With each passing year the medical landscape is plagued with more and more landmines. Declining reimbursements, bundled payments, the looming implementation of Obamacare and the constant rule changes of insurers are just a few of those landmines you need to sidestep this year. However, one of the most explosive of these landmines is the marketing your practice is engaging in. Over the past year I have seen some physician marketing campaigns and efforts that have made me and, more importantly, potential patients cringe.
2013 brings another year of opportunity. Opportunity to stop making crucial marketing mistakes. I would like to share with you the 4 Marketing Mistakes Your Practice Needs to Stop Making in 2013. I will illustrate the difference in myths and truth and fact from fiction. Hopefully, this will give you an insight into effective marketing strategies that will increase your patient volume.
1. Your Practice’s Website
If you, or your practice, do not already have a website, I implore you to call me immediately. Your website can be a very effective tool to illuminate patients as to your experience, procedures and outcomes. But, it can also be very tricky and sometimes end up being more cumbersome than useful.
One of the most common flaws I see is the images on your website. The trend seems to be photos of happy geriatric couples walking on the beach or riding bikes. These photos intend to illustrate satisfied patients and an active lifestyle. This imagery is not only ineffective but can also be detrimental. Allow me to explain.
The psychology of a potential patient is a factor that you must take into consideration. Nobody wants to feel old. Not even the elderly. If you website is filled with images of the elderly, no amount of smiling faces is going to detract from the fact that the patient has now been made to feel old. Furthermore, if a patient from a younger demographic views these images they can not identify with the people in the images. They want to continue sports, working and all of their other beloved hobbies. They more easily identify with sports imagery, youthful imagery and fitness imagery.
Even if your patient base is elderly the images need to be active and youthful. You will want to give the perception that your procedure is going to make them feel as healthy and youthful as they did in their younger years.
Next, there is no doubt that you desire to convey quite a bit of information to the visitors on your site, as the site acts as a digital representation of you and your practice. You will want to show them all of your credentials, experience and knowledge in an effort to compel them to to pick up the phone and make an appointment. But is that what they came there for?
The important thing to remember is that most potential patients came there for answers. People want to know the cause of their radiculopathy, back pain, joint pain or muscle weakness. That necessary information has to be readily available to potential patients and easy to find. If visitors have to search through page after page of content, they will most likely become frustrated and move onto the next site. It may seem a bit odd, but patients need to be able to trust your site and believe that your site is providing the answers they are looking for from an expert.
Once the patient obtains the information they are seeking they will inevitably want to know who that information is coming from and how further this physician can help them. This is where a dedicated page to each physician in the office is important. Do not be afraid to list your credentials, accomplishments, awards and any innovations you have been a part of. The more accomplished you seem the more a patient will bestow their faith in you. Once you have given the patient the information they are seeking the next thing you want to do is have them contact you.
Getting a patient to visit your contact page is the most important factor in their digital experience. Having easy to find and access contact information is critical. Visiting the contact page shows that you have conveyed enough insight and information to persuade a patient to set an appointment. Having a separate tracking metric to track the traffic to your Contact page can be a very useful tool as well. This will help us determine if the layout is effective.
Too often I see this page cluttered with useless info and what I call “Black Hole Boxes”. Your practice phone number is the item that must be most prominently displayed, as this is still the dominant method in which patients make appointments. Next, all of your locations with addresses and suite numbers must be readily accessible. Patients are often concerned as to how far they will need to travel for their appointment. The Google Maps application on your site is a free and effective tool for patients to figure out travel time.
Lastly, “The Black Hole” email. On most sites there is a section of the Contact page where a patient can leave a question, comment or concern. Almost inevitably this is in the form of a contact box with no indication of who is receiving and reading these messages. This box often conveys a cold and faceless perception of your practice and patients are very hesitant to disclose sensitive medical information to a box on a website. The common thought is that their query is sent to a black hole where no one will ever see nor read it. Sadly, most of the time this is true.
Consider instead putting the name and email address of someone in the practice in place of this box. This will show patients that a live person is going to receive and reply to this inquiry.
2. Your Blog
Blogs are an imperative tool in establishing an online presence and makes for great social media content However, your blog needs to be finely tuned to differentiate your website as a reference or an authority.
In most cases, practices take medical studies or medical news and regurgitate them onto their own blog. Practices then post this information on their social media pages and sit and wait for the traffic to come to the site. This is incredibly ineffective. When creating a blog, originality is key for two reasons.
