We’ve all seen how the internet has revolutionized advertising and marketing – heck, I’m even talking to you through it right now! For medical billing companies specifically, standing out and attracting leads despite the competitive white noise on search engines can be difficult, and even seem impossible. However, with the right knowledge in your arsenal, your company can increase the amount of leads it receives and ultimately boost clientele.
Lead generation for medical billers begins with a few key factors: setting measurable goals, analyzing competitor metrics, as well as your own, and creating a framework to meet those goals. Utilizing the principles and practices of inbound marketing will help you attract more leads and meet these strategic goals. Exciting stuff, right? Let’s get started:
1. Know Your Audience
One of the cornerstones of inbound marketing is attracting your preferred audience over the general public, in order to garner higher quality leads and nurture them into happy, satisfied customers; loyal advocates of your product/business. Before that can be accomplished, though, you need to really identify who your audience is. As a medical billing company, your customer base would most likely consist of physicians and office managers seeking billing solutions for their medical group/practice.
By pinpointing your audience, you are establishing your buyer personas—these personas should address your ideal customer’s pain points, demographic preferences and targeting requirements. Personas help companies, medical billers included, provide real solutions to audience problems.
Depending on how you wish to approach your personas in conjunction with your website, dividing sections of your content so it is easily accessible to your audience may be wise. Perhaps you handle a specific set of EHR software, or you provide transcription services and customized billing packages for scalability; these are things you want your potential customer to be aware of immediately, and distributing clear, consice and targeted content will foster more leads in this case.
Trust can be built from the moment potential customers view your website and see engaging, well-crafted content, geared directly toward resolving their issues.
2. Having Engaging and Mobile-Friendly Content
A recent study conducted from comScore shows the total percentage of smartphone and tablet usage combined has skyrocketed to compile 60% of time spent on digital media from 2010 to 2014. Many millennials aren’t even using desktop computers regularly, and surprisingly enough, 55 year-old consumers are “the fastest growing faction of mobile users.”
What does this tell us? That it is absolutely essential that your website is mobile-friendly and compatible, or you are going to lose a huge percentage of the audience you’ve worked so hard to attract to your website.
Along with this content, you will need to have SEO configured in said content so your website will rank and pop up on search engine results. You can achieve this using keywords, and although they can be quite competitive concerning medical billing and the healthcare industry, this is worth delving into and researching. Put yourself in the shoes of one of your buyer personas to see what they would be searching for—what words pop into your head? Combine these with your analytics to optimize your content and increase traffic, both through search engines and organically.
3. Utilize Automated Workflows
So you’ve optimized your content for web rank and know your audience – so what now? By this point, you’ve probably established contacts that have clicked through your CTAs and other content and have filled out a form to become a subscriber. Great!
As your medical billing company progresses, your contacts and customers will all be in a different “lifecycle stage” that you must cater to. Becoming a subscriber is what comprises the first step, and weekly emails are what take them down the sales funnel to offers and the transformation into becoming a lead. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. Once you have all of this established, it’s just that simple.
Automated workflows function as a way of prepping your subscribers into leads, or according to Pyxl, making them “more sales-ready.” These are campaigns or emails aimed at your potential customers for every stage of the lifecycle so they don’t see duplicate content.
You wouldn’t want to send a contact interested in payer credentialing tasks something about buying an EHR—obviously you want to upsell, but not in the archaic, old-fashioned pushy car salesman way. Let them look through your website and come to you about what they’re interested in. Once you’ve built a relationship, you can show them other benefits of using your company’s EHR, or whatever other A/R and claims submission services you provide.
4. Take Advantage of Using Social Media & Blogging
Here’s the really fun part—once you’ve procured the content and made an image for your company, you can spread this all over your social media accounts, and more importantly, your blog. It is integral for any business online to have a blog showing they’re up to date on all the exclusive news and information in their industry.
Blogging makes you a more credible source, and will have your subscribers revisiting your page to view the content. Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or even Instagram, you can pump out newsjacks and other short snippets to entice your readers to be redirected back to your website for more.
Being a medical billing company, you can keep live updates on Twitter regarding Medicare rules and legislative changes that are expected to occur; this will appeal to your physician persona.
Key Takeaway
The possibilities are endless when it comes to social media, because let’s face it, word of mouth is still a very powerful tool, and is now being facilitated by all social media platforms. People are constantly being engaged with online digital material, so make sure you’re catching the personas you wish to attract in your net with more leads!
By organizing your personas and optimizing SEO, as well as the other aforementioned data, you can succeed and flourish your leads in your medical billing company. That’s the beauty of inbound—you can use it for what you need.
Shelby Catalano
Shelby is an Inbound Marketing Consultant who started out as a Copywriter here at Bluleadz. She graduated with a B.A. in English Literature from The University of Tampa, and enjoys aerial arts and watching cat videos in her spare time.