Dermatology Marketing Strategies and Ideas that Really Work

Proven marketing strategies and ideas to successfully differentiate your private dermatology practice from your competitors and attract more patients.

Author: Jennifer Highland, Content Manager of Miiskin | Reviewed by: Slavica Nikolić, SEO Specialist of Miiskin

When you start your own dermatology private practice, you are responsible for developing a marketing plan for your dermatology clinic. One of the best ways to begin your dermatology marketing strategy and marketing plan is by creating a solid offline and online presence for your clinic because, without it, you’re losing patients.

On the other hand, with a solid online presence, it will be easy for your potential clients to find your dermatology clinic’s website, professional profile, and social media pages. Patients will also be able to ask you questions about your practice through these channels.

online marketing for private dermatology practice tips

Besides, it’s a well-accepted fact that people tend to do research before deciding to book an appointment. Research indicates that people trust personal recommendations from friends and family (word-of-mouth), the same way they trust online reviews. Today’s patients want to find out everything about you and will go through reviews from other patients on different platforms. So don’t miss this opportunity!

So, How do you Market your Dermatology practice?

The list below gives you great dermatology marketing strategies and ideas for your private practice

Build a solid online presence for your clinic
Build the customer personas for your dermatology clinic
Understand the job-to-be-done for each persona
Develop your value proposition and unique selling points of your private practice
Invest in a good website
Develop an SEO and content strategy
Set up social media channels
Invest in paid advertising
Outsource digital marketing tasks to freelancers or an agency
Implement teledermatology in your clinic
Develop a referral and loyalty program for your skin clinic
Socialize with other dermatologists

Build a Solid Online Presence for Your Private Dermatology Clinic

Patients nowadays want to know they are dealing with a professional, reliable dermatology clinic—otherwise, they will go to another clinic.

Develop a user-friendly and mobile responsive website for your dermatology clinic
Create business listings
Build social media channels
Get customer reviews for your website
Start a blog if you are willing to do it right
Create content optimized for search engines

Create Customer Personas for Your Dermatology Private Practice

A customer or buyer persona is defined as a semi-fictional character representing critical traits of an important segment of your audience, based on the information you know and the data collected from user research and website analytics. It would be best to build your personas based on actual data, not intuition.

Click on the image to enlarge

private dermatology practice customer persona

Two ways to ensure this is by conducting qualitative (customer interviews or focus groups) and quantitative research (website analytics, online surveys.)

Customer personas help you better understand your patients’ needs and how to address them.

They also help you create alignment across the organization and prioritize the marketing campaigns and initiatives to invest time and resources.

Request a PowerPoint version of this free Customer Persona Template to create patient profiles for your dermatology practice.

Request Customizable Customer Persona Template

Understand the Job-To-Be-Done for Each of Your Personas

The jobs-to-be-done framework is essential for any digital marketing strategy. It aims to develop products or services based on understanding the specific “job” your patients “are hiring” your “service” to do for them¹.

For example, in the case of Sarah, the customer persona mentioned above, she is not going to your dermatology clinic to do skin checkups and get fillers or other cosmetic procedures.

Sarah is “hiring” your dermatology clinic to “keep her cancer-free and help her look her best, and advance in her career.”

In this case, your “dermatology service” may be competing against another clinic, a personal trainer, expensive skin care products, and spas.

You may think that a personal trainer is not your direct competitor; however, Sarah has limited money to spend on herself because she also needs to pay rent, bills, food, and entertainment.

Therefore, if Sarah decides to pay for a personal trainer this month, she may not have any more money to spend in your dermatology clinic. In this case, a personal trainer competes against your dermatology clinic for Sarah’s money.

This information is helpful because to do some advertising, you can do it in the same channels where spas, personal trainers, or skin care products also advertise.

You can also consider cross-promotion with local businesses such as fitness centers, spas, or a shop selling skin care products. Although you are all competing for Sarah’s money, she may choose to buy skin care for one month, pay a personal trainer for another month and do some cosmetic procedures during another month.

