Blog Archives

Why Healthcare Providers Don’t Advertise

8/28/2009

Conventional wisdom says its tradition which prevents healthcare providers from advertising their services. Truthfully, it may be simpler.

In the pioneer days a new doctor would come to town, “hang out his shingle,” and the resultant word-of-mouth in the community was enough to keep him gainfully employed for the remainder of his life.

In many communities it still works that way. In those communities there are more people looking for a primary healthcare provider than there are doctors willing to accept new patients.

Not all doctors, however!

Not all physicians, dentists, optometrists, chiropractors, physical therapists or nurse practitioners have a waiting list of new patients, hoping to become “accepted.”

At a meeting with a television sales staff yesterday I was asked if professionals (other than personal injury lawyers) ever advertised their practices? I had to admit that it’s not common. But, the problem, as I see it, isn’t tradition. The problem is communication.

Healthcare providers tend to be scientifically-trained, analytical, rational, left-brain thinkers. The nature of their professions requires them to critically examine the clues and deduce the optimal treatment.

Marketing? That’s persuasion. That’s an intuitive, perceptive, emotional, right-brain process. Its a way of thinking which runs counter to a health care provider’s mindset.

And when effective salespeople talk about “advertising,” they know that people make decisions emotionally, then come up with a intellectual explanation for the purchase later. Naturally, the salesperson uses emotional reasoning. Just as naturally, the health care provider is making a rational decision.

The doctor asks a rational question:

“If I spend $2,500 on this advertising schedule, how many new patients will I get?”

But the salesperson responds with an intuitive answer, “If you don’t spend the money, how many new patients will you get?”

Since they’re obviously not communicating, no sale happens. No advertising is run. And the doctor still wonders how to effectively (and ethically) attract new patients and grow his practice.

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Working Your Dental Practice As If It Were A Franchise

8/25/2009

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The most successful practices don’t make marketing decisions. They don’t have to. The most successful practices have a marketing plan, and a system.

Have you ever given any thought to franchising? Some of the most successful companies don’t expand by building more stores. They sell franchises.

The franchisor sells a recognizable name with its accompanying goodwill.

The franchisee buys a system. He/she pays handsomely to use the names, and proven systems of such companies as Hardees, 24-Hour Fitness, Build-A-Bear Workshop, Baskin Robins, or One Hour Heating & Air Conditioning.

Those systems provide consistency. Consistency in product and service, and consistency in customer contact, including marketing.

The power of frequency

Every media sales representative will explain the importance of frequency of repetition of your marketing message. They’re right. A message not repeated is quickly forgotten. But, a dozen repetitions in a single day followed by four weeks of no contact is also quickly forgotten.

Consistency of message is as important as consistency in customer service. Or patient care.

Consistent high frequency of contact creates top of mind awareness. It increases the odds that when someone thinks “dentist,” Dr. Cuspid’s name is the one that comes to mind. Whether that person needs dental services herself, or is being asked for a referral, he/she thinks of Dr. Cuspid. Top of mind awareness is effective even when the person has no first hand experience.

But consistent frequency doesn’t necessarily mean buying more ads.

Create a system

Most practices have used simple tactics to make additional contact with patients. They’ve sent notes, made follow-up calls, mailed newsletters, but they don’t do it consistently. And those efforts are forgotten.

But a system keeps these, and other contacts, happen on schedule. No patient is forgotten. No step is skipped.

For example:

1.       New patient, referred by a current patient, calls for appointment.

2.       New patient receives a new patient information packet.

3.       Dr. Cuspid personally calls and introduces himself to the patient.

4.       The patient comes in for initial exam, and is warmly greeted by the receptionist.

5.       Patient sees framed testimonials from other satisfied patients.

6.       Patient schedules second appointment for treatment.

7.       The patient receives a “thank you note,” signed by the entire staff.

8.       The patient receives a postcard reminder of his treatment appointment several days in advance.

9.       The patient receives a telephone reminder the day before his appointment.

10.   The patient is greeted by name at treatment appointment.

Are we done?

Hardly!

Doctor Cuspid’s staff also sends a handwritten thank you note, and a coffee cup with the practice’s logo to the patient who originally made the referral. This also happens automatically, because the doctor has a system in place.

Do you have a system for frequent, consistent patient contact? Shouldn’t you?

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Sir Isaac Newton’s First Law Of Dental Marketing

8/21/2009

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Would you ever advertise for your competitor’s benefit? It might be the smartest way to grow your own practice.

Here ’s the scenario: You’re booked one and a half months out, new patients are calling (about one a day) and you just can’t seem to catch up with all the treatments you have diagnosed…What do you do?

Well, the answer I get most often is to STOP MARKETING. Why have patients call when they have to wait two months just to get in for their first appointment. It seems better to stop marketing, and start up again when you need patients.

