Why joint replacement marketing needs its own playbook
Someone with a worn-out knee can spend years thinking about surgery before booking a consult. They try injections, physical therapy, a brace, a cane they hide in the closet. They read forums. Their daughter sends them articles. So by the time they call your practice, they’ve often already picked a surgeon in their head, and that choice was shaped by marketing they saw months earlier.
That’s the problem with running joint replacement marketing for orthopedic practices the same way you’d market sports medicine or urgent ortho. A sprained ankle needs a doctor this week. A hip replacement patient needs a reason to trust you, repeated over a long stretch of time, through several channels.
Joint replacement marketing is the set of channels an orthopedic practice uses to reach people considering hip, knee, or shoulder replacement. It covers search, education, referrals, and intake, and it stays with them through a decision that often takes months or years. The goal is to be the practice they already trust by the time they’re ready for a consult.
We put this list together based on the work we do with specialty practices. Each item is rated on four things: how close it sits to the actual decision, what it costs, how long it takes to pay off, and what it does badly. You won’t need all of it. Most practices should start with three or four items and add more once those are working.
One note on compliance before we start. Joint replacement ads touch outcome claims, surgeon credentials, technology claims (robotic-assisted surgery is a common one), and patient testimonials. State medical boards and the FTC both have rules about this. Run your ad copy and testimonial policy past your compliance or legal counsel. We’ll flag specific spots below.
Search channels that reach joint replacement patients while they’re researching
Search is where intent shows up first. Somebody typing “knee replacement surgeon near me” is a lot further along than somebody scrolling Facebook. These channels capture demand that already exists.
Procedure-specific SEO pages
Most orthopedic websites have one “Joint Replacement” page with a few paragraphs covering hips, knees, and shoulders together. That page won’t rank for much. Build a separate page for each procedure you want more of: total knee, partial knee, total hip, anterior approach hip (if your surgeons do it), revision surgery, and shoulder replacement.
Each page should answer what patients ask: who’s a candidate, what the consult involves, what recovery generally looks like according to your surgeons, whether it’s done outpatient or inpatient at your facility, and what insurance you take. Write recovery information in your surgeons’ words and keep it general. Don’t promise timelines.
Best for: practices that plan to stay in a market for years. Cost: moderate, mostly content and technical work. Weakness: slow. In a competitive metro you’re looking at several months before the pages bring in steady consults, and hospital systems with huge domain authority are often ranking for the same terms.
Google Ads on high-intent procedure terms
Paid search is the fastest way to show up for people looking right now. Keep the campaign narrow: procedure terms plus “surgeon,” “doctor,” “near me,” and your city names. Skip broad terms like “knee pain,” which pull in a lot of people who need a PT referral, not a surgeon.
Best for: practices with open surgical capacity that need consults in the next quarter. Cost: high. Joint replacement keywords cost a lot per click in most markets because hospitals and large groups bid on them too. Weakness: it stops the day you stop paying, and it’s easy to waste money if nobody tracks which clicks became consults and which consults became surgeries.
Google Business Profile and reviews
For local searches, the map results often get attention before the organic listings. Each surgeon should have a complete profile, and so should each location, with joint replacement listed in the services. Reviews matter a lot for elective surgery. A practice with a steady flow of recent reviews looks more trustworthy than one whose newest review is two years old.
Best for: every practice. This is the cheapest item on the list. Cost: low. Weakness: it takes a staff process to ask for reviews consistently, and you have to respond to reviews without confirming that the reviewer is a patient. That’s a HIPAA issue, and practices get it wrong more often than you’d expect.
| Channel | Relative cost | Time to first results | Best for | Main weakness |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Procedure-specific SEO pages | $$ | Several months | Long-term consult volume | Slow, competes with hospital systems |
| Google Ads | $$$ | Days to weeks | Filling surgical capacity soon | Expensive clicks, stops when spend stops |
| Google Business Profile and reviews | $ | Weeks | Every practice | Needs a consistent staff process |
| Joint pain seminars and webinars | $$ | 1-2 months | Patients still on the fence | Takes surgeon time |
| Email nurture | $ | Months | Converting older leads | Needs a clean CRM |
| Surgeon video content | $$ | Months | Building trust before the consult | Surgeons often resist being on camera |
| Referral relationships with PCPs and PTs | $ | Months | Steady, high-quality referrals | Relationship work that doesn’t scale fast |
| Speed-to-lead intake fixes | $ | Immediately | Practices already getting leads | Requires changing front desk habits |
Education channels for the long consideration cycle
This is the category most orthopedic practices skip, and I think it’s where the most money gets left behind. Search catches people at the end of their research. Education reaches them during the year (or three) when they’re deciding whether surgery is right for them at all.
Joint pain seminars and webinars
A surgeon presenting for 45 minutes on knee and hip arthritis treatment options, followed by Q&A, is an old tactic. It still works. In-person seminars do well with an older audience in suburban markets. Webinars reach adult children who are researching for a parent, which in our experience is a bigger share of the audience than most practices assume.
Cover the whole range of options, conservative ones included. Prospective patients can tell when a seminar is a sales pitch for surgery, and the practices that come across as balanced earn more trust. Promote it through Facebook ads aimed at people 55 and older in your service area, your email list, and local print if your area still reads the paper.
Cost: moderate, mostly ad spend and surgeon time. Weakness: attendance varies a lot, and the event is wasted without a follow-up plan for every attendee.
