The Comprehensive Digital Marketing Guide for Your New Medical Practice (Or Side Gig Business)
- Nisha Mehta, MD
- Jun 29
- 13 min read
Starting a new private practice, or a small business as a side gig, is an exciting time with a lot of moving pieces. While you may hope that having the medical expertise and a well run office will be enough to get patients in the door, businesses need a solid marketing campaign to build awareness in the marketplace. This is especially true for startups like new private practices looking to establish themselves. Think of a strong online presence as your virtual “Yes, We’re Open” sign. Below, we offer a basic guide covering how to get started with digital marketing for a new private practice. While this content is tailored to medical practices, the information below applies across businesses/industries if you’re looking to form a digital marketing plan for a side gig endeavor instead.
If you’re an established business, we’ll cover how to refine and build upon an existing digital marketing strategy separately.
The information for this article has been derived from original material contributed by GMR Web Team, one of our partners who offers a comprehensive suite of digital marketing solutions for physicians, including SEO, content creation, website design/management, and more.
Disclosure/Disclaimer: This page contains information about our sponsors and/or affiliate links, which support us monetarily at no cost to you, and often provide you with perks, so we hope it's win-win. These should be viewed as introductions rather than formal recommendations. Our content is for generalized educational purposes. While we try to ensure it is accurate and updated, we cannot guarantee it. Rules/laws can change frequently. We are not formal financial, legal, or tax professionals and do not provide individualized advice specific to your situation. You should consult these as appropriate and/or do your own due diligence before making decisions based on this page. To learn more, visit our disclaimers and disclosures.
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Guide to getting started with digital marketing for your new private practice
Create your private practice’s website as your professional online home
Build your practice’s online reputation to establish credibility and trust
Consider paid ads to get immediate attention for your private practice
Build authority and recognition with social media and educational content
Guide to getting started with digital marketing for your new private practice
Below, we cover the steps for a comprehensive digital marketing strategy. We’ve presented them in the order that is typically most beneficial to practices, but don’t feel compelled to follow them step-by-step in order as a hard and fast rule. What fits one practice’s goals may not be the best solution for another.
Establish your practice’s marketing goals and brand
Before we dive into specific digital marketing strategies, take a moment to establish the target audience you’re hoping to reach, as well as the objectives of your marketing strategy, as this can dictate what styles of marketing you’ll need.
Consider:
What services does your practice offer? What makes you unique, or what unique problem can you help solve?
What is your mission and values for your practice? This helps establish a brand for your company.
Who is your ideal patient? Define who they are and spend some time researching your target population.
What do you hope to achieve with your digital marketing strategy? Do you want to grow your practice by a certain %? Do you hope to have X new patients added to your roster each month? Be as specific as possible here, as this can help you set target benchmarks for success, often called key performance indicators (KPIs).
We’ve covered these topics in more detail with:
Create your private practice’s website as your professional online home
Just like you need to set up a physical location or online platform to see patients, one of the most fundamental steps in digital marketing is to claim your online real estate. Your domain name and website will be your practice’s digital address. This is where online traffic flows when people search for you or find you through a search engine, whether they’re directed from an online listing, through an ad campaign, or from a friend. Without a website, you’ll miss out on organic search traffic and your practice will look less legitimate. Without having your contact information on a website, it can also be hard for potential patients to connect for an initial appointment.
Think of your website as a digital brochure. Unlike your front desk administrators, your website is available 24/7 to help answer questions, book appointments, and more. Unlike social media accounts where you are at the mercy of a platform’s algorithms or can be deleted, you completely control your website.
Tips for a good private practice website:
Ensure it’s simple to navigate both on a computer and a phone so visitors can quickly find what they’re searching for.
Optimize your site’s loading speed with a clean and simple site. This can include reducing the size of images and limiting videos. Not only do visitors not have the patience for slow websites, but load speeds can factor into your online SEO rankings.
Speaking of SEO (search engine optimization), an effective website optimizes headings and page copy with specific keywords that people might use in online searches related to your practice. While this can be done later, it’s much easier to become successful if you start with the end in mind.
Make your call to action clear. If you want visitors to become new patients, include a big button saying “Book appointment” directly on your homepage. If you’re directing patients to your website to fill our new patient intake forms ahead of their first appointment, put the new patients form link directly in your main menu.
Include key information on dedicated, easy to find pages, including: About Us, Services, Insurance Info (plans you accept), Contact Us, and Patient Reviews.
If possible, add the option for online appointment booking. This is a huge convenience that can help drive new patient engagement, especially if they are searching after hours when your practice is closed.
Learn more about:
While it’s possible to create a polished website yourself, it can help to have a web developer create a clean, professional site that’s optimized for ease of navigation and SEO.
