Healthcare marketing in Melbourne, by clinic owners.

Melbourne is the one city where patients search for myotherapy by name. In Brisbane or Perth the same person would type "remedial massage" or "back pain" and never think of the word. That changes how a Melbourne myotherapy or clinical massage clinic should build its keywords and its website.

Melbourne also has a big NDIS plan management sector, and that changes where NDIS patients come from. Many Melbourne OT, speech and psychology clinics get their NDIS volume through plan managers and support coordinators rather than through Google. For those clinics Google Ads is usually the channel for private and Medicare patients, not NDIS.

The city splits into areas that act like separate towns. The inner north around Carlton, Fitzroy and Brunswick. The inner south east around Prahran, South Yarra and Toorak. Bayside from St Kilda down through Brighton. The east through Hawthorn, Camberwell and Box Hill. Then the outer suburbs, which behave differently again. Clinics that run a separate campaign for each area get better results than clinics that run one.

Melbourne's hospitals are bunched together. Parkville alone has the Royal Melbourne, the Royal Women's, the Royal Children's, Peter Mac and the University of Melbourne within a few blocks. Clayton has Monash Health and Monash University. Heidelberg has the Austin. Footscray and Sunshine anchor the west. A private clinic near one of those is competing with hospital outpatients and university clinics as well as other practices, and it needs to say plainly what it offers that they don't: no waitlist, your choice of clinician, the same person every visit.

East and west are different cities and always have been. The east and south east have more clinics, more private health cover and patients willing to pay a higher fee. The west, through Footscray, Sunshine, Werribee, Point Cook and Tarneit, has grown fast and the clinics have not kept up. In the east you are fighting for share against clinics that are already there. In the west a lot of people don't have a regular clinic yet, and a plain explanation of what you do goes a long way.

A lot of Melbourne's new patients now live in the fast growing outer suburbs. Melton and Wyndham in the west. Casey and Cardinia through Clyde and Officer in the south east. Whittlesea through Mernda and Doreen in the north. A campaign built for Hawthorn fails in Tarneit, and not because the ads are worse. The patient out there is younger, more likely to have kids, less likely to have a clinic already, and far more interested in what you do than in a slogan.

One thing that is particular to Melbourne: trams and trains shape who comes to you. Inner Melbourne patients often pick a clinic on their tram or train line rather than the closest one, so a clinic two suburbs away on the same line can be easier to get to than one a kilometre away across it. When we set up inner Melbourne targeting we look at the routes, not just the distance.