Establish Goals and the Budget
Most importantly, what is the necessary ROI for your plan? Creating a plan requires an investment of time, knowledge and dollars. Use your resources wisely. Work with your marketing advisor to fine-tune and target. Put the marketing plan goals and budget in the context of your overall financial goals and business plans. You may be more comfortable with traditional marketing, such as direct mail, store or neighborhood signage, but today you’ll want to look at leveraging the power of digital marketing.
Supporting Elements for Digital Marketing
Build a Website
Once you’ve identified your audience, you’ll need a place to direct them. In the digital age, a user-friendly website is a useful tool to help current and potential patients learn about your business, and most importantly, connect with its products and services.
Websites are a direct line to your pharmacy’s offerings, and can generate revenue by allowing clients to refill prescriptions online. A good website should be easy for users to navigate, and should highlight essential pharmacy information, including:
- Contact information
- Logo and branding
- Information about products and services
- Your hours of operation
- Links to social media channels
- Link to mobile app, if applicable
Your site should also be accessible. Similar to making your physical location accessible and meet the ADA guidelines, making it easy for your customers to navigate your site can help increase both the usability and profitability of your site.
An additional must-have for any pharmacy’s website is the ability to safeguard sensitive patient information. Whether or not you’re building a website from scratch or just making a few updates, be sure your website is HIPAA compliant by meeting all the necessary requirements.
Utilize Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
In today’s digital media landscape, there’s so much noise that it can be hard for any one brand to stand out. That’s why it’s essential to create a site that leverages search engine optimization (SEO), increasing the visibility of your website to users of Google or other web search engines. By optimizing your site’s SEO, you position it to draw in more visitors who can then engage with your products and services.
- So how do you improve your SEO? There are a variety of elements that impact it, including:
- The site’s software – the Content Management System (CMS) being up-to-date and working for different size screens (mobile, etc.) – what is known as “responsive”;
- The structure of the content (article, etc.) – headlines, body copy, etc.
- The language you use within that structure – “keywords” or search terms that people use to find what they want.
- The content saliency – how consistent, coherent and relevant your content is to the type of business you are. Google attracts and keeps users by serving up content that is what the user came looking for – so the more relevant you are, the more likely you are to be shown to the searcher.
- And more – but these are some of the things to consider as you look at improving your SEO.
The bare minimum is to make sure your pharmacy’s name, address, and phone number are correctly listed on your website and any online local directories. Setting up a free Google My Business profile is a good first step to attract new patients and connect digitally with your community. A similar paid strategy could also be used, essentially buying ad space on Google so that your advertisements appear next to search results, increasing your business’s visibility to internet users.