There is one very important thing to consider when you decide to stop marketing. Some call it the snowball effect, I call it MARKETING MOMENTUM.

Newton’s First Law of Motion

Every object in a state of motion tends to remain in that state of motion unless an external force is applied to it. This simply means if something is moving or standing still, it will continue moving or standing still unless a force is applied. A force like friction, gravity, or a physical push.

When a doctor starts up a marketing program, I talk about average results, the momentum, and what they will see happen in the next few months. They’ll see schedules start to fill up, and patients will seem to “drop out of the sky.”

These same patients can’t wait to start treatment, and pretty soon you’re booked solid, whether it is directly traced to the program or not.

When you put a marketing program in place that is hands-free, simple, and consistent, it creates a buzz, an excitement both inside and outside the office, and things start gaining momentum. You’ve put an object in motion, and as long as you continue that object will stay in motion.

Think of Your Marketing as a Playground Swing

You push at timed intervals and the swing goes higher and higher. Finally, you’ve reached the highest the swing will go, so you stop pushing. The momentum of the swing dies down until eventually it comes to a stop.

It takes a lot more energy to get that swing back up to the top again rather than the small amount of effort it took once you had things going.

Back to dentistry; you still have a problem with booking people two months out. This is a problem many practices would love to have, and frankly, it’s not a problem at all, but another marketing tool. One of the biggest selling points of a practice is its exclusivity.

You now have a schedule that is booked solid for two months, it doesn’t get more exclusive than that.

When patients look at it, they’ll ask themselves what dental practice they would rather go to; the one that has no patients, or the one that is so good, it has patients lined up at the door.

I personally would choose the latter option, because that practice must be good and must be doing something right. And trust me; people don’t mind waiting to go to the dentist. In fact, people love to wait for anything, just look at the line for Starbucks every morning.

So You Want to Stop the Marketing to Catch Up with Your Schedule

Here’s what happens:

The patients that would have called your practice, scheduled, and waited to be seen are now going to the dentist across the street (your direct competition). This does accomplish your goal and your schedule empties out.

Congratulations; the patient flow has now ceased to exist, and now, not only are you not booked out two months, but you now have the openings to schedule same-day appointments (if a patient calls) because you stopped marketing for new patients a few months ago.

Now you struggle to fill a day's schedule, pay a front office worker and hygienist full-time pay to sit around through the empty appointments, and, to top it all off, the dentist across the street is booked two months out, and every time you look out the window they have new patients coming in.

The worst part is, your marketing momentum has now stopped. In order to increase the new patient flow to the same level it was, you’ll have to make a big push.

Just think how great it is to show up at the practice and know you have a full schedule every day for the next couple months. Sounds like a perfect practice to me. Why would you want to stop it?

What is the answer to your problem?

·          Instead of stopping the new patient flow, you could hire some help, or add a day to the schedule

·          If it got really bad and you really didn’t want patients, you could even refer them to another practice

·          Do anything but stop the flow of new patients. There is no quicker way to kill a practice

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Search Engine Optimization Tips: Meta Tags

8/18/2009

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SEO Tip #1: Mysterious and Magical Meta Tags

Meta tags have gained a certain mystical notoriety from the generally accepted rumor that adding them to a web page will magically propel that page to the top of search engine results. In the glory days of the Internet, meta tags held greater importance to search engines than they currently enjoy. Modern search engine algorithms have progressed beyond the point that the content of these tags make any real difference to page position or rank.

I am not implying that you can ignore all meta tags though. While they don't contribute to your web site's position in search engines, some of them contribute heavily to getting visitors from search engines to click through to your site. This alone provides a strong marketing incentive for adding them to every page.

Meet the Meta Tags Title Tag: Located in about the same position in a HTML document as the meta tags, the title tag is often lumped into general meta tag discussions. However, in this post I will try to stay on topic and recognize that the title tag is not a meta tag. Keep in mind that the title tag is a critical SEO element and you should probably read about optimizing title tags before worrying about meta tags.

Meta Description Tag: The meta description tag has special importance because many search engines add it to the snippets returned on the search engine result page (SERP). While it may not help with deciding actual position within the SERP, a well crafted meta description tag does influence whether or not people will click on the search result. Careful attention to the copy of the meta description can have bottom line impact on the click through to your web site.

Meta Keywords Tag: The most confused, misused, and abused of the meta tags is the meta keywords tag. In an age where web site owners have learned to obsess about keywords, having a place within the HTML code specifically for them seems almost too easy. So easy in fact, web site owners frequently jam pack the meta keywords tag with every possible keyword and keyword combinations they can think of. Search engines realized long ago that the meta keywords tag was pretty much useless to them and none of the major engines take any notice of it anymore.

