Most Frequently Asked Birth Center Marketing Questions
Our Top Midwifery Marketing FAQs
We’ve been helping birth centers and midwives with their marketing for nearly 7 years, and in that time, we’ve learned a thing or two! Most midwives have the same questions when they are looking to step up their marketing efforts and reach new clients, so we figured we would compile some of our most-asked questions over the years right here. This is 7 years of information from birth centers & midwives across the US all about how to use marketing to grow your midwifery practice or birth center.
- How do I reach new midwifery clients?
Ahh, starting with the hard question, huh? It’s the main question that’s asked, and essentially all our other FAQs boil down from this point right here. We want to target your highly specific market, educate the majority of them on what midwifery care or birth center birth entails, offer you as a resource and an expert in your field, and provide an easy way for them to engage further. Simple right? If we’re simply talking about reach (we’ll talk more about engaging and converting later), the absolute first thing you need is CONTENT.
Skipping content creation is a super common mistake to make for small businesses and even for ‘professional’ marketers. It seems easy enough to run an advertising campaign to your audience, but WHAT exactly are you going to advertise? You need to first start with content: videos, photos, written copy, etc. Skipping content creation skips the point. Is your audience supposed to really connect with you over a stock photo or a whiteboard video? Really?
That’s why our whole approach here has always revolved around content. We start the execution of our marketing strategy by first creating content of all types – video, photo, and written. THEN, you’re ready to approach your reach – utilize advertising on a range of platforms that suit your audience: Facebook, Instagram, Google, Youtube, Twitter, and on and on. If you have content that people can connect with, the advertising piece becomes easy. That’s where we target and reach the audience we need.
- Should the birth center be posting on every platform?
Every platform? Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Google, your website, Twitter, Threads, TikTok, LinkedIn, Reddit, Snapchat, and on and on and on? No, probably not. It’s a lot to keep up with, even for us, and we’re the pros!
What we always encourage our midwifery & birth center clients to first consider is who THEY are. The platforms that you post on and prioritize should be a reflection of your brand and your strengths, blended with where your target audience is. Luckily, those two things often align quite well. For MOST midwifery marketing, we currently tend to recommend covering FB & Insta, YouTube (Google), and TikTok. At this moment in time, those platforms seem to be the best places where the message and education that comes with midwifery care meets up with the bulk of most practices’ target market.
The key to posting on multiple platforms is to try to create content that is native to that platform. You want a great photo for Instagram or Facebook, a vertical video for Insta Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, and a nice promo video for your YouTube channel. Not easy to do, but if you plan your content well, you’ll be able to cover a strategic spread.
- How should I brand my birth center?
Depending on your goals, most practices choose between a local branding name and more of a ‘vibe’ brand with some symbolism. In our experience, either way of branding generally works completely fine, and they both have their pros and cons. With a location-based brand, you may have quicker growth in local/organic searches. With a more creative name, you may be able to do more creative things in your own content and branding.
Likely more important than what you name your business is what materials you prepare for your branding – creating a logo that you like and that fits in various usages (you may need a square version, a rectangular or round version, a dark version, a light version, a version with a background, etc). We’ve helped many birth centers and midwifery practices create their branding, and believe us, especially when getting established or rebranding, you need a lot of graphic design work and other creative materials to help get your brand going.
You’ll also need to be thinking about your handles across all platforms, your domain name, and so many more pieces. Try not to be overwhelmed, but do what you can to make each decision in an order of priority that works for you.
- How do I get more reviews for my birth center?
Whether you’re working on a new birth center or an established practice, reviews are everything. Not only do they help establish credibility and your ‘ranking’ on platform searches, they also help push your name in front of your secondhand connections. ‘Friends of clients’ are probably your strongest possible target market, and when reviews fly in, that’s exactly who you reach.
