As a doctor, you’ve dedicated your professional life to maximizing your impact and helping patients improve their lives. You know there’s still room for growth, but you’re just not sure how to expand your reach or strengthen your brand authority. 

If you’re like many doctors, you approach marketing a bit haphazardly, tossing a few eggs into a couple of baskets and waiting to see the outcome. Perhaps you organize community events or find other sporadic methods to connect with your base, but you don’t have an automated marketing system working for you in the background. 

I know firsthand the life-changing and career-changing power of a cohesive marketing machine, which is exactly why I want you to tap into these five healthcare marketing trends for natural health doctors in 2021. 

These trends aren’t complex or intimidating; they’re simple actions you can implement to achieve steady growth and slam down the accelerator. 

1. Diversification of Social Media

The term “social media” used to be synonymous with Facebook. And while Facebook still holds an undeniably massive presence in our social media consciousness, it’s no longer the only player in the game. 

We’ve experienced a massive diversification of social media platforms over the past few years. Different audiences are drawn to these various platforms for unique reasons. You can capitalize on this to connect with your target audience members exactly where they already spend their time. 

What does this mean for your natural health practice? You don’t need to spend your time and money in the wrong place as you attempt (and hope!) to connect with a few people who appreciate your message. Instead, you can identify target audience groups, niche down, and speak directly to them. 

For example, you might use ClubHouse to develop relationships with entrepreneurs and high performers, or Pinterest to engage with 35-to 45-year-old females. 

Diversification of social media is the future! Natural health doctors who embrace this trend are crushing it when they diversity and create growth patterns with special interest groups.

2. Authority Branding Wins

You never want to give your clients a reason to wonder if you’re a master of your art. Yet that’s exactly what you do when you overlook the importance of authority branding.

In order to become an authority brand, you must let go of the “jack of all trades” mentality. When you’re a jack of all trades, you’re a master of none. Until you niche down and create authority within a specialized corner of your market, you’ll never realize the power of becoming an expert in one single arena. 

Many doctors avoid picking a niche because they don’t want to disappoint potential patients or turn them away. But it’s okay to say no! In fact, successful entrepreneurs are masters of saying no for the right reason. You owe it to yourself and your patients to only serve the people you can deeply and impactfully support. 

Authority branding wins in this year’s healthcare marketing trends because authority within your niche creates magnification and attraction. It allows you to leverage your gifts, talents, and abilities to forge meaningful connections with the tribe of people who want to hear every word you say. That’s a powerful marketing position to achieve!

3. Virtualization

According to research publishing by Deep Market Research Group, healthcare is predicted to surpass energy as the number one money-making industry by 2026… to the tune of $26 trillion! 

Now is the time for your practice to earn its fair share of that $26 trillion by embracing the growing healthcare marketing trend of virtualization. The interest in virtual healthcare was already bubbling before the pandemic, but COVID-19 created a nearly instantaneous surge in demand for virtual medicine. 

Now that patients and clients realize the convenience, impact, and appeal of virtual healthcare, they want it more than ever before. Demand currently far exceeds supply, which puts you in the prime position to cater to clients actively seeking natural health doctors on virtual platforms. 

This virtualization trend is lucrative and powerful for so many reasons. When you build a virtual practice, you quickly:

• Become more intentional with your time
• Extend the reach of your philosophy
• Achieve lower overhead with higher profit margins
• Drive revenue back to your brick and mortar practice
• Enjoy freedom and flexibility 

Virtual care is an investment in the future and a way to share your gifts and talents with a larger audience. It’s the best opportunity you’ll ever find to achieve more impact, more freedom, and more income. Many of our most successful Virtual Practice Accelerator members evolved from the brick and mortar practice model to embody everything that virtual healthcare has to offer.

4. Wearable Integration

In the 1990s, doctors only received updates on their patients through phone calls or scheduled office visits. By the 2000s, email made it easier to communicate, but few patients communicated with their doctors more than once every six to 12 months. Now, in 2021, wearable technology has completely transformed the concept of patient-doctor communication. 

Wearable healthcare technology encompasses devices like smartwatches and Fitbits. These devices are designed to collect data on a patient’s personal health, exercise, and lifestyle habits. Far beyond just “counting your steps”, wearable technology provides an unprecedented opportunity for doctors to integrate streams of precise, personalized data into their medical evaluations and recommendations. 

In other words, thanks to wearable integration, healthcare has the potential to become intricately customized to each patient’s specific needs. Just consider the data that wearable technologies can capture:

• Heart rate
• Respiratory rate
• Temperature
• Blood pressure
• Caloric intake
• Calories burned
• Daily activity
• Sleep patterns
• Blood oxygen saturation

Such remarkable customization creates a wealth of marketing opportunities for natural health doctors in 2021. You have the easy and affordable ability to deliver customized medical care that far exceeds anything your patients have experienced before. 

5. Lifestyle-Centered Practices™ 

I firmly believe that you don’t need to compromise your own health and wellness to build a thriving practice. My trademarked Lifestyle-Centered Practices™ demonstrate exactly how doctors can embrace a healthy lifestyle while driving business success and generating residual streams of income online. 

When you incorporate lifestyle-centered practice trends in your own business, you experience a transformation: instead of working on your business, your business will start to work for you. All it takes is an organized system driven by technology. 

Thanks to the growth of technology, what took $10 million to create 10 or 20 years ago is now easily accessible to every virtual doctor with a $249 per month Shopify subscription. Technology delivers exponentially increasing capabilities that become easier and more affordable to leverage year after year. 

What does this mean for you, the practice owner? It means you can automate systems and strategies that allow your business to grow rapidly. It means you can achieve more success with less effort and finally take the time to travel with your family or take a day off. It means you can finally create true freedom, not just imagine it. 

Use this year’s healthcare marketing trends to build the type of life-changing momentum that only a well-oiled marketing machine creates.