The Top 3 Future Trends of Online Marketing for doctors - What are the Implications for Doctors?

As a doctor you invest a lot of time, energy, and money into your practice. With all the demands of a regular doctor’s office (seeing patients, managing staff, negotiating with insurance carriers) you can easily get absorbed into a day-to-day mentality. However, it’s important to occasionally take a step back and look into the future. Is your practice ready for what the future will bring? Are you aware of changing patient trends and are you strategically positioning your practice according to these trends? If not, don’t worry - it’s not too late. This article and video are created to give you a quick update about the top 3 future trends of online marketing for doctors and what this means for you and your practice.

1. Online Advertising will become more Expensive

It’s the basic theory of supply and demand. As more and more people come online, the demand for online ad space (for this bigger potential market) increases. However, the supply of available ad space is NOT increasing at the same rate. For example, despite Google’s audience greatly increasing in 2017, it still has the same number of advertising spaces at the top of the page. Therefore, with an increase in demand but no increase in supply, it will inevitably lead to an increase in the cost of online advertising.

Implication(s) for doctors:

For smaller practices, it may become hard to compete with larger practices or hospital conglomerates who have bigger advertising budgets. Consequently, you may want to consider an Organic Search Engine Marketing Campaign, which is much more affordable and still gets you onto the first page of Google. Read more about SEO for doctors or Online Marketing for Doctors.

2. More augmented reality

We all saw the popularity (or insanity!?) of Pokemon Go. It was the mix of reality and digital additions which made the game so popular. And guess what - this trend is set to continue. We can safely assume that more and more people will be using the smart phones and/or augmented reality glasses which show them the real world but with digital additions. For example, someone driving might be using Google Maps, which may show them reality but with labels, for example a digital “Urgent Care Center” label appearing above the building on the right.

Implication(s) for doctors:

Doctors and healthcare practices need to ensure that they are listed on programs and applications which are using this technology. In particular, you should make sure you’re listed with Google Maps;
But being listed is not enough - when you show up on Google Maps you need to make sure that what patients see is POSITIVE. Do you have a rating below 4 stars? Not good! Perhaps start positioning yourself for the future by increasing your number of positive online reviews today.

3. Smartphones will dominate desktops

It’s no secret that more and more people are switching to using their smartphones for internet-based actions instead of using their desktop. But this is old news - even in 2015 Google had already told us that “more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries including the US” (Google ).

Implication(s) for doctors:

Your website MUST be mobile friendly. This means that it appears well on smartphones and tablets;
Your website should make use of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) which helps it to work faster. Although Google has not yet explicitly said that its algorithm takes the speed into account, it would not be surprising if this became an important factor in the future, as it would not be a good customer experience for users to find a slow and unresponsive website.