When Should Your Medical Practice Publish a Press Release? 5 Opportunities You Shouldn’t Miss
As great as your marketing may be, it can only go so far. If you want to spread the word about your practice even further, you need patients to hear about you from multiple sources. One particularly helpful way to do this is with a press release. While a press release alone is helpful publicity and can even benefit your search engine optimization if you carry it out correctly, you stand to gain far more if you can get the local news media to pick up your story. Before any of this can happen, you need to know whether you have news that is newsworthy. Based on our extensive experience in marketing and public relations, these are the top reasons our staff at McCauley Marketing Services recommends a press release.
- You’ve Won an Award
In a bustling city like Atlanta, you’d be hard pressed to name a medical specialty that doesn’t have significant competition in the area. When there are factors that set you apart from your competitors, like prestigious awards, you need to capitalize on them.
Some physicians worry that doing a press release about an award will sound like they’re bragging about themselves, but there are a few reasons why that isn’t the end result. First, press releases are written in third-person point of view, referring to the doctor as “he/she/they” rather than “I/me/we.” They’ll read more like a news story than a self-report of “I did this.” Second, if you have a skillful writer crafting your press release, we know how to point out all your best features without sounding “braggy.” Finally, when patients are looking for doctors, they genuinely want to know who the award-winning physicians are. Patients will be glad to get the helpful information rather than asking, “So what?”
- You’re Getting Involved in the Community
Especially during the spring and summer, communities throughout metro Atlanta love to host public events like festivals, concerts, and family activities. These events can be fantastic opportunities for businesses like your practice to offer a helping hand while gaining publicity at the same time. They also make great opportunities for press releases. A press release about your sponsorship of an event adds to your public reputation by subtly showing that you are an invested part of the community. It helps future patients recognize you as not only a medical practice in their area but also a true neighbor. Your press release also does a favor for the event staff because you’re giving them a boost of publicity that doesn’t cost them a dime.
- You’re Offering Something New
Patients are always looking for the newest solution to their health-related and cosmetic problems. When you add those innovative solutions to your practice, the public will want to know about them. This doesn’t just apply to brand new treatments and products, or to situations in which you’re the first in Atlanta to offer this service. Even if some of your competitors offer the same service, you can assume that there are potential patients out there who are located closer to your practice or who like your practice’s reputation better and will be thrilled to know that they can now get that new service from you. Remember that these press releases aren’t just about your practice: they’re about the service you’re offering as well. Use the press release to educate the community about the treatment, technique, or technology, how it works, and how it can benefit them.
- Your Practice is Growing
People tend to trust the opinions of others around them. If they see that a medical practice or other business is busy, they assume it is busy because the business is offering something special or is better than the rest. When your practice grows by adding a new location or a new healthcare provider, that is the message it sends to the public: that you’re successful and therefore they should join the crowd in becoming a patient.
- You’re Hosting a Special Event
Our team at McCauley Marketing Services has seen first-hand how successful a single event can be for a practice’s business if they plan it well, offer something people want, and market the event well with enough time for customers to find out about it and plan ahead. On top of conventional marketing channels like social media, online ads, and email marketing, press releases are another strong way to spread the word about your upcoming event. It’s important to remember that people don’t like being “sold to,” so your press release shouldn’t read like a sales pitch. For this reason, press releases are particularly appropriate for events that have an educational element like open houses or lunch and learns, rather than simply sales and discounts.
Marketing isn’t a field you can learn in a crash course, but one of the most instrumental lessons anyone should learn about marketing is that you need a diverse strategy. Digital ads, internal marketing, radio ads, social media marketing, and email marketing will each help you on their own but they’re far more successful if you invest in all of them at the same time. Press releases are another cost-effective measure to add to your strategy, particularly in the occasions above. If you have news to break and you want your press release to be as successful as possible, contact McCauley Marketing Services to give your project a professional touch.