5 Digital Marketing Wins for Neurodiversity Clinics
Why marketing feels overwhelming to clinic owners (and how to fix it)
Running a clinic with a neurodiversity focus means that all your energy and time go to where they should: your patients and their families. Marketing your clinic can sometimes drop down your never-ending “to-do list”, and then even when you do make an attempt at one aspect, the amount of information online can be downright overwhelming instead of helpful.
The good news is that a few simple, strategic changes to your mindset can make a significant difference without needing a complete rebuild or needing to spend hours online every day. Here are five to start with.
Site Audit & Review
Before promoting your clinic, it’s important to have a healthy and well-functioning website that not only is optimised for search engines to crawl it but also has minimal errors and provides a great user experience (UX). There are hundreds of SEO tools online with both free and paid tiers that will give you a snapshot of your site’s health. Start there and identify any broken links, excessive load-time issues, and more (or engage the skills of an SEO specialist to review what needs remedying and take action).
Once the technical errors are minimised, move on to review the content on your website. Search engines value sites with well-written content that is keyword-rich and regularly updated. If you have lots of images but little text, it’s time to start adding content that visitors will find value in and fleshing out your site.
Define your content pillars
They are known by many names, but all refer to the same concept. ‘Content pillars’, ‘content buckets’, and ‘content marketing strategy’ mean you have established 3-5 topics you will speak on regularly on your social media, your website content, and beyond.
Having a plan in place ensures you don’t deviate into off-topic areas and also helps you plan out your content in advance. A framework to follow gives you the opportunity to dive deep into these areas and establish your site as an expert and trusted source for information on neurodiversity and the services your clinic provides. Use these pillars as the starting points for blog posts, service pages, social media, and more.
Establish a consistent social media presence
Similar to your content strategy, your social media channels will benefit from a clear and consistent plan. For each clinic this will be different; there is no one-size-fits-all social media plan. With so many social networks now in existence, it’s so easy to become overwhelmed trying to maintain a presence on each. Even if you do, you might find your audience doesn’t engage with anything you’re posting, and it’s not drawing in any new faces.
First, figure out where your ideal client – the families you serve – spends their social media. When that’s determined, start planning out what you’re going to post about (keeping the aforementioned content pillars front of mind). Then, determine how many posts you can create weekly (for some that may be 5, for others 2). Posting less often while following a plan is preferred to posting in spurts and then falling off the radar for weeks (or longer) before returning again.
Above all else, avoid posting something “just to post something”. Consistently posting valuable, informative posts that seek to educate, entertain, and inform (it’s a good idea to rotate between the three) will reignite your audience and help it grow as well. And most importantly, remember that it’s called social media—so keep it fun. Your audience will reward you for it.
Utilize Email Marketing
People tend to push email marketing further down their to-do list, but it most definitely deserves to be at the top (or very near) of your overall marketing plan.
Hard as it may be to believe, not everyone is on social media every day or several times a day (gasp!). BUT, nearly everyone checks their email once a day. That knowledge, combined with the fact that emails sit in your inbox until you read them, is hugely different from every social media network, where a post can be off your timeline in 20 minutes or less. Your followers might miss your post, but it’ll be a lot harder for them to miss your email.
Something that no practice wants to experience is being locked out of their social media accounts or having them deleted by the platform for any number of reasons. If that was your only channel of contacting your audience and you’re suddenly cut off, either temporarily or permanently, you’re forced to start over and rebuild your audience again. However, once someone signs up for your newsletter list, you now have an alternate avenue of communication. You own that list.
Consistent and simple emails with clinic updates, resources for families, therapy tips, and event announcements keep your audience engaged and you top of mind.
Review Your Analytics
If you take action on steps 1-4 listed above and don’t review their effects—see what impact they’ve made (good or bad)—your time may all be wasted.
Your site analytics are a critical part of your marketing and overall business growth. They provide you with a vast amount of data that helps you make more informed decisions for your clinic’s future.
So you worked on the SEO for your site by writing a blog every week—did it help your site traffic? Posting consistently on social media for 3 months—did your audience grow, and did engagement increase? After sending out regular emails, did you get more new patients?
Google Analytics is a free (with paid options available) tool, and there are many others to choose from as well. Putting in the work without measuring the results doesn’t allow you to review and see cause and effect. If you see a lot of referral traffic from your social media channels, then keep going! If your emails aren’t getting a great open rate or a low click-through rate, it’s time to go back and dig deeper there.
Review on a regular basis to see what areas need work and which areas are successful, and then continue to optimise and refine.
There are many spokes to a clinic’s digital marketing plan. Establish your priorities, identify the gaps, and decide how to move from where you are now to where you want to be. When you’re ready to take your email marketing further, automated email sequences are a natural next step — and if any of the terminology along the way has you second-guessing yourself, the digital marketing terms glossary is a handy reference to bookmark. Small, consistent steps are what move the needle for busy clinic owners.
If you’re not sure where to start, book a free 30-minute call and we’ll work it out together.