Email nurture for people who aren’t ready yet
Your practice already has a list of people who came in for knee or hip pain, got conservative treatment, and haven’t been back. A lot of them will need a replacement eventually. A quarterly email with educational content (what a consult involves, how to know when conservative treatment has stopped helping, an invite to the next seminar) keeps your practice in mind without pushing.
Cost: low. Weakness: it only works if your patient data is clean and you have permission to email those people. Keep the emails general and don’t make them feel like your practice is tracking anyone’s condition.
Surgeon video content
People choose a surgeon, not a practice. A two-minute video of each surgeon explaining how they approach knee replacement, filmed in a plain office with decent audio, does more for trust than a polished brand video. Put the videos on the procedure pages, on YouTube, and in the confirmation emails before the consult.
Cost: moderate. Weakness: getting surgeons to commit a morning to filming is harder than the filming itself. (Side note: the surgeons who hate the idea usually come across best on camera, because they don’t perform.)
Patient stories and testimonials
Testimonials work well in this category, and they carry the most compliance risk. You need written consent, you need to follow your state’s rules on testimonials and results claims, and if the testimonial describes an outcome, the FTC expects it to reflect what patients can typically expect or include a clear disclosure. Talk to your counsel before running any of these in paid ads.
Referral channels most orthopedic groups underuse
Primary care and physical therapy relationships
A lot of joint replacement patients arrive because their primary care doctor or physical therapist told them it was time to see a surgeon. Most orthopedic practices treat referral relationships as something that just happens. It should be a managed channel.
In practice, that means someone owns the list of referring offices, visits the top ones regularly, makes sure referred patients get seen fast, and sends the referring provider a consult note quickly. The referring office cares a lot about whether its patients got a call back. If your intake loses a referral, that office starts sending people elsewhere and won’t tell you why.
One warning: referral relationships are covered by the Stark Law and the Anti-Kickback Statute. Lunches, gifts, and anything else of value given to referral sources need to follow your compliance team’s guidance. Keep the relationship about patient care and communication.
Cost: low in dollars, high in staff time. Weakness: it grows slowly, and results depend on one or two people in your practice.
Past patient referrals
People who had a good experience talk to their friends, and this age group does a lot of that. You can’t pay patients for referrals, but you can make it easy: a follow-up note after recovery, a request for a review, and an invite to share a seminar with someone who might benefit.
Conversion fixes that cost almost nothing
Before you spend another dollar on ads, look at what happens to the leads you already get. This is the least exciting item on the list and often the one that makes the most difference.
Speed-to-lead and call handling
Call your own practice from a cell phone at 4:45 on a Thursday and ask about knee replacement. Does someone answer? Can they explain what the consult involves, which surgeons do hips and which do knees, and which insurance you take? If the call goes to voicemail, or your scheduler pushes the caller to a general new-patient line with a three-week wait, a lot of your marketing budget is gone.
Web form leads need a reply within the hour during business hours. People researching surgery fill out forms at several practices, and they usually book with whoever calls back first and sounds like they know what they’re talking about.
Insurance and Medicare clarity
A large share of joint replacement patients are on Medicare or a Medicare Advantage plan. Put which plans you accept on the procedure pages and train intake staff to answer coverage questions confidently. Uncertainty about coverage stops a lot of consults from getting booked.
Where you operate is part of this too. CMS has removed total knee and total hip replacement from the inpatient-only list over the past several years, and many practices now do some of these cases in outpatient or ambulatory surgery center settings. If your practice offers outpatient joint replacement, explain what that means for eligible patients, and leave the candidacy decision to the surgeon.
Tracking from first click to surgery
Most practices can tell you how many leads came in last month. Few can tell you how many became surgeries, or which channel those surgeries came from. Without that, you’re deciding where to spend based on cost per lead, which for joint replacement is almost useless. A cheap lead who never schedules surgery costs more than an expensive lead who does.
How to choose where to start with joint replacement marketing
You’ve probably heard from three agencies that said they’d fill your OR in 90 days. None of them did, because joint replacement doesn’t work that way. Here’s how we’d prioritize based on where a practice is starting.
| Your situation | Start with | Add later |
|---|---|---|
| Leads come in but surgeries aren’t growing | Speed-to-lead fixes, tracking, insurance clarity | Email nurture |
| Open OR or ASC time to fill this quarter | Google Ads on procedure terms, Google Business Profile | Seminars |
| New surgeon building a joint practice | Surgeon video, referral outreach, reviews | Procedure SEO pages |
| Established group losing share to a hospital system | Procedure SEO pages, seminars, email nurture | Expanded paid search |
| Multi-location group with no consistent reporting | Tracking from lead to surgery across locations | Everything else, based on what the data shows |
A few questions to ask any agency, ours included. Can you report surgeries by channel, or only leads? Who writes the procedure content, and does a surgeon review it before it goes live? How do you handle testimonials and results claims under our state’s rules? What happens to leads after hours?
To be honest about fit: PatientProcure isn’t the right partner for every orthopedic group. If you have a solid in-house marketing team and need more ad spend, a pure paid-media shop might suit you better. Same if your OR is already booked months out. We do our best work with practices that have capacity, get leads they can’t fully convert, and need the whole system connected from search through intake and follow-up.
If that sounds like your practice, start by finding where joint replacement patients drop off before they book. Book a free strategy call and we’ll trace your path from search to scheduled surgery, so you can see which leaks to fix first.