Meta Robots Tag: To keep search engine spiders away from a page or to keep the page from sharing any of its ranking power (often called link juice) to other pages, you can use the meta robots tag. Search engines will crawl a page and index everything on it unless they find this tag telling them not to. Not including this tag on a page is like hanging out a welcome sign to search engines so unless you really want to keep them away, you can forget about this tag

Meta All the Rest Tags: From time to time you may see examples of other meta tags included in the HTML specifications. Copyright, Author, Generator, Classification, Rating and a slew of other obscure tags are available for use if you need them, but search engines completely ignore them so have no real value on search engine optimization.

Take Home Points

- Do use the meta description tag

- Don't bother with the meta keywords tag

- Do use the meta robots tag to hide a page or prevent caching

- Do forget about all the other meta tags

- Don't call it a meta tag, but do use a unique title tag on every page

SEO Tip #2: Designing Dazzling Descriptions

A well crafted meta description tag will increase traffic to your medical web site even if your position within a search engine results page (SERP) is not as good as you would like. Consider the meta description tag as an advertisement that, if done well, will entice people to click on your link instead of results above or below it.

All of the major search engines use the meta description tag to some degree. Matt Cutts from Google said in his video “Anatomy of a Search Snippet” that the meta description tag is one of the main sources for the snippet. Google uses other sources for the snippet in the absence of a meta description tag which means that leaving out the meta description abdicates responsibility for describing your medical practice to Google.

Although the meta description tag has no influence over position in the SERP, it has tremendous value in influencing people to click on the link when it appears. Having this kind of control in organic search is a rare gift which offers a financial benefit if you use it.

Meta Description Tag Syntax

Place the meta description tag within the head element of the HTML document.

Use the following syntax:

<head>

<meta name='description' content='Put your dazzling description text here'/>

</head>

Tips for Writing Meta Descriptions

- Know Your limits: Google displays 160 characters while Yahoo! displays 165 and Live Search /MSN displays over 200. As a simple rule, keep all descriptions shorter than 160 characters.

- Focus on Users: Think of your users and tell them what they can expect to find on the page that will help them. If you try to spin them and the page doesn’t deliver what you said it would, your users will hit the back button. Common sense says that a good search engine will conclude that a lot of users returning from your web site may mean that the site is not a good match for that keyword. Remember, truth is its own reward especially in search engine optimization.

- Dazzle Them: Just because your description is truthful doesn’t mean it needs to be boring. A concise, compelling and complete description will attract qualified clients so spend the time to make it perfect.

- Use Keywords: Search engines bold the terms users search for in the results they return. This added emphasis can make your description stand out even more and attract click through to your medical web site.

- Find a Winner: Test out different descriptions to see if one converts better than others. Pay-per-click is a great testing environment for this. Run descriptions as ad campaigns to see which ones get the most click through action. When you find a strong performer, use it for your page description.

Take Home Points

- Do create a unique compelling meta description for each page

- Do make it short less than 160 characters including spaces

- Do experiment with descriptions to find strong converters

- Don't use the same description on every page

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Social Media Marketing: Get With The Program Or Get Left in the Dust

8/14/2009

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“My mother asked me what Twitter was the other day,” said one of my consultants recently, laughing hysterically. Though my consultant laughs now, her 71-year-old mother’s interest shows that slowly but surely, the entire spectrum of the population is becoming savvy to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and other new modes of social media that are popping up faster than you can post a Tweet on Twitter.

Last year, I don’t even think I knew what Twitter was, but that’s what’s so phenomenal about social media. It’s redefined the marketing, PR and advertising worlds in an extremely short period of time.

Between only February and March 2009, Twitter’s unique-visitor traffic rose 131 percent, taking the number of visitors to 9.3 million. Facebook now has 250 million users with over 100 million who log in at least once per day.

To many in the business world, social media is a strange, confusing concept. “Why would I care to know what you had for breakfast or what music you’re listening to?” you say? Social media is about closing the gap between companies and their consumers. Knowing everything about your consumers firsthand, even down to what they ate today, is a gift. Isn’t this the type of access marketers have been aching to gain for decades?

Last week, I attended a social media seminar led by the director of a public relations firm. She hit it on the head when she explained the attitudes that more traditional executives have toward social media. “They think social media is a bunch of kids on MySpace in the middle of the night,” she said. As she went on to explain, nothing could be further from the truth.

The basis of social media is sharing information in real time, and in doing so, making friends with business partners, customers and so on. To have the opportunity to post articles, blogs, videos and press releases for free and instantaneously have your entire social network see them is priceless. With a high number of users on these social media websites, information spreads like wildfire. Even faster than global news outlets. Now, that’s serious market exposure.

