Primary Care Marketing

The short answer

Primary care marketing is local search plus insurance clarity. Patients pick a primary care physician using the map pack, a review count, and one question: do you take my plan and are you accepting new patients. Practices lose most of their inbound calls by answering that question badly or not at all. The work is a correct Google Business Profile, a plans-accepted page that stays current, new patient pages per location, and call tracking that shows how many callers were turned away.

primary care practices under management — verify with Tim

Primary care practices on retainer

share of tracked calls turned away for insurance or capacity at a typical practice — verify against call data

Inbound calls that never become appointments

Most lost patients are lost on the phone

A person switches insurance in January, searches for a family doctor near them, and calls the first practice with decent reviews. The front desk says the next new patient appointment is in eleven weeks, or that the doctor is closed to new patients, or that they are not sure about that plan. The caller hangs up and calls the next one.

That call never gets recorded, counted, or reported to the physician owner. The practice concludes marketing is not working. The marketing worked and the intake failed, and no one has the recording to prove it.

The first thing we install is call tracking with recordings. Before any campaign runs, we count how many people called, what they asked, and how many were turned away.

Insurance information is the highest-traffic content you refuse to write

Search volume for a plan name plus doctors near me is enormous and almost nobody serves it well, because practices are nervous about publishing a payer list that might go stale. So the payer's own directory ranks instead, and the payer's directory is wrong about you roughly as often as it is right.

The practices that publish an accurate, dated plans-accepted page pick up qualified calls their competitors never see. It is a maintenance commitment, not a creative one, and it is the highest-return page on a primary care site.

Direct primary care practices have the opposite problem. Their entire pitch is that they do not bill insurance, and searchers do not know the model exists. That is an education problem solved with content, not a local search problem.

Primary Care Marketing: how we run it for primary care practices

Local search per physician and per location

A practice listing plus a properly configured practitioner listing for each physician, correct primary categories, accurate hours, and cleanup of the duplicate listings left behind by every doctor who ever worked there.

Plans accepted and new patient pages

A dated, accurate list of accepted plans, and a page per location stating whether each physician is open to new patients. These are the two questions every caller asks, answered before they call.

Review velocity built into the visit

Requests triggered after the appointment rather than left to staff. Primary care reviews decay in relevance fast, so recency and volume matter more than the average.

Paid search on switching moments

Open enrollment, a move, a new baby, and a retiring physician are the four moments people change doctors. Campaigns are timed and worded for those, not run flat all year.

Call tracking scored against booked visits

Every call recorded and tagged as booked, turned away for insurance, turned away for capacity, or abandoned. That breakdown usually changes practice operations more than it changes the ad budget.

Services

What we would run here

Local search marketing

Families search for help close to home, and the map pack sits above every organic result on that search. Ranking your locations there is a different job than ranking a website, and for treatment providers it carries rules nobody else deals with.

Search engine optimization

Patients searching for care should find your clinic first. We build the pages, rankings, and call tracking that bring qualified inquiries to your team and show which searches produced them.

Online reputation management

One angry post on a thin profile costs you calls you will never know you lost. We build the review volume that absorbs it and write the responses that will not get you fined.

PPC management

Our best-fit accounts run $50,000 to $100,000 a month through Google. Run right, paid search is the only channel that produces admissions this month; run badly, it funds your competitors' research.

Call tracking and analytics

Every page, every campaign, and every listing gets its own number. When admissions picks up, we already know what made the phone ring.

Web design and development

Structure first, then speed, then the part that looks good. Most facility sites lose rankings to their own URL map and lose calls to a phone number buried in a hamburger menu.

Free audit

Want to see where your calls are going?

We audit your rankings, ads, and call tracking against the programs you compete with, then show you what is leaking. Yours to keep either way.

Prefer the phone? (561) 269-2833

Compliance

The rules that apply to this category

This is the part that catches agencies who have not worked in this category before.

Medicare Advantage co-branding and CMS marketing rules

If you advertise participation in a specific Medicare Advantage plan, or run co-branded material with one, CMS communications and marketing requirements can reach that material, including required disclaimers and plan-side review before it runs. Practices routinely discover this after a plan's compliance team pulls a piece down. Naming plans generically on a plans-accepted page is a different and much lower-risk act than co-branding a campaign.

In-network claims and provider directory accuracy

The Consolidated Appropriations Act requires provider directory information to be verified at least every 90 days. Your website is not the regulated directory, but a page listing a plan you dropped last quarter generates the same angry patient and a worse review. We date the page, set a review cadence, and remove plans the moment the contract ends.

Direct primary care is not insurance

More than thirty states have passed laws stating that direct primary care agreements are not insurance products, and most of those laws require specific contract disclosures. Copy that describes a DPC membership using coverage language, or implies it satisfies a coverage requirement, invites a state insurance regulator to disagree. DPC copy has to sell access and time, never coverage.

HIPAA in review responses and patient stories

Replying to a review with anything about the visit confirms a treatment relationship and is a disclosure. The same applies to patient success stories on a website, which need written HIPAA authorization rather than a verbal yes at checkout. Every response template we write is safe to post without knowing whether the reviewer was ever seen.

Sources

FAQ

Questions we get asked

How many new patients a month should we expect?

We set that number from your own call data, not an industry average. The first 30 days baseline your tracked call volume and how many of those calls book, and the target comes off that. typical new patient volume for a two-location practice — verify with Tim

Our schedule is already full. Should we still market?

Probably, but for payer mix rather than volume. If a third of your panel is on a plan that reimburses poorly, marketing aimed at better-paying plans changes revenue without changing patient count. That is a targeting decision, not a spend decision.

Do we need a new website?

Usually not. Most primary care sites need three pages fixed and a Google Business Profile cleaned up. We will tell you when a rebuild is the real constraint, and it is less often than agencies claim.

Should we publish which insurance plans we accept?

Yes, with a date on the page and a quarterly review. A stale list is a real risk, and a smaller one than sending every insurance question to the payer's directory, which is wrong about you often enough to cost you patients.

We are a direct primary care practice. Does any of this apply?

The local search half does. The insurance half is replaced by education content, because your searcher usually does not know DPC exists. Expect a longer content ramp and a much higher value per patient once they convert.

Free audit

Find opportunities for more calls and patients.

Get a free review of your rankings, ads, and call tracking. We'll show you opportunities to reach more patients and what to improve first. Yours to keep, with no obligation.

Prefer the phone? (561) 269-2833