Urgent Care practices must stand out to attract patients who often make quick decisions about care based on convenience. A strong marketing strategy ensures your practice remains visible, builds trust with potential patients and ultimately generates more revenue for your practice.
We’ll break down the steps you need to walk through to create a solid Urgent Care marketing strategy.
Related reading: To see a completed strategy with details on tactics, check out this Complete Guide to Urgent Care Marketing Strategy.
Step 1: Establish Your Practice Objectives
The foundation of your marketing strategy should begin with defining your objectives.
- Clarify Your Goals: Are you looking to increase overall patient volume, grow a new location, or improve revenue per visit? Your goals should align with your practice’s broader vision.
- Set Measurable Targets: Establish specific numbers you’d like to achieve, such as a target number of patients per month. For example, if your practice typically sees 500 patients monthly, set a goal to grow that by 20% within six months.
- Balance Short- and Long-Term Planning: Develop achievable short-term goals alongside ambitious long-term objectives. Multi-location practices should focus on setting “break-even” targets for each site to identify where more marketing attention is needed.
Remember, the aggressiveness of your goals should guide the size of your marketing investment—more ambitious goals will require larger budgets.
Step 2: Define Your Ideal Patient Target
Understanding your audience is critical for creating an effective Urgent Care marketing strategy. Use your historical data to identify key insights around the following items:
- Geographic Data: Determine which zip codes bring the most patients. This ensures your marketing efforts focus on the areas most likely to yield results.
- Demographics: Are most of your patients seniors, families, or working professionals? Tailor your marketing based on the age, gender, and needs of your primary audience.
- Insurance vs. Self-Pay: Track the percentage of insured vs. uninsured patients to understand revenue trends and target high-value audiences.
- Patient Behaviors: Analyze how many patients walk in versus those who use online registration or waitlists. This data helps refine your messaging and convenience-focused campaigns.
This research will ensure your campaigns are optimized to resonate with the right patients. Planning ahead will also make sure you don’t waste money targeting the wrong patients.
Step 3: Prioritize Your Services
General urgent care interest will always attract patients, but focusing on specific services can help differentiate your practice and drive additional growth.
- Highlight Core Services: You can generate campaigns targeting those looking for core services like flu testing or immunizations.
- Expand Beyond Core Services: If your practice is broadening into areas like weight loss management or aesthetics, develop dedicated campaigns to target people looking for these services. You want dedicated campaigns so you don’t take budget away from core patient driving campaigns.
- Test New Offerings: Use marketing campaigns to test demand for additional services and adjust based on the results you see.
Step 4: Identify Seasonality Unique to Your Practice
Urgent care practices experience strong seasonal patterns, and recognizing these trends is crucial for planning an effective Urgent Care marketing strategy.
- November to February: Flu and cold season brings peak patient demand, but competition is also higher. Increase your ad budget and intensify marketing efforts during this time.
- Summer Months: Patient volume often dips, but ad costs are lower, making this an ideal time to capture market share. Promote seasonal offerings that peak in the summer like sports physicals to drive additional revenue.
- Special Local Dynamics: In college towns or tourist-heavy areas, consider increasing ad spend during these influx periods for maximum impact to patient volumes.
By aligning your marketing with seasonal trends, you can not only drive additional growth, but steal market share from competitors who aren’t actively marketing.
Step 5: Evaluate Key Marketing Channels & Identify Opportunities
Evaluate your current marketing efforts to determine what’s working and where there are opportunities to improve.
Website Audit:
- Is your website mobile-friendly and fast? A slow or clunky site can deter patients. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights Tool to identify performance issues.
- Does your site make it easy for patients to act? Prominent phone numbers, maps, and location pages for each practice location are critical.
- Is your content up-to-date and optimized for search engines? A strong SEO strategy can help your practice appear at the top of local searches.
Google Business Profile:
- Is your GBP complete with accurate contact details, photos, and descriptions? Regular updates improve visibility and patient trust.
- Monitor your reviews—are they recent, positive, and plentiful? A low star rating or fewer reviews compared to competitors can deter patients.
Advertising Campaigns:
- Analyze your ad platforms: What platforms are you running?
- Analyze your ad performance: How much are you spending, and what’s your cost per lead? What kind of return are you seeing?
- Track patient conversion rates: How many of those leads turn into actual visits or treatments?
Beyond these foundational channels, consider exploring other channels. Here are 20 marketing ideas for Urgent Care.
Step 6: Determine Your Marketing Investment
Marketing is not a cost, it’s an investment. With the right spend and execution, you will see a return on that investment. Here are some of our notes on how to think about that investment.
- Percentage of Revenue: Most practices that are marketing should be allocating between 3-5% of gross revenue on marketing. But a practice that wants to grow aggressively may spend even more (8–10%)
- Cost-Per-Acquisition Analysis: Patient acquisition through Google Ads typically costs $25–$45. This is enough to get a solid return on investment from a single visit, and even more when considering the lifetime value of a patient that returns to the practice. You should plan to spend at least $3,000–$5,000 per location on ads, with even larger spends in highly competitive markets.
- Beyond Ads: Include costs for optimizing your GBP, maintaining your website, and collecting patient reviews in your budget.
Step 7: Hire an Agency or Execute In-House?
Deciding whether to handle marketing internally or hire an agency is a critical choice. We believe an experienced Urgent Care marketing agency like RUNNER can get you results much more quickly, often at the same cost of hiring someone in house.
- Challenges of In-House Marketing: Attracting top marketing talent can be difficult for individual practices, and even skilled in-house marketers will lack experience across all areas of digital marketing.
- Advantages of an Agency: Partnering with an agency gives you access to a team of specialists for the cost of a full-time hire. Choose an agency with experience in healthcare and urgent care marketing for the best results.
Step 8: Setting Up Tracking
Without tracking, it’s impossible to know if your marketing investment is working.
- Set up and configure Google Analytics to measure website performance and most importantly, the key conversion events tied to your objective.
- Implement Google Ads auto-tagging and UTMs so you can measure the impact of your ads.
- Use a tracked phone number to differentiate between marketing-driven calls and other inquiries.
- Set up daily patient count reporting to be able to provide a feedback loop for marketing to see the impact of efforts on patients. This is particularly important for Urgent Care clinics that see a high amount of walk-in patients.
Proper tracking ensures you can evaluate your return on investment and adjust strategies as needed.
Iterating and Optimizing Over Time
Marketing strategies are not static—they require regular evaluation and adjustments. We recommend taking the following steps to optimize over time:
- Review Data Monthly: Monitor the performance of campaigns at least monthly, identifying areas for improvement.
- Adjust Goals: If you’re exceeding expectations, set new benchmarks to continue pushing growth.
- Stay Flexible: Be ready to pivot strategies as new opportunities or challenges arise. Spend more when you need to, shift efforts around to different locations if you have to.
Long-term success in the implementation of your Urgent Care marketing strategy will come from continuous improvement and refinement of your efforts.
Conclusion
A thoughtful marketing strategy is essential for growing your urgent care practice. By following these steps, you can attract more patients, improve visibility, and increase revenue.
Need help getting started? Partner with RUNNER Agency to build and execute a marketing plan tailored to your practice. Request a free consultation today to see how we can help you succeed.