With the use of social networking sites, consumers and the media have total access to companies. This allows a few special things to happen:

·          A culture develops within your social networks where you and users can connect and share ideas.

·          You can provide value to your network by posting links to relevant resources and information.

·          Companies become more trusted as members of their social networks feel less intimidated and more equal.

·          You establish a leadership role among users and are able to listen and follow others.

If you combine all of the above outcomes of successful social media, this leads to consumers and the media becoming friends with a company. And that’s really all that matters because sales and media exposure will automatically follow.

Social media is not going anywhere, and those who refuse to accept that and jump in will ultimately outdate themselves and lose out on revenue.

What has your experience been with social media sites like Twitter and Facebook? Let me know your thoughts.

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Get Inside Your Patients’ Heads

8/11/2009

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Does your ideal practice match your neighborhood’s demographics? Do you know your patients “hot buttons?”

Your medical or dental practice is a business, which will thrive when you meet the wants, desires and needs of your customers/patients.

You already know this is much harder than it sounds. Each person is totally unique. If you look at their individual wants, desires and needs you will never be able to satisfy them all and you will go broke trying.

This is where statistics comes into play. Any time you get a large enough group together they will begin to form a statistically coherent pattern.

You can use this pattern to gain a little glimpse into what is going on in your patients’ heads. That is the purpose of things like census data – to look at big enough groups of people to help governments make appropriate policies.

Back at the turn of the century businesses worked out their best customers were all of a certain age, spent a certain amount of money, lived in certain areas, had certain jobs and visited certain shops. This demographic data was a great start to help us to segment our customers target our marketing. Even today media will provide you with demographic data on their readership (or listenership, or viewership) to help you make a decision about whether or not to advertise with them.

The problem with demographics is they don’t take into account large variances within groups, and they don’t take into account the changes in how people view the world.

30 years ago you could look at a demographic profile and make a decision that if you wanted to reach businessmen of a certain income and age you should advertise in the Financial Review or Wall Street Journal. These days, people gather their information in a more varied way.

The Internet allows people to search for precisely what they want. Readership of newspapers and magazines are dramatically down. TV viewing is down. Radio listeners are down. People go to their clan or their group to find information. And people have always hung out with like-minded people and exchanged ideas and information.

Making your decisions with only demographic data will not be helpful to your practice.

So what has replaced demographics? In recent times we have started to look at psychographic profiles – we work out the common things our best patients think, value and believe in.

Why do people do what they do? To do this you ask questions such as:

·          What needs are your best customers/patients looking to fulfill?

·          What beliefs about themselves and the world do they hold?

·          What inspires them?

·          What problems do they have?

·          What is similar in how they view the world?

·          Where do they “hang out”?

Psychologists have been doing something similar for years when they look at tools to help profile people. They look at ways of categorizing ways people view and interact with the world.

How might this work for your practice?

Recently I studied the demographic data for a pharmacy which had retained BAC Medical Marketing’s services. They were located in a blue collar, lower income suburb.

I found that their best patients/customers were split into two categories – young moms with very small children, and retired people. Our client chose to focus on the young mom market.

I turned to psychographics to look for similarities in the way they viewed the world.

Many of them had grown up in a life of semi-hardship. The majority now live in the same or close suburb to the one they grew up in. They were locals who had been to the local school before marrying and settling down in their community.

“I want my kids to have a better life than I did when I was growing up” was a common saying among these women when talking about their kids. “I want my kids to be healthy so they can do their best in school and make something of themselves” and “When it comes to my kid’s health, money is not an issue – their health is more important than money” were also popular sayings.

So how did this translate into my marketing?

I placed an emphasis on boosting the health of their kids to help their school performance, and to set them up for the future.

I used pictures and colors that reflected the taste and age of their children (and not some over the top flash designer's ideas of what kids and families look like).

Is this manipulation?

No. I just looked at the pharmacy’s customer base and sought to understand their needs better. The business wanted more customers just like the ones they had, so by directing our marketing to the psychographic profile of their best customers, our marketing made it easier for new customers to feel right at home with the company.

Now it’s your turn. Get inside your patients’ heads.

Start with your best patients – the ones you truly love to see.

What makes them so great? How do they view the world? What problems are they trying to solve by coming to you? What do they value? Where do they hang out?

While you are at it, have a look inside yourself.

What makes you so great? How do you view the world? What problems do you love to solve? What are your values? Where do you hang out?

When your profile and your patient’s profile are congruent, then your practice booms. If you are in a state of flux and you are not clear on your own profile, you’re likely to attract patients that aren’t profitable, or simply don’t provide the cases you want to treat.

Getting clear on your own profile and matching it to the profile of your ideal patient makes your practice marketing easier, your case acceptance easier, and your life easier.

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