Michael Epps Utley 
Medical professionals aren’t always the best marketers (it’s understandable — it’s not one of the many subjects taught at medical school).
This guide can help bridge the gap. It explains proven promotional strategies for increasing new patient appointments at your practice.
1. Optimize Your Website
Today, potential patients search the web for information about local physicians and healthcare services. They must feel comfortable with a physician before booking an appointment or walking through the front door.
Improving your website experience will result in significantly more appointments.
Your medical website should have information that represents your practice in a positive light, pages that load quickly, and engaging interactive elements.
Your site must also be mobile-friendly. Since most users browse on smart devices (phones, tablets, etc.) these days, Google focuses on mobile-first indexing, which means it primarily uses the mobile version of a web page or website for indexing and search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.
Your website is the centerpiece of all your medical marketing efforts, and your top priority should be to make it the best it can be.
2. Leverage Social Media to Raise Awareness
Social media marketing is an essential way to reach prospective patients and convince them that yours is the best medical practice for them. It’s a great way to share information, thought leadership, and testimonials that demonstrate your knowledge and experience.
What’s critical is that you consistently share helpful, high-quality information on social media. This will encourage current patients and prospective ones to follow you and regularly engage with your content, keeping you top of mind when they need the healthcare services your practice offers.
The easiest way to accomplish this is to come up with one or two big ideas related to the type of medicine you practice each month and build all your content around them. Repurpose these ideas as articles, videos, facts-and-figures posts, and graphics. This should provide enough material to keep your followers active on social media all month.
3. Get Competitive in Local Search
Medical practices depend highly on local search results perhaps more than any other type of business. Even with the advent of telemedicine, people want healthcare support from practices near them.
If yours is a brick-and-mortar medical office, you must focus on local search engine optimization.
Start by optimizing your website for local search. Your home page should include key information about your practice, focusing on your community presence. If you have different practice areas, creating a page for each is probably a good idea. Develop an About page that anchors your medical practice in your local area (if you and your team members are active in your community, for instance, offering free cancer checks or checkups at a senior center, include that information). If you have multiple locations, develop a page for each one, including information about the services offered there and the people who practice there.
Ensure your blog is regularly updated with content demonstrating your medical expertise and tie it to your local area when possible. For example, write about unique chronic health issues in Nashville rather than ones that could happen anywhere.
Ensure you use appropriate keywords reflecting the type of medicine you practice throughout your site, including your headings and subheads. Make sure everything is tagged correctly and that your site speed is optimized. If you feel that this website optimization work is beyond your skill set, hiring someone to do it would be a wise investment. It will pay off in significantly more qualified traffic reaching your site, likely turning into appointments.
Your Google Business Profile (GBP) greatly impacts how the search engine perceives your medical practice and its website. Make sure you claim yours, input complete information (name, address, hours, images, FAQs, etc.), and update it regularly.
4. Invest in Google Ads
Google Ads is a popular advertising platform for medical practices. If you correctly set up your campaigns — especially your bidding strategies — your practice will appear in search results near the top of the page ahead of other similar businesses in your area. Plus, you can feature your unique medical procedures in your ads, driving more qualified traffic to your website.
5. Take Advantage of Remarketing
Remarketing ads target individuals who have already shown interest in your medical practice. They’re valuable because choosing a healthcare practitioner can take significant time and deliberation. They can help keep your operation front-and-center during that decision-making process.
Here are the steps to set up a medical remarketing campaign.
Set up a remarketing tag. You must install a remarketing tag or pixel on your website to launch a remarketing effort. This allows you to track visitor behavior and develop audiences based on it.
Define your remarketing segments. Create different audiences based on things people do on your site. For instance, you can target people who view specific treatment pages but don’t book an appointment. Segments allow you to personalize ads and make them more meaningful.
Set up remarketing campaigns. Create a campaign for each audience segment you want to target. Choose messaging, bidding strategies, and ad placements based on the characteristics of each prospective patient group.
Leverage dynamic remarketing. It will allow you to feature specific products or treatments that people view on your website, which will likely result in higher conversion rates.
Monitor and optimize your retargeting campaigns. This type of marketing isn’t once-and-done. You must track performance to optimize your efforts over time.
6. Request Patient Reviews
People today are unlikely to take your word that you’re a great physician. Instead, they will check online ratings and reviews from your patients. That’s why it’s critical to put procedures in place to request reviews on platforms like Google Business Profile (GBP) from satisfied patients.
The keys to receiving more reviews are making it easy to do so and incentivizing it (you can’t bribe people for good reviews, but you can encourage them to leave one). Add QR codes linking to your review platforms on patient receipts. Include links to them in follow-up text messages and emails. What’s important is that you make it easy for patients to navigate to your preferred rating and review sites and be explicit about what you want them to do and say once there, for instance, “Please give us a five-star review and explain why you liked your experience with our practice.” Note, however, that patients you encourage to leave reviews will rate you however they like. And, if their feedback is fair, you will not be able to have it removed (a better approach here is to promptly and respectfully respond to negative reviews to express your commitment to quality and improvement).
In addition to helping build trust with prospective patients, positive ratings and reviews can improve your search results because they signal to Google that your practice is a good one to recommend to its users.
7. Invest in Video
Make video marketing a priority. Video attracts more attention, and many people today prefer it over other forms of content. Plus, it’s an effective way to explain complex medical concepts because you can combine images, diagrams, animations, sound, and more to deliver information all kinds of people will be able to understand.
Use video for:
Staff interviews
Day-in-the-life stories
Procedure demonstrations
Explanations of follow-up home care
Patient testimonials and stories
Brand and culture showcases
If you do one single thing in 2025, develop more of your medical marketing and communication content in video.
8. Add Appointment Scheduling to Your Website
Adding appointment software to your website makes good sense. It is a great way to remove friction from your marketing process while reducing staff time spent on this tedious task, which can be used for more valuable things. It seems simple, but adding this basic functionality to your website will increase the number of appointments booked while improving staff efficiency. Many people today avoid making or receiving phone calls, so doing it all online is a major win for everyone.
9. Rely on Metrics
Determining which marketing efforts are most effective for your medical practice requires tracking data and analyzing it. It allows you to invest more in tactics that are working while cutting out, changing, or improving those that aren’t.
Social media, website, email, and other marketing channels all come with dashboards that provide clear, high-level views of the effectiveness of your campaigns. Most marketing apps and platforms have extensive training modules that can help you understand how to read dashboards and the metrics reported through them.
Top 2025 Medical Marketing Strategies Wrap-Up
While different marketing strategies can be effective for different healthcare practices, try out some of the tactics in this article to boost your local presence and earn new patients.
