Google officially announced last year that more Google searches now occur on mobile devices than on PCs in the US and several other countries. Clearly, mobile search has made dramatic strides in recent years, and it is time to increase focus on boosting your dermatology online exposure through mobile marketing.
Sustained effort in the area of mobile marketing will help to boost your overall site traffic, progressively improve the footfalls at your dermatology practice, and meet more needs of your site visitors and potential patients seeking information via mobile. Consider the following proven and effective ways to support your dermatology mobile marketing.
1. Create Your Own Mobile App
Mobile apps have been rapidly emerging as an alternative to using mobile sites. The average mobile phone user is spending an increasing amount of their time on mobile apps, and as many as four out of five smartphone users access their mobile apps every day. If you can create an innovative mobile app for your dermatology practice, it can help you drive a larger target audience to your website.
A mobile app will provide greater accessibility, portability, and location targeting for your practice. Your business conversion rates will improve as you are able to promote your dermatology services and products to a wider audience and reach on-the-go consumers who want to make a quick purchase decision. An app can also support patient loyalty programs, online purchases, and social media engagement.
Promote your app through your website, blog, social media, and email accounts. Make it available for free download via your website. The more people download your mobile app, the more they will feel connected with your practice and will recall you faster when they are looking to fulfill their dermatology related needs.
2. Make Your Website More Mobile Friendly
To begin with, make sure that your dermatology website design is mobile responsive across multiple screen sizes and multiple browsers. It must offer an equally efficient user experience to people with different types of mobile devices. Categorize your site information in a sharp and logical manner and create intuitive navigation so that mobile users are able to find relevant information in as few clicks as possible.
You may add a search button to your site to facilitate quick information access. Make sure that your site design has clear visual paths with succinct text presentation. Build a faster download speed for your site, considering the fact that many mobile users have limited time and patience. The mobile site should ideally load in four seconds or less.
Optimize image files for mobile screen viewing, and use a clearer resolution. Size of the images should ideally be such that the reader does not need to scroll up or down to see a full image. Provide share buttons to encourage mobile users to make a phone call, send a mail directly from the web page, or access your social media pages.
3. Integrate Mobile Promotion with Email Marketing
Email marketing and mobile promotions should be created and managed in tandem with each other to achieve optimal outcomes. Targeted email marketing and newsletter sending can be a highly effective and affordable strategy to improve exposure and generate more visits to your website. This time-tested approach has continued to deliver higher conversions for smart email marketers.
When email marketing is combined with mobile, it can become a more potent promotion tool. Mobile email marketing campaigns have increasingly grown in popularity over the last few years. Between 2011 and 2014, mobile email opening rates grew a dramatic annual rate of 180 percent. This rate far exceeds the email opening rates of traditional email desktop marketing campaigns.
Mobile and email marketing integration can also leverage the power of social networks. Make sure that your social media icons as well as your website link are prominently placed somewhere near the top of your newsletter or email and also included in your email signature. Whichever of your social media pages deals with similar content as your email campaign, try to include that social icon in your email signature.
4. Set Up Online Calendar Events
Mobile phones are no longer used only for conversations, chats, or Internet surfing. A lot of people also use them as personal digital assistants to create notes, emails, reminders, calendars, and even integrate both mobile and desktop platforms. That creates a new mobile marketing opportunity by way of calendar integration. One of the popular ways to capitalize this opportunity is through mobile banner ads, which have relatively high click-through rates (CTRs).
To begin with, you can create an eye-catching mobile banner ad for your dermatology service or product. When a potential patient in the local area clicks on the ad, the ad can automatically direct them to your website’s event calendar. The ad can be designed in a way that it additionally creates an event on the user’s mobile calendar to remind them of any upcoming offer, rebate, unique service, seminar, or another special event. Such innovative strategies can foster better engagement with your target audience and yield favorable results for your practice.
5. Create Mobile Friendly Online Videos
In addition to your focus on marketing your products and services, you can also disseminate useful information and educate potential patients about new procedures and technologies through videos. Two-thirds of the Internet users are active visual learners. You can make a strong impact on this vast online population by leveraging the power of mobile videos.
Optimize your videos for search engines and include your website URL to direct more people to your site. Mobile device users increasingly prefer videos over other forms of content, and you can create new relationships with your target audience through visually creative, informative and mobile friendly videos. n
Naren Arulrajah is President and CEO of Ekwa Marketing, a complete Internet marketing company which focuses on SEO, social media, marketing education and the online reputations of dermatologists. With a team of 140+ full time marketers, www.ekwa.com helps dermatologists who know where they want to go get there by dominating their market and growing their business significantly year after year. If you have questions about marketing your practice online, call 855-598-3320 to speak one-on-one with Naren.
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