Are you tasked with handling your medical practice’s marketing efforts? Do you feel like there’s way too much to do and not enough time to do it all?

We know the feeling.

So, where should you start? If you’re like many small to medium-sized medical practices, marketing may be an added responsibility of the office manager or HR director. Of course, it’s better to have a full time person, but the job can be handled adequately if you prioritize and manage your time correctly.

When you don’t have a $100,000 budget or 48 hours in a day, prioritizing is the next best thing.

3 Things You Can Do Today to Make Your Life Easier

1. Set Measurable Goals

When it’s time to put on your marketing hardhat and go to work, it’s important to make sure they have a solution-oriented mindset.

In addition to that, you need to set clear, measurable goals and benchmarks to determine progress (we like to put this in a simple dashboard report for tracking purposes). This will let you know where you should be spending your time, dedicating your focus and making real-time adjustments.

You should set numbers you’d like to reach month-over-month that are easy to find and even easier to interpret.

Before sitting down to come up with a marketing plan, first ask, “Who is our target audience?” In other words, whom are you trying to reach with your message? Once you determine that, how are you going to measure if you’ve reached them?

• Is it purely patient count?
• A survey? An uptick in web traffic?
• Increased social media engagement?

This is where it’s important to set benchmarks to measure success. You should set numbers you’d like to reach month-over-month that are easy to find and even easier to interpret. That alone will save your marketing “team” from pulling out what hair they have left.

2. Focus on the Right Marketing Platforms

Once you’ve established these important baselines, the next step is to determine how to reach them.

If you’re a small pediatric practice, does it make sense to put your entire marketing budget into a huge billboard? Probably not. How about a targeted Google AdWords campaign? Maybe. What if your office pairs the AdWords campaign with an old fashioned direct mail piece? That might be a winner.

It’s all about determining the best way to reach your target audience in a way that’s both affordable and measurable.

On that note, it’s also important not to try and take advantage of every social media platform out there. You’re likely to wind up throwing the aforementioned hardhat out the window. Not a pretty sight.

Instead, focus on the ones that make sense for your practice. Be sure to strategically choose one or two platforms that fit your goals and really make them great. Spend time in those communities and make it worthwhile for followers to pay attention to you. To help determine where should be, take a look at your analytics and see where your traffic referrals are coming from.

• Are they all from Facebook? Maybe that’s the answer.
• Do you get a lot from LinkedIn and not really anything but spam from Twitter?
• Perhaps it’s time to put the Twitter account to bed.

3. Create Evergreen Content

In the realm of SEO, there is an ever-increasing importance on content. Writing quality content for your website and updating it regularly is one of the best things you can do to help your site get on the front page of Google.

And to get the most out of your content (especially with a shorthanded or small marketing team) is to write evergreen content, or content that stays relevant over a long period of time.

This strategy will help your designated writer keep their sanity while also packing the biggest bang for the buck. Since writing content can be time consuming, this allows what they put up to pay for itself multiple times over. Because it isn’t time sensitive, search engines can continue to drive traffic to evergreen posts, which will continue to drive patients to your office long after you press the “Publish” button.

Now What?

Take what you’ve learned in this article and pass it along to whomever you’ve deemed as your in-office marketing professional and encourage them to actually read it. Start with tip no. 1 and bite off small chunks until you can implement all three priorities. Work through the trial and error and keep at it. Now, go put on that hardhat and get to work.