Related PSG resources:
GMR Web Team offers website design, management, SEO, and a full suite of other digital marketing solutions for physicians. They can help you build a strong online presence, cultivate patient loyalty, and achieve sustainable growth for your practice. PSG members receive 20% off website design and hosting when they sign up through our affiliate link.
Artillery designs attractive websites that are pretty reasonable in price (usually $2,000 to $5,000 depending on complexity). They have helped numerous physicians in our community. Mention PSG when you reach out through their website for an exclusive $200 off a website custom designed for your private practice.
Squarespace offers a really easy way to create a website to advertise your private practice with stylish templates for our DIY physician members on a budget. Use code PARTNER10 for 10% off through our affiliate link.
Make sure people can also find you locally online
Unless you’re starting a fully telemedicine practice, your patients will be looking for local options. Prospective patients often search on Google Maps or Google phrases like “doctors near me.” You want to make sure your private practice appears as an option when they do.
One of the most important priorities for local searches is your Google Business Profile. This is a free listing from Google that puts your practice on Google Maps to show up in local search results. Your business profile includes information including your practice’s physical address, telephone number, hours, website, and patient reviews. Include as much information as possible in your listing. The easier you can make it for people and search tools to find your practice’s information, the better your chances at reaching potential patients.
Once you’ve established your Google Business Profile, consider other healthcare focused online directories. These can include:
Healthgrades
WebMD
Vitals
Specialized local directories
Listing your practice widely gives you more opportunities to be found by new patients who are searching in different places. Sites like Yelp aren’t healthcare specific, but can also be helpful for building local SEO.
When providing your information for online directories, make sure your information is exactly the same across your entire online presence (website, Google Business Profile, Healthgrades listing, etc.). Google likes consistency, and having your practice’s name and contact information uniform also helps people trust your information.
Build your practice’s online reputation to establish credibility and trust
Research suggests that 80%+ of people read patient reviews when selecting a new doctor.
Establishing an online presence with a website and local listing helps patients find your practice, but online patient reviews build trust to bring them in the door. While having a patient reviews page on your website as suggested above can help, especially for direct referrals, many patients are more passive and are looking for information right at the point of their search. It’s important for patients to be able to find positive comments and star ratings on sites like Google and Healthgrades.
Building a strong online reputation can be challenging for new practices, but it isn’t impossible. Tips for building an online reputation after establishing your online listings:
Encourage your current patients, or patients you’ve worked with in the past, to leave a review on Google or other platforms. Many patients by default only go to leave reviews if they’ve had a bad experience, but asking satisfied patients to leave reviews can quickly increase your positive reviews.
Make it easy for them to leave a review. Give them a QR code or quick link to each platform with simple instructions on how to post a review so they can quickly navigate the submission page
Let them know their feedback is important and means a lot to you/your practice. A simple request can go a long way!
Consider setting up a system to automatically send a polite email or text message after a patient visit with a request to leave a review online.
Respond to reviews as they come in–both the good and bad ones. We’ve covered tips on how to handle a bad online patient review separately.
Leverage social media accounts to help build relationships with current and prospective patients.
Related PSG resources:
We have partnered with RepuGen to provide physicians access to a powerful reputation management platform designed to enhance patient acquisition and drive business growth, while integrating seamlessly with existing systems. Its automated patient feedback collection and review generation helps practices build positive online reviews and reduce negative reviews. PSG members receive 50% off the integration fee, as well as the Testimonial Widget and CommentWiz tools for free when they sign up through our affiliate link.
Consider paid ads to get immediate attention for your private practice
Building your online presence organically takes time. New practices looking to grow quickly may want to consider paid ads as a way to get seen sooner. Platforms like Google, Facebook, and Instagram all provide targeted ad campaign options to help get your practice in front of specific groups of people.
Google ads: Google offers paid ad placements at the top of their search result pages, so when someone searches for “pediatrician near me,” your ad appears at the top of the search results, even if your website hasn’t organically climbed in the SEO rankings yet. For these types of ads, you typically only pay when someone clicks on your ad.
Facebook/Instagram ads: These targeted campaigns let you show your practice’s ad to people based on demographics like their location, interests, and age. While you might not be reaching patients actively searching for a new doctor right now, this can help you build brand awareness for your practice so they think of you first in the future before turning to Google Maps or another online search.
These different advertising options can have different objectives (reach new potential customers now versus build a larger patient funnel for later), so determine your marketing budgeting for each accordingly, depending on your overall objectives.
Build authority and recognition with social media and educational content
Building out one or two selected social media channels with educational content related to your specialty and expertise can be a great way to establish your reputation and gain trust with patients. Focus on creating content (articles, videos, posts, etc.) that educate people about health topics relevant to your practice.
Consider a blog on your practice’s website and social media such as:
Instagram: Typically attracts a younger target population. Can be great for topics such as health tips, answering common FAQs, skincare, aesthetics, and more.
