Let’s start simple with a short question and answer session, shall we?

1. How many email addresses do you have in your patient management database?
2. Are you using all the tools available both online and internally to communicate effectively with your patients?
3. Are your patients satisfied with your practice – your office, staff, resources and care?
4. Are you satisfied with your office staff and their interactions with patients?
5. Have you tried traditional marketing methods including direct mail and yellow pages ads, only to find that you’ve wasted money or were unable to track the results?

Now let’s talk about those marketing tips to get you started while looking a little closer at your answers.

1. Collect Patient Email Addresses – This is so incredibly important for marketing in the internet age. Emails can be used to confirm appointments, send out newsletters, surveys, introduce new staff members and events. Make sure to contact your patient management software provider and ask them the most effective way to enter this information into your system so it’s easily accessible when running reports. Offer staff incentives to aid in the effort. Sending out quarterly emails using a simple email marketing tool such as Vertical Response, Constant Contact or MailChimp is becoming the norm for medical practices to communicate with their patients.
   Take Action: Communicate with staff about the importance of collecting email addresses and make sure  your patient registration form asks for this data.

2. Communicate with Your Patients – This is the single most important advice I can give.  You must find a way to communicate effectively with your patients.  Every. Single. Day. I’ve already mentioned the importance of email addresses, but this takes it one step further. If you aren’t internet savvy and do not utilize social media yet, then now’s the time. I’m willing to bet that one of your staff members uses it daily and if given the opportunity, they would enjoy being the elected “voice” of the office with a little guidance from you.  It’s not rocket science, but it does require at least 5-10 minutes a day to visit and update your Facebook page status or tweet. The updates could include office happenings, events, contests, trivia, photos, resources, health tips or just fun facts about your office. You get the picture, right?  Patients who aren’t online should be able to learn more about your office while sitting in your reception area. Create an office newsletter and leave a stack at the front desk, put an bulletin board on the wall displaying newspaper clippings, cards and photos from patients, run a presentation on a flatscreen TV educating your patients, and have signage mentioning your Facebook page where it’s easy to see.
   Take Action: Make it as easy as possible for patients to learn more about you and your staff via many influence points. By acting as a health resource for your patients, you will establish trust and a stronger reputation. Highly engaged patients are proactive in their health care and have become savvy health care consumers who will refer their friends and family to you.

3. Send Annual Patient Satisfaction Surveys - Seems simple right? Well, you’d be surprised at how many practitioners do not actually know what their patients think of them. There are abundant resources online these days and this extremely useful tool will give you a birds-eye-view of your patients’ experience. I prefer Vertical Response for my email marketing since they have a built-in tool for surveys that’s simple to use. There are also several survey tools out there including SurveyMonkey and Zoomerang which are fairly simple to execute.  If you find that online surveys are a challenge, then take the time to create and print out a survey for patients to fill out at their next office visit. You could also offer a small incentive that will boost your number of survey responses.
   Take Action: Implement a patient survey at least once a year either online or in-office. Take your time reviewing the results and make adjustments if necessary based on patient responses.

4. Make the Most of Your Internal Marketing –  Every office has its good days and bad, but be sure to pay attention to the way your staff interacts with your patients on a continual basis.  Your front office staff has the tough job of making a positive first impression for your office, and you want to be sure your patients feel welcome, are greeted with a warm smile and good eye contact. With a long list of tasks, staff members can get caught up staring down at their computer or answering the phone, making patients feel neglected. Team meetings should be held weekly or monthly and all staff members should be present.  This is your chance to praise or remind staff of the continued effort of marketing your practice. It’s also a great time to review new procedures, patient survey results and any relevant topics that should be communicated to patients. The more your staff engages with patients, the more you happier your patients are.
   Take Action: A continual focus on internal marketing will generate word-of-mouth advertising and patient referrals. Medical practice marketing is a process, not an event. You must consistently implement your internal marketing tactics, and demand the highest standard of customer (patient) service from your staff.

