Allied Health Marketing

There are a few ways to tell whether your marketing is working.

1. Metrics like website clicks are known as leading indicators. They’re positive signals that things are moving in the right direction, but they don’t mean anything on their own. Think of them like the indicator on a car – if the indicator is blinking, the car is likely to turn in the future, but it hasn’t necessarily done so yet.
2. High-intent revenue opportunities (HIRO) are another type of leading indicator. For most allied health practices, HIRO pipeline looks like phone calls and form submissions from high-intent sources like their websites. Think of HIRO like the car starting to turn – it hasn’t finished yet, but the steering wheel is moving.
3. Finally, revenue is a lagging indicator. It shows how well your marketing has worked. You can see which marketing activities helped your business the most using revenue attribution. The ‘golden triangle’ of attribution uses 3 different types of reporting to help build a clear, accurate picture of your marketing – software-based, self-reported, and sales-reported.

If you work with us, we’ll do our best to report on all 3 levels. Too many agencies just focus on leading metrics like clicks, which don’t mean that much and can easily be gamed – just because the indicator is flashing doesn’t mean the car will turn.

Digital marketing can seem like a nice-to-have, a thing you spend time on when you have availability – which, for many practice owners and managers, is never.

But it’s not. Unless you have other marketing activities running offline, such as building referral networks, you need to set aside time to review key assets like your website. The alternative is to keep kicking the can down the road (‘I’ll get to it soon!’), waste thousands of dollars in opportunity costs, and deprive your practice of the new clients it needs to grow.

If you know you need an external marketing partner, understand that you will have to spend some time approving collateral. The only alternative is to grant your agency permission to simply publish new pages and ads – which may feel risky if you haven’t worked with them before.   

We can’t give legal advice … but there are some basic guidelines all allied health websites should follow.

1. Make sure you have a privacy policy and terms of use page. Read more about what those cover here.
2. Avoid showcasing testimonials. AHPRA does permit ‘non-clinical comments’, but that’s getting into a legal grey area. Unless your solicitor has specifically approved a testimonial, don’t feature it. 
3. Don’t promise clinical outcomes, ever.
4. Avoid false, misleading or deceptive advertising. That includes using scientific research that’s unbalanced or confusing, implying a practitioner is a specialist when they aren’t, and making claims that your service is superior to others.
5. Always be able to back up claims you make about the effectiveness of your services. If you can’t produce high-quality peer-reviewed data to support it, don’t say it.
6. Remember that advertising laws work based on the impression that a member of the relevant class (your ideal customers) is likely to take away from reading your website. Fine print and ultra-specific wording aren’t loopholes, and no-one actually has to be misled for you to be liable.
7. In healthcare, pressure tactics that create a sense of urgency or unnecessary need are illegal (and immoral). Don’t use them.

You can read more about AHPRA’s guidelines here.

It depends on the context. Copy on your website, for example, will probably focus on helping non-technical users – your ideal customers – learn about your offerings and get in touch with you. The level of medical knowledge required to do that is relatively low.

Creating content – any work primarily designed to educate, entertain and/or inspire your ideal customers – is a little different. People consuming health content typically want to learn and be inspired to change, which normally involves distilling peer-reviewed studies into actionable recommendations.

That’s where our allied health expertise becomes critical. Most agencies don’t have the capabilities or the budget to synthesise large amounts of medical literature. Our content marketing function, on the other hand, has been built on strong technical research skills – and our specialisation in allied health means it’s commercially viable for us to spend time doing so.

Of course, we still need you. You and your team are subject matter experts. You have years of clinical knowledge that can’t be replicated through research alone. So our approach relies on delivering very strong, near-publication-ready assets that you then fact-check and enhance – or, in some cases, acting as a kind of managing editor that directs and publishes content created by you and your team. (The latter approach works best for platforms like Instagram and TikTok.)