Facebook: Typically attracts an older target population. Can be great for practice updates/announcements, engagement with patients, and more.
TikTok: Typically attracts a younger target population. This can be helpful for fast growth. Popular content focus areas include disease awareness, preventative health, answering FAQs, debunking myths, and more.
YouTube: Can attract a broader target population. Can be great for longer form educational content (as well as shorts) to tackle complex medical concepts, answer FAQs, debunk myths, and more.
This content not only helps build trust as a medical authority, but also helps build SEO for your practice to increase your rankings in search results.
Set concrete goals with a content plan to help you stay on top of this aspect of digital marketing, as social media algorithms favor accounts that consistently put out content. Planning out content ideas ahead of time can help you stay current. Consider prepping your content in advance so it’s ready to deploy if things get busy clinically or emergencies crop up. Many social media platforms will even let you pre-schedule your content.
Try starting with a blog post once a month (to build SEO for your website over time) that addresses a common question you get from patients, or share one or two posts to your social media account(s) each week to help your visibility on followers’ feeds.
Related PSG resources:
GMR Web Team offers a comprehensive suite of digital marketing solutions for physicians, including SEO and content creation. PSG members receive 20% off blog writing services when they sign up through our affiliate link.
A virtual assistant can help your practice with social media, as well as other patient services, as you build your practice. Learn more about how remote virtual assistants can be used in private practice.
GSD Associates provides full-time and part-time virtual assistants for a comprehensive range of administrative, sales, marketing, and management services, with a focus on enhancing efficiency and productivity. Their mission is to streamline and optimize business management for physicians and other professionals, offering efficient solutions that free up valuable time and resources. Use our PSG partnership inquiry form for 10% off your first year of services.
Edge Health provides college educated remote employees that work full time for your practice. They perform tasks such as primary or secondary phone support, billing, claims, insurance verifications, scribing, social media, and other tasks. Practices tend to use the services in multiple different ways. They are trained prior to starting in your office, and the cost is substantially less than what you would pay an in-house employee. To learn more about Edge's services and schedule a demo, and receive $500 off each of your first 3 months, connect through our affiliate link.
Tips for developing content that converts:
People are increasingly searching for information through generative AI solutions, which aim to provide direct, factual answers. Make sure your website/articles provide clear, concise answers to common questions to increase your chances of being chosen as a source for their searches.
People are increasingly using smart assistants (Alexa, Google Assistant, phone voice commands, etc.) to ask questions. When people ask questions verbally, they use longer, more natural phrases, such as “What are the early signs of diabetes” versus traditional SEO keywords like “diabetes symptoms,” so make sure your content addresses this full question to help capture ranking for these searches.
Your online content sets a tone for your practice, whether it’s a written post or video. Your content suggests to prospective patients the type of interaction they may expect in a clinical appointment with you. Write your content in a friendly, conversational tone, as if you’re talking directly to a patient.
Try reading your content out loud before publishing it. Does it sound natural and is it easy to follow and understand? Most patients never took Latin, so use layman’s terms versus medical phrases/jargon to make it easier for them to understand.
Be authentic. Your unique perspective and expertise are your biggest assets, and your voice/tone will be the most natural (and thus the most relatable and believable) when you aren’t forcing it.
Stay in touch with emails to keep existing patients engaged
Once you have patients, keeping them informed and engaged can help with patient loyalty and retention. The easier you can make it for patients to sign up for email communications, the more likely they are to agree to receiving them. Consider asking your patients for their email address and for permission to send them occasional helpful updates from your practice as part of your new patient intake process.
Unlike social media content, email is a direct form of communication that doesn’t rely on algorithms or rankings to connect. Your content goes directly to their inbox, which provides a greater opportunity to connect. Just be careful that you don’t send too many emails and flood their inbox, as this can cause them to unsubscribe from future communications.
As we mentioned above, your email communications can be a great way to send an appointment follow up with a request to leave an online review. You can also send automated follow up reminders, such as for annual appointments, so they don’t forget.
Also consider a simple newsletter for your practice. It can be a short and simple email every month or even every other month and may include:
Updates from your practice (new staff announcements, changes in accepted insurance plans, updated appointment hours, etc.)
Reminders for preventative care
Helpful health tips
Answers to FAQs
Links to recent and popular blog articles or social media content
Conclusion
We know we’ve covered a lot and that it might seem overwhelming at first. You don’t need to do everything at once. Start with your marketing goals, then focus on one or two of the strategies above at a time, just as we suggested focusing only on one or two social media accounts. Regardless of where you start, make a plan and be consistent with your efforts as you work your way through that plan. Building an online presence takes time, but each step above provides another building block to help you reach your ultimate goal of growing your private practice.
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