First, in terms of your Google and SEO (Search Engine Optimization) rankings, Google penalizes sites that are filled with reproduced content. It forces Google to see your site as unoriginal and gives it a lower page authority. Second, it is important to relate the story or research to your own practice to reinforce your authority on the subject. If there is no mention of your practice’s experience or expertise on the subject, then what is the function of the blog? In 2013, your can no longer survive as an aggregate news outlet. Let me give you an example, if news came out tomorrow that Kobe Bryant was going to have a hip surgery, it would no doubt make the news and create a buzz for a few days. If you are a physician who performs hip surgery, then you need to capitalize on this news. Create an original blog highlighting Kobe’s career achievements, awards and what may have led to his injury. Then, incorporate yourself into this article. Designate a small paragraph at the bottom to discuss your experience with similar injuries, how you have treated them and how you can help others with similar injuries. By utilizing a newsworthy case, you are asserting yourself as an authority on these types of injuries. This increases not only your reputation but patients trust in your experience as well. Do you have time for this? As a busy physician, you probably do not. However, can you honestly afford NOT to take part in the digital revolution? These are questions that may take a rude awakening to answer. Warning- a plug is on its way. We are professionals at facilitating these techniques. For now, let us continue teaching.
3. Social Media
With the advent of social media, one of the biggest streams of revenue for marketing charlatans has been “social media marketing”. This is one of the most embellished and misconstrued forms of marketing in the medical world today. Let me make something clear right now, beware of this farce.
This is not to say that social media does not have its place in your marketing efforts, but you need to be aware of how to effectively utilize these tool. First and foremost, monitor your audience. If you have engaged in a social media campaign, the first thing most physicians want to see is their “Likes” and “Followers” increase, as this is often the metric used to measure the effectiveness of the campaign. More important that “how many” are following you is “who” is following you. Many companies will engage in “back door” efforts that garner you more “Likes” and “Followers” but this increase is filled with people from overseas, spam accounts and those who have no interest in your page.
For instance, if you are surgeon in Ohio and you have 1000 “Likes” you are probably satisfied at the idea of this large audience. But if this audience is from overseas, what is the likelihood they are going to fly from Ireland to Ohio to see you? Probably zero. The focus needs to be on the age and location of relevant profiles who are more likely to become patients. Focus on your immediate area and expand from there. As the old adage goes, quality over quantity.
Next, the purpose of your social media should be to direct traffic to your website where patients can get a better picture of your full experiences and scope of practice. Social media can be an effective tool in disseminating your blog, practice announcements and press releases. If you have social media profiles populated by a captive audience then this content will interest them, and can direct traffic to your site. But trust me, if you are in New Jersey, no one in Idaho cares about your upcoming Patient Seminar. Track your audience and more importantly, track who is building your audience.
4. Advertising
Undoubtedly during your tenure you have been solicited to advertise in the local newspaper, magazine, etc. The advertising rep has touted all the benefits of advertising with their publication and given you “analytics” of their readership and audience all in effort to entice you. What you need to be mindful of is the effectiveness of traditional advertising. Every day, online news consumes more and more of the market of news readers. To combat the decline in revenue, publications have hired larger sales forces to sell as much ad space as possible in an effort to maintain enough revenue to continue being published.
So what does this mean for you? Well, if you choose to engage in a paper advertising campaign you are going to see newspapers and magazines filled with more ads and less news content. This proliferation of advertisements dissuades many readers as they feel the publication is now no more than a book of advertisements. Furthermore, your ad is far less effective because by the time the reader sees your ad they are so desensitized to ads that they will most likely skip past it. Also, you need to keep in mind how many similar ads or competitors ads are appearing in this publication as well. If there is an abundance of competitive ads it is often best to find another advertising avenue.
Another trick advertising reps like to employ is the “Rule of 3”. They will tell you that for your ad to be effective you need to advertise multiple times and usually engage in a contract for 3 months. It is true that repetition is important, but there is usually a more underhanded reasoning for this rule. Ad reps are forced to solicit new business constantly to sell ad space and this process can be redundant. If they lock an advertiser into a space for 3 months as opposed to one week, it makes their job a lot easier and they do not have to seek out a new advertiser for that space for the next 3 months.
Lastly, what are you really getting out of this relationship? As a general rule, I never engage my clients in a paper advertising campaign unless my client is getting more than just an advertisement. Generally, I like to offer an advertisement as a supplement to original content about our practice that they will publish. This can be an informative piece, a story of a local patient, announcement, etc. Most often, the reps are hesitant to engage in this sort of agreement as they feel it compromises the newspapers “integrity”. At this point in the conversation I usually like to highlight how it not only behooves the publication to publish this content but how it in no way compromises their ethics. They usually see my point.
Medical Marketing is a complex discipline and requires the implementation of several vital aspects of Branding, Identification, Research and Positioning. Gold Medical Marketing implements demographic and psychographic marketing to generate new patient volume into your practice. For more information visit us online at www.goldmedicalmarketing.com
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