5. Resolve to Try Something New in 2011 (but track your results!) – I believe it was Albert Einstein who said that the definition for insanity was doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well this year, why not step outside your comfort zone and try something new – you might be surprised by the results! If you answered to the question above that you’ve wasted money on traditional marketing methods, it sounds like its time to re-focus your efforts. Here are some more ideas to consider for 2011:
   1. Online Marketing – there are many online options now including Facebook Ads, Google Adwords, Local Search Tools and Email Marketing.
   2. Revamp your Website – finally time for that new website? Launch a professional, successful and engaging design this year and you’ll be on your way to reaching new patients in no time at all.
   3. Referral Programs - implement a patient referral program or field marketing program to focus on patient and practice referrals.
   4. Patient Newsletters – enhance your patient communication with a professional newsletter. Leave copies in the office or email them to patients on a quarterly basis.
      Take Action: Spend time taking inventory of all your resources, current efforts and future goals. Write down all your ideas for 2011 and start to create a strategy including internal and external marketing efforts. Make a resolution to continue to improve upon your marketing efforts this year and beyond to build upon your patient file.

While many doctors, dentists, and hospitals recognize the need to market their medical practice, the biggest challenges are developing the actual medical marketing strategy and budget, and tracking the results. Have you been “putting off” ideas because you don’t have the resources internally to execute them?  You may want to consider an outside partner to help get your practice on track and build a successful financial future.

So what are your New Year’s marketing resolutions for 2011?  Please feel free to leave a comment.

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About Wendy Hamel

As co-founder of Med-Marketers, and serving as Director of Client Programs, Wendy is directly responsible for guiding creative strategy and overseeing client services for the company. Wendy has over 10 years of marketing and management experience serving technology, healthcare and retail. Wendy’s background includes consulting and strategic marketing for orthodontists, dentists, chiropractors, plastic surgeons, pediatricians and primary care physicians in the Greater Boston area.
About Med-Marketers

The inception of Med-Marketers was based on the clear and compelling need for medical practice owners to be able to drive new business and retain patients through professionally managed marketing programs. We know that consistent contact and effective communication with your patients and referring physicians are the keys to business growth and continued success. We listen carefully about your unique practice needs and take the initiative in working with you to develop a sound strategy within your target market. Finally, we take the lead in making things happen to deliver on your specific business goals.

To learn more about our services, visit www.med-marketers.com or fill out the form below.

• Produce timely results
• One stop shop: they meet all my needs
• Creative geniuses
• Think outside the box
• Affordable Price

A poll by Med-Marketers

In my last post about the importance of SEO, I mentioned the importance of using Local Search to drive more patients to your website. Since professional practices are marketing to a limited, local demographic, local search is a simple way to make sure that current and prospective patients can find you.  This is especially true if you have not completed SEO on your site yet, because your local business listings, if created carefully, will show up near the top of the search results even if your website doesn’t.

Local Search Result for: Chiropractor, Georgetown, MA

Local search is simple. It allows you to quickly search results by neighborhood, city, state, or zip code. If patients are searching for a chiropractor in Georgetown, Massachusetts, they could simply type in: “chiropractor, georgetown, ma” and the local business listings appear at the top of their screen.  If you’ll notice in the example to the left, the first local business listing also appears first in the organic search results below, which offers double exposure or twice the impressions for that particular chiropractic practice. Someone in that office has been doing their homework. The local business listing is an ‘owner-verified’ listing and the site has been designed and optimized to appear at the top of the organic search results.

Your primary goal when marketing your medical practice is to reach out to your local demographic. This is where many websites fail with their SEO efforts. A patient seeking a plastic surgeon in Boston isn’t going to find your website if it isn’t coded for the local Boston area and surrounding suburbs. It is critical that your website have a strong presence in the local search results to attract new patients.

There are three ways consumers go about searching for local results in your area:

1. Check local search engines such as Google Places or Yahoo Local or social search tools such as Yelp and Insiderpages

2. Access the Internet yellow pages with yellowpages.com or superpages.com

3. Go right to a search engine like Google and type in keywords and demographic info with “City, State”

How do you verify your listing?

Act  like a consumer.  Visit all the sites listed above and look for the links that say: “Business Owner?” or “Claim Your Business.”

When you claim your business, make sure to add relevant content to your local listing. Review the address, map and URL to make sure they are correct, add images, business categories and of course, your products and services. More often than not,  people are using these tools to get correct driving directions, read reviews, and visit your website.  Confirming that your web address is correct will help you get more inbound links to your website. Some sites will even let you post coupons or updates that drive patients to visit your site.

Why use Local Search?

Why not? More and more businesses are beginning to understand that Local Search isn’t just convenient for users, it is also a powerful marketing tool for businesses. Here are a few benefits:

1. Free or inexpensive advertising to promote your business

2. Additional inbound links to your site to increase SEO (search engine optimization)

3. Increase visibility in the search engines to increase new patient referrals to your website

Just because you have a website, doesn’t mean new patients can find you on the search engines. Along with completing SEO on your site, you should take advantage of every free tool available to you.