Draft a Value Proposition for Your Dermatology Practice

To complete this step, you must build at least three customer personas with their respective jobs-to-be-done.

After that, you can create a table with the customer pain points on one side and how you address these pain points on the other side.

Customer Pain Points	How does your clinic address these points
Works long hours	Virtual dermatology visits
She is scared about skin cancer and wants to stay healthy	Extended opening hours and open on weekends
She wants to look good, but she has very little time for herself	State-of-the-art medical and cosmetic equipment
Dermatology clinics have a long waiting time for new patients	Waiting lines are reduced due to the teledermatology service offering
She wants to socialize at the same time	A special discount applies for two or patients booking cosmetic procedures together
Cosmetic treatments are expensive	Loyalty Card with a point reward system for cosmetic treatments

Hopefully, after completing these templates, you are aware of who your ideal customers are, what they want, how you can reach them, and where.

So developing a value proposition and unique selling points should be pretty straightforward.

Example of a value proposition and unique selling points statement for a private dermatology practice:

Advanced medical and cosmetic dermatology treatment offering patient-centric healthcare delivery.

Prioritized treatment
Short waiting times
In-person and virtual consultations

Digital Website Marketing Strategies for Medical Practices

Website marketing is defined as the strategic promotion of a website to drive relevant traffic (people who may be interested in your services) and get new customers.

The main goal of website marketing strategies is to rank highly in SERPs by implementing a mix of search-engine-optimized content, PPC (pay per click) campaigns and social media marketing. One study from BrightEdge estimates that paid and organic search drives around 70% more traffic then other channels.

Websites that rank in the top 3 organic results on search engines (such as Google, Amazon, Yahoo, Bing etc), get more then 50% of the traffic, while the sixth ranking page only gets around 5% of traffic.

Digital Website Marketing Tips for Dermatologists to Rank on Search Engines

Your website pages should be optimized for the name of your city or area
Invest in a good website builder
Purchase an SSL certificate for your website
Build a mobile-responsive website
Include an XML sitemap on your dermatology website
Use a clear URL structure for your website
Include the site navigation on all your pages
Feature your social media channels on your website

SEO and Content Strategy for your Private Practice

Local SEO

Local SEO is the most critical type of SEO for Private Practices, whether they have one or multiple locations.

Google is localizing results as much as possible, especially for mobile devices, because they are tied to a particular geographical area.

Important Considerations for Local SEO

The Google Local Pack
Business Citations
Business Reviews

Global SEO

Writing SEO-optimized content that appeals to your target audience is an excellent way of attracting patients to your dermatology practice.

Create unique, high-quality, helpful content that will help your readers.

Steps to Write a Search-Engine Optimized Content

Choose a topic (dermatologist/physician)
Do keyword research on the topic
Check the top-performing results
Write the content piece
Optimize content with keywords
Publish content
Share your content on social media

Best Content Types for Private Practices

Content can be presented in many shapes and forms. It is a good idea to create a content piece in a format and then re-purpose it so you can appeal to different audiences.

Paid Advertising (Pay per Click)

There are many different types of digital ads, but these ad types are more likely to be successful for dermatology practices.

Social media ads
Re-targeting campaigns
Google AdWords
Whatsapp
Snapchat

Read more: Social Media Marketing and Pay Per Click Campaigns for Dermatology Practices

Outsource Digital Marketing Tasks to Freelancers

Don’t worry, you don’t need to handle these digital marketing tasks by yourself. There are many sites where you can find talented and affordable freelancers that will help get more patients to your dermatology clinic.

These freelancers can help you with ad-hoc projects such as creating a practice website and with ongoing tasks such as managing the social media channels of your newly established dermatology practice.

Below you will find a few alternatives to hiring freelancers from all over the world.

