from other pediatric doctors and show their patients and their patients’ families why they are better suited to meet their patients’ needs. Even when you are not interacting with patients face to face or prospective patients have never met you, your online presence is helping them to form opinions about your brand as a pediatrician.Additionally, as millennial parents and now generation z parents become more and more online savvy and search for information whenever they need it, it is vital that you develop your brand by building a profile and having your practice listed on various healthcare platforms, such as Healthgrades, ZocDoc, Vitals, RateMDs, and RealSelf. Doing so will also provide you with the opportunity to keep information regarding your pediatric practice up to date and make your website’s link available. Strengthening your brand also increases the chance of word-of-mouth referrals, which is a powerful marketing tool. For all of these reasons, an important aspect of building your brand is consistency. In order to keep up your excellent reputation, you will need to meet their expectations each and every time. If you and your practice promise a certain experience to your patients and their families, you need to deliver on that promise. Consistency will also help you build trust with your patients and their family members. No matter what type of communication channel you are using – from in-office visits to online marketing initiatives to virtual visits– it should serve to represent you and your brand. 

Marketing has become an essential part of a medical practice's growth, especially a pediatric practice. Just as you know about clinical best practices, you need to need to be aware of marketing best practices. In the past year alone, 72 percent of all internet users searched for health information online (Pew Research Center). The advances in technology have made it so that patients and their family members are able to easily lookup a doctor and practice online to be more informed. They no longer need to make random or arbitrary choices when it comes to choosing a pediatrician. While some may still seek the recommendation and opinion of their family members and close friends, most now have the luxury of looking up doctors online on various devices. Thus, more than ever, pediatric doctors will need to utilize marketing strategies to establish an online web presence and remain in high demand. With a doctor’s online presence carrying a lot of weight in determining whether a patient and their families chooses them as their physician, it is imperative that you have the right marketing strategy for your practice.