Local Search today makes up 60-75% of all Internet searches. To spread the word and attract new patients, it is crucial you be proactive in marketing your practice on Local Search. The window of opportunity is NOW. Take advantage of Local Search to build your business, especially during tough economic times.

About Wendy Hamel

As co-founder of Med-Marketers, and serving as Director of Client Programs, Wendy is directly responsible for guiding creative strategy and overseeing client services for the company. Wendy has over 10 years of marketing and management experience serving technology, healthcare and retail. Wendy’s background includes consulting and strategic marketing for orthodontists, dentists, chiropractors, plastic surgeons, pediatricians and primary care physicians in the Greater Boston area.

4. Content is Key—Keywords that is….

Here is another opportunity to use that list of keywords. The content on your site may be a great resource for prospective patients, however, if your website is low on search engine results, your web traffic will suffer—which means less new patients for you, and more for your competition. In addition to updating your meta-tags and submitting your website to search engines, you’ll need to reinvent your content focusing on carefully using those keywords as much as possible. Keyword density is a combination of the number of times a keyword or a keyword phrase, in proportion with other words, appears on a web page. The more times the keyword appears in relation to the total number of on page words, the greater the overall keyword density. Always remember that you are writing content for humans to read and not for the search engine robots. If patients find your website to be useful and readable, they will stay on your page for a longer time to learn more about you and your practice. Search engines will also find them useful, index them in their database, and rank your website above others.

5. Local Business Search

A lot of medical practices rely on local search results to direct patients to their website, but aren’t aware that they have control over these results.  Let’s face it, most patients are looking for a doctor that is close to their home or office and search for medical facilities in a certain geographic location.  That is why claiming your business on all the local business and social search sites is so incredibly important and absolutely must be included in your online strategy.  Some of the sites I manage for my clients include Google Places which is tied into Google Maps, and social search tools like InsiderPages and Yelp. By claiming and managing your business on these sites, you are enabling patients to find your updated and complete office information, you are given the ability to communicate with patients, add photos of the office, link to your website, get insights to make decisions, read patient reviews, post coupons & live updates for free and view a performance dashboard to see how your site is doing. These free tools can result in measurable success if they are actively managed.

6. Social Media

I could write a completely separate blog on this topic because the possibilities of using Social Media as part of your Online Marketing strategy are endless.  If you aren’t using Social Media for your medical practice, now is the time.  And if the idea scares you, by all means, start small.  Some of my clients are using just Facebook to connect with their patients, and as they get their feet wet, it is a comfortable starting point to drive a significant amount of relevant traffic to their website.  However, if you want to take your online presence to the next level, you may consider starting a blog using a site like WordPress and write about medical procedures or new products and services that you’ve introduced to your practice.  Once you get the ball rolling, consider joining Twitter and post updates from your medical blog to Twitter and Facebook so you are reaching even more potential patients.  Blogging isn’t for you?  Try joining LinkedIn to make connections with colleagues in your specialty and start a group posting discussions about patient care, referrals, medical marketing, etc…focus on practice referrals from colleagues.  As I mentioned, the possibilities are endless.

7. Track Your Progress

So now that you’ve learned about the importance of SEO, local search tools and social media, you are well on your way to understanding how to increase your web traffic and ultimately gain new patients from a thoughtful and useful web presence.  Understanding is half the battle.  Tracking your progress is another. There are many free tools out there, but my favorite is Google Analytics. Make sure to implement (or request access from your web admin) and review website analytics. Don’t forget to note dates of when your efforts take place to understand increases in web traffic and referrals.  You won’t know if all your hard work has paid off if you don’t have tracking mechanisms in place to begin with, and you may be surprised when you see those numbers increasing steadily due to your new and improved focus on your online marketing efforts.

Now you can use this knowledge to implement the programs that are within your reach or take what you’ve learned to help choose the right medical marketing company to implement your goals. Whatever path you choose, implementing a strategy that executes a progression of online marketing efforts brings you closer to your overall practice goal – getting more patients to walk through your door.

For more information, visit www.med-marketers.com.

About Wendy Hamel

As co-founder of Med-Marketers, and serving as Director of Client Programs, Wendy is directly responsible for guiding creative strategy and overseeing client services for the company. Wendy has over 10 years of marketing and management experience serving technology, healthcare and retail. Wendy’s background includes consulting and strategic marketing for orthodontists, plastic surgeons, pediatricians and primary care physicians in the Greater Boston area.