Tips for Working with Freelancers

Always check their customer ratings
Make sure that the freelancer you choose speaks English (at least to an intermediate level)
Don’t hire the cheapest freelancer, you pay what you get
Make sure to schedule an initial virtual conversation to talk about the goals and business objectives (this is also a good opportunity to evaluate their English level)
Ask to see samples of their work (usually called work portfolio)
For the design and development of your practice website, choose someone with at least 5 years of experience so they can lead the project and ask the right questions
Choose someone who seems knowledgeable and whose work samples you like the most, even if they are a bit more expensive, in the long run it will be cheaper
Set a limit on the number of hours they can work for you each week or agree on a one-time budget for the project

Implement Teledermatology in Your Dermatology Clinic

Teledermatology is one of the most common telemedicine applications, and it is usually delivered via live video conferencing (synchronous) or store-and-forward communications (asynchronous).

A live video conference is when patients and doctors communicate via a live platform such as Zoom for Healthcare or Doxyme.

Store-and-forward telemedicine is when patients use a teledermatology app or web portal to take photos of their condition, fill in their symptoms, and share this information with their dermatologist.

This type of communication is very efficient because patients can skip appointment booking altogether, get an answer from their dermatologist with a treatment plan, or are called in for an in-person consultation.

Implementing telemedicine in your dermatology clinic is a great way to promote your clinic to new customers for several reasons:

You can automate the patient intake
You can prioritize patients based on illness severity by triaging patients virtually
Patients can request urgent care directly from an app, and you can attend to those requests whenever you have the chance
Asynchronous telemedicine visits help you deliver a better experience your patients since you don’t need to be available at the same time
You can attend up to 20% more patient cases without working more hours
You can have more flexibility on your schedule by working some days or some hours from home
Boost patient acquisition
You can target young patients who prefer virtual dermatology consultations
You can increase the patient experience and satisfaction
Teledermatology is reimbursed at the same rate as in-person visits by private insurance companies

If you see the image below, you can see a pop-up on the dermatology website that says “Need Urgent care?.”

So, for example, if a patient with an acne problem doesn’t want to wait 30 days for an in-person appointment, they can download the Miiskin app, upload photos of their problem areas, answer the fully-customizable patient intake form and share this information with you.

If the case seems straightforward, you can review the photos during a no-show visit or at the end of the day and initiate treatment immediately.

Develop a Referral and Loyalty Program for your Dermatology Clinic

Reward the customers of your cosmetic treatments for being loyal and for bringing you new business. Create a loyalty card where they get points every time they visit your clinic for cosmetic procedures. Give them extra points when they bring someone to your clinic.

Socialize With Other Dermatologists in the Area

Whether you are setting up a new clinic or want to attract more customers, networking with other dermatologists in your area is always a good idea.

If they have more customers than they can handle, they could refer business to you in exchange for a referral fee. If you are setting up a new clinic, they can give you tips and tricks on what to do or what not to do. If they are looking to retire in a few years, you may get many new customers. You can always consult with them if you need a second opinion on a patient’s case.

Conclusion

Dermatology Practice Marketing can be a challenge given the nature of the practice and the wide variety of services it offers. When it comes to creating an online presence, there are many different factors that need to be explored.

Many dermatology clinics offer similar services, so you must find a way to make your clinic stand out. On top of that, there are some nationwide online dermatology services that are diverging patients from local private dermatology clinics.

There are also other elements of digital marketing such as mobile and search engine marketing to consider as well. Thus, digital marketing for dermatology clinics is a multifaceted practice, which requires thoughtful consideration and planning for a greater chance of success.

MIISKIN PRO PROMO

See more patients per hour and get reimbursed

Miiskin PRO is a HIPAA-compliant telehealth platform for dermatology that allows patients to request virtual or in-person consultations with a dermatology clinic via the Miiskin app. Dermatologists can offer asynchronous virtual care, renew prescriptions online or prioritize in-person consultations for the patients who need urgent care.

Virtual visits with Miiskin PRO are reimbursable by payers at a rate comparable to physical consultations.

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References:
¹ https://strategyn.com/jobs-to-be-done/

Teledermatology White Paper