How to Promote Telemedicine to Your Patients

For understandable reasons, telemedicine has become a virtual (pun fully intended) necessity in the age of COVID-19.

Hopefully that isn’t news to you.

After all, this is something you can be using to both keep your practice active right now and position it for even greater success down the road at the same time.

In other posts, we share how to implement telemedicine at your practice and outline best practices for telemedicine calls. If you want to know more, be sure to check them out.

Of course, providing a new service is only half the story:

You have to get the word out!

More than that, you also need to help patients understand why they absolutely should be taking advantage of it.

In other words, you should be marketing your telemedicine service.

How to market telemedicine to patients

The good news about creating a telemedicine marketing strategy is that the core principles you’d use to market any of your medical services still apply.

Now, if you’re familiar with our agency, you know we emphasize the importance of strategy.

And strategy is our starting point today.

See, the old cliché “if you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there” stands the test of time because of its inherent truth, you know?

So your first step is to determine what you want to achieve.

To put this in marketing terms for a second, your overall goal is to create awareness so you can then inspire action (patients scheduling telemedicine appointments with you).

That’s not a bad start, but let’s try to make it a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) goal – like this hypothetical example:

I want to use telemedicine to see 20 patients each day over the course of the next month for follow-up appointments.

That goal is:

• Specific – instead of saying just appointments, we’ve specified follow-up appointments (and this tells us we’re talking about existing patients who’ve been in for treatment recently)
• Measurable – the number of patients per day can be measured
• Achievable – admittedly, this element depends on the practice establishing the goal (for all intents and purposes, though, let’s say 20 patients/day is reasonable)
• Relevant – these appointments relate directly to the practice’s overarching goal of generating revenue by treating patients
• Time-bound – the goal has a definitive timespan

Those respective elements allow you to track metrics and determine if you’re on course to meet your achievable objectives.

Once you’ve got your SMART goal in place, it’s time to start outlining what it will take to arrive at your destination.

Your telemedicine marketing messages

Since you want to get the best ROI from your marketing efforts, you need to consider your audience, your messaging, and how you convey those messages.

This means knowing things like:

Who are you marketing to? Marketing must be targeted and carefully planned in order to be useful. While providing general information to the community at large could be effective in developing awareness of your telemarketing services, targeting people who could most benefit from the services can go much further in boosting your ROI.

What will be your message? Once you know who your prospective audience is, it’s necessary to develop messages that will create awareness and inspire action. At this time, your messaging should be fairly universal (due to COVID-19). Once the pandemic subsides, you will need to cater your messages for different patient groups or specialties your practice offers.

How will you reach your perfect patients? Obviously, no time is perfect and there are always bound to be issues (such as a worldwide health crisis). That said, one of the great things about this period of time is how connected we all are. In some ways, it’s easier than ever to reach a target audience.

Of course, we had to modify that last sentence with “in some ways” because in some ways it’s also more challenging.

And what do we mean by that?

Well, because the internet affords us all greater connectivity, there is so much “noise” out there. If you want your messages to be heard, you need to rise above them.

While that’s certainly doable, it doesn’t mean it’s easy to do.

Fortunately, you don’t have to figure it out on your own – you can always have a team of skilled marketing experts do it for you.

Why choose VMD Services to promote your telemedicine services?

Speaking of having pros handling it for you, we’ve created a special marketing campaign explicitly to promote telemedicine at your office.

Instead of trying to do it all on your own, our team will provide you with the marketing tools you need to make sure your patients know you’re offering telemedicine services and why it’s the right choice for them.

And if you’re an existing VMD Services client, this special campaign might be able to fit into your existing plan, at no additional cost. To find out if this applies to you, simply connect with your dedicated account manager – and they will be happy to discuss specifically what this looks like for you.

If you’d like more information about this campaign, check out this page.

To learn more about all our innovative medical marketing solutions to help you and your practice get through the COVID-19 practice, click here.

Finally, please remember that we are always here for you. If there’s ever anything we can do to help your practice reach more of your perfect patients, please feel free to reach out. We’d love to chat with you, answer your questions, and see how our services can solve your marketing problems.