I’ve had the same conversation many times with clients – I ask them about their current website goals, online marketing strategy and if their website has been optimized properly.  And quite often I get similar answers like “My web guy said he took care of that when he designed the site”…or “I’m pretty sure its been done, but I’ve never looked at it.” Unfortunately, there are companies out there billing thousands of dollars for this service and taking advantage of this behavior.  Sadly, the business owners who do need help optimizing their site don’t know where to start since there are so many options out there with varied pricing structures, automated programs and empty promises about search engine ranking.

So what exactly does SEO mean and how you can benefit from it? Let’s take a look at some of the basic steps you need to take in order to leverage the power of SEO and Online Marketing as part of your overall strategy to increase your patient flow.

1. Your List of Keywords is Great—But it’s all in Your Head

The most important thing you can do is sit down with your team and brainstorm a list of at least 100 keywords that describe your practice, treatments, services, products, symptoms, specialized procedures, etc. and jot them down with the group. This list can and should be used for SEO and all of your online marketing efforts. If you haven’t completed this exercise in the past, but your “web guy” told you he’s done the SEO, then believe me when I tell you that your site is not properly optimized for your specific practice and you’ll need to hire a reputable firm to get the job done right.

2. Your Medical Practice Description and Why it’s Important.

After completing the keyword exercise, pull out the top 20 keywords and highlight them.  If you put all those words together, you can easily create your business

Inadequate Search Engine Result

description. This description is also extremely important because it is the first thing people read when your site comes up on keyword searches. You

Adequate Search Engine Result

should always create a short and a long version of your business description, which is simply a combination of keywords, your mission statement and your practice goals. This description should be placed in your meta-tag code along with your keywords in order to properly optimize your website and achieve an adequate search engine result. Any medical marketing firm, SEO company or knowledgeable web designer can help you put this in the code on all your pages.

3. Search Engine Submission

This part is easy, but often times, is forgotten when a website is launched.  Your keywords and business description will also come into play here, as you will need to submit your site content to several search engines.  Although there are some big players that still charge a fee for this, you can easily search for “free search engine submission” and retrieve several sites that are willing to list your web submission for free.  The more sites that have your content, keywords and contact information will increase your exposure, search ranking and the ability for your prospective patients to find you.

Stay tuned next week for Part II of this blog. For more information, visit www.med-marketers.com.

About Wendy Hamel

As co-founder of Med-Marketers, and serving as Director of Client Programs, Wendy is directly responsible for guiding creative strategy and overseeing client services for the company. Wendy has over 10 years of marketing and management experience serving technology, healthcare and retail. Wendy’s background includes consulting and strategic marketing for orthodontists, plastic surgeons, pediatricians and primary care physicians in the Greater Boston area.

What’s the Difference?

It’s important to note that these two terms have different meanings.  Search engine optimization (SEO) is actually an import piece of search engine marketing, or a function within your overall SEM program.  SEO is the act of optimizing a website for organic or natural search engine listings.  (Google, Yahoo, Bing etc.)  Search engine optimization is arguably the most cost-effective function within a search engine marketing program, yet it is still only a piece of the puzzle.

Search engine marketing (SEM) is the process of marketing a website through search engines; whether by improving natural organic rank or listings, paid or sponsored listings, or a combination of the two.  A comprehensive search engine marketing program should include the following:

• Search engine optimization
• Search engine and directory submission management
• Paid inclusion and trusted feed programs
• Pay-for-placement management
• Link popularity / reputation development
• ROI and performance monitoring and reporting

It is important to clearly understand the difference between SEO / SEM and both should also be implemented within your marketing program.  Although SEO is incredibly cost effective, many will tell you that well conceived pay-for-placement programs can produce tremendous ROI for your practice.  The key is to understand the difference and make sure you have a well-versed marketing partner who is able to devise a strategy that leverages both correctly.

We recently launched a patient satisfaction survey for one of our orthodontic clients and wanted to share just how powerful this measurement tool can be if used correctly.  We immediately gained a clearer understanding of the practices’ strengths and weaknesses with regards to patient care. We also gained valuable insight on the patient experience while validating the success of the clients’ marketing programs.  Surveys play an integral role in helping our clients quantitatively measure the patient care experience, as well as provider/patient communication. Also, the information they yield enables a practice to monitor its performance and implement quality improvement measures, two elements necessary for providing excellent health care.