Your strongest resource for bringing in reviews is your email list. Oh yea, you are going to want one of those. Utilize your email list to reach your current supporters and request that they leave you a review. Around here, one of our favorite ways to do this is to offer a drawing or incentive. We promote the heck out of it for a predetermined amount of time, offering to give away some sort of prize for leaving reviews on Facebook & Google. Reviews make a big difference!
- How do I improve my birth center SEO?
Write, write, then write some more. When we’re talking about organic search engine optimization for your birth center or midwifery practice, it’s all about blogging. You’ll want to make sure, of course, that you start with a solid website with strong copy that was built well to handle Google and other search engines’ parameters. From there, you want to utilize regular blog posting covering key topics and full of keywords that your target audience might be searching for.
There are a ton of little tricks for ranking up faster and really getting the maximum benefit from your SEO, but nothing beats solid content creation – writing about the topics that people want to know about. Noticing a theme here?
- Does my birth center need a new website?
There are a lot of reasons why you might want a new website to promote your midwifery services. Most people immediately think of a new website for the design, but a new website may also offer you a ton of functionality that you didn’t have before – maybe a calendar of events for childbirth education classes where people can register and purchase tickets right on your website, maybe encrypted intake paperwork for new clients, the list goes on. There are even SEO reasons for getting a new website since some platforms offer deeper optimization features to help your site rank up better.
Whatever the reason, you want to make sure your website has that crisp design that it needs, is mobile-optimized (since about half your traffic will be on smartphones), and offers secure functionality so that your business can grow.
- What should my birth center marketing budget be?
We don’t dodge this question here – it’s not the same number for everyone, but that doesn’t mean that there just isn’t a right answer. There is an equation here that we encourage all of our birth center clients to utilize. Start your own equation by determining how much an average new client is worth to you – this may depend on whether your business is a birth center or a homebirth midwifery practice, what different packages you offer and at what rates, and whether or not your average client is paying with insurance, Medicaid, self pay, etc.
Once you know that number, take into consideration your close rate – that is, out of any number of new leads, what percentage are likely to sign up for care? Some birth centers have a near 90% close rate while others are closer to 50% because of various factors like availability. Side note, better targeting in your marketing can actually improve that close rate.
When you combine your close rate with your average new client value, you should have a good guess as to what you might earn when new leads come in. Often, we calculate growth for our clients by looking at births per month. Are you looking for, say, 5 more births per month? Let that number guide you on how much you should spend compared to how much you will earn.
For our part, we have always and will always continue to price our marketing services competitively for what we do and for the birth center and midwifery industry. We know we achieve our ROI for clients month after month.
- Who is my target audience for midwifery care?
Targeting potential midwifery clients in advertising sounds so simple but is deceptively complex! We’re generally trying to reach people during a VERY specific time in their life which is often quite random and hard to predict. There are some factors that we have utilized over the years that tend to reach our target audience, but that’s some of our special sauce.
More important than demographic targeting is a philosophical shift in your marketing perspective. We want to utilize proactive marketing in the world of midwifery and birth center marketing, not reactive marketing. We want to become a resource and an expert in the community BEFORE our services are necessarily needed. By establishing yourself in the minds and trust of your targeted community as early as possible, you become the default choice for care when your services are needed. As we like to say, we don’t want potential clients to Google ‘midwife near me’ when the time comes, we want them to search for your name directly.
- Does Marketing TEA serve other industries?
Certainly we do! Since our beginnings in 2016, Marketing TEA has first and foremost worked in the field of midwifery marketing and birth center marketing. It’s where we thrive and what we’ve built our business on.
But at our core, what we are is a team of talented content marketers operating on the agency model and absolutely capable of getting results for clients within or outside of the midwifery industry. We’ve had many clients in related industries like physical therapy, chiropractic, childbirth education, medical billing, and more. The reason? Content Marketing WORKS. Want to find out just how well it works? Let’s have a chat.
We are a homebirth practice that is expanding our primary care/functional medicine. We are looking for a marketing team to help us grow
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