What We Learned

In the whitepaper, we asked the questions: Where are your patients coming from? And what sets your practice apart from the competition within your area? After surveying an active list of 500+ patients we examined the answers.  We learned which two avenues were driving the most new patient consultations and why people stayed with the practice. 51% of the referrals were from other practitioners and 45% were from patient referrals. This data proved that the amount of focus dedicated to practice referral programs, including educating referring dental practices through face-to-face marketing, was well worth the time and investment.  The amount of patient referrals confirms the extraordinary value of the current patient file. The result validates the importance of patient retention programs, engaging patients through social media, newsletters and the website as well as offering rewards/contests programs and having a friendly and educated office staff to create a pleasurable practice experience both in and out of the office.

The survey also provided us with valuable insight on improvement measures through two simple questions: How can we improve to better meet your needs? And what expectations of our practice are we not meeting for you or your child? The questions offered patients the opportunity to write candid answers in a free-form text box.  The responses speak for themselves, so I will post a few here:

“Your office is very kid friendly, the staff is well trained and extremely courteous, appointments have always been kept on schedule, the doctor is very informative and great with the kids.  All over a great experience, no improvement needed in my opinion!”

“The office environment is fantastic.  You make having braces a great experience for the kids.  The staff is so nice, understanding and patient.  The contest and Points programs are such a great idea too.”

“Would like, at the end of the visit, a summary of overall mouth health. What’s my status (healthy, not healthy, etc.) and what do I need to do to make improvements. The little sheet that I got when I left was great, but it doesn’t talk about what I need to change, just what’s wrong.”

Although we only share a few comments here, the complete list demonstrated a clear picture of the practices’ strengths and weaknesses in terms of patient satisfaction. Patients were allowed the opportunity to offer specific suggestions, comments and inquiries about the practice, providing us with a clearer understanding of their experience. The end result? Honest feedback for us to examine and learn from.

Taking Action

So we’ve learned about some of the things that are working and what needs improvement with our orthodontic client.  So what does that mean for you? My advice is to take the time to listen to your patients and make those improvements for your practice.  Focus on the specific improvements that your patients share with you. After all, the main reason for this exercise is to improve your practice and learn where to focus your priorities. After you’ve put your changes in place, make sure to communicate with your patients. Post office news on your website and social media sites, or communicate the changes in your next newsletter. Above all, make sure your patients feel heard by taking action with their requests. As we’ve said before, the easiest way to improve upon your practices’ marketing success is to sustain and improve the continuity of care with established patients.

And don’t forget, utilizing the results of your survey to gage the success of marketing programs will encourage you to continue, alter and/or expand your marketing efforts. Get permission to use positive survey responses as testimonials for your marketing materials and on the website. Survey your patients on an annual basis and learn what programs are working, and which ones are not as part of an integrated marketing plan.

About Wendy Hamel

As co-founder of Med-Marketers, and serving as Director of Client Programs, Wendy is directly responsible for guiding creative strategy and overseeing client services for the company. Wendy has over 10 years of marketing and management experience serving technology, healthcare and retail. Wendy’s background includes consulting and strategic marketing for orthodontists, plastic surgeons, pediatricians and primary care physicians in the Greater Boston area.

An initial question that comes to mind is how many private medical practices on average are taking this critical first step to marketing? From our experience, it appears that 20% or less of practice owners have an actual layered marketing strategy that takes into account their practice’s increase and decrease in numbers year over year…

Which treatment segments are thriving?

Which ones have decreased from the previous year?

What actions are being taken to drive new patients seeking private-pay or cosmetic treatments?

This may sound like a fairly basic analysis that any sound minded business owner would and should be taking. However, most medical practice owners are also practitioners and spend 90% of their days or more actually treating patients. Unfortunately, as a direct result the business side of the practice suffers unless there is a competent office manager or partner who takes on these responsibilities directly.

On that note, how many private medical practices are really able to boast having synchronized finance and marketing partners who work together towards common business objectives? 10% or less?

About Scott MacAllister
As co-founder and Managing Director of Med-Marketers, Scott is responsible for the overall strategy, development, and day to day operations of the company. Scott has over 15 years of sales, marketing, and business development experience stemming from technology, healthcare, and the retail industries. Prior to Med-Marketers, Scott held Business Development and Marketing leadership roles at both Core Security Technologies and Imaginatik PLC. As an integral part of management, he built and developed teams that were focused on executing brand awareness and demand generation initiatives that directly helped both companies realize significant increases to their overall revenue lines.