Reduce your tax payment and Spend on marketing in 2011

Gain significant tax benefits by investing in important marketing before the end of the year

If you’ve remained profitable this year, you’re most likely going to have a tax liability early next year. One way to reduce your practice’s income taxes is to invest in any marketing tools your practice will need before the end of the year. ALL marketing expenditures are 100% tax deductable.

If your practice will need any marketing tools (or staff training) next year to implement an effective marketing plan and take your practice to the next level, you should consider investing in those tools now, before the end of the year. Doing so will allow you to deduct those expenses in the current year and reduce your tax liability.

Here is a checklist of important marketing efforts you should consider investing in before the end of the year:

• Staff training – front desk training to handle inbound calls, training staff to cross-market ancillary services & ask for referrals, and Practice Rep training to build your referral base. Take the opportunity to prepare your staff so they’re ready in 2011 to help you take your practice to the next level
• Web site updates and search engine optimization – if your web site needs updating or needs more exposure through effective search engine optimization.
• Marketing collaterals – if your brochures don’t reflect the professional image you need to build your brand or you need additional tools to market individual service lines or products
• On-hold message – develop a recorded message for callers to listen to when placed on hold. Studies show that callers will stay on hold longer and be less likely to abandon the call with a professionally recorded on-hold message
• eVideos – A short 60 second video on your web site will not only provide visitors with a visual of your practice and you, it will also help you search engine optimization due to the impact YouTube has on Google search result.

For more enquiries, please call us at 852-25801058 for more information.

www.medicalmarketing.com.hk

It's Time to Rethink Viral Marketing – Burger King Campaign as an example

The goal of a viral campaign is that it doesn't perform well in the next 10 minutes; rather, that it have some long-term impact. For example, instead of simply uploading a video on YouTube, think about how your audience will find your content -- are you using the right keywords to provide stronger ties to your brand and your viral marketing effort through SEO? And once your content is discovered, how are you encouraging your audience to remain engaged? Also, is there a clear path of distribution?

The list is exhausting yet necessary if you have any chance at sparking sustainable viral content.

So what does this have to do with sandwiches and my spontaneous thought the other day? Well, I was simply curious to know if the benefits of an almost seven-year-old viral project still proved valuable to Burger King.

This could be challenging. When the burger king campaign launched, The co-developers of the campaign, the term "viral marketing" wasn't yet mainstream and to really make you feel old.

Yet even without the benefits of video aggregation platforms, Facebook and Twitter, the burger king campaign saw 1 million hits the first five days. The average time spent on the site was an amazing 5 minutes and 44 seconds. The campaign over the years has accrued more than 4 million hits.

Back to my original thought: Impressive as its statistics were years ago, does the campaign still provide a benefit to Burger King and how?

Well, impressive SEO results for one! Burger King is #4 on Google when searching the word "chicken" -- only below Wikipedia, recipes, and KFC.

What's more, the Burger King campaign content continues to be discovered through social-media channels such as Twitter, where sentiment is positive and frequency of mention is high.

The façade that is all too easily emulated and completely misunderstood is the "life curve" of a viral campaign. While some companies guarantee viral success, their definition of reaching goals need to be rethought and re-taught. Campaigns via viral marketing are designed to be provocative, yet how does that provocation impact your overall brand marketing strategy? If you start thinking "logistical versus parabolic" then you'll be in great shape. The assumption that all viral contain is good only for the short term amplified brand lift has to continue to be disproved. By embracing sustainability when it comes to your viral campaigns -- thinking through integration strategies, your landing pages, and your content.

For more enquiries, please call us at 852-25801058 for more information.

www.medicalmarketing.com.hk

Working smarter is the key to building your practice cost effectively

Step back for a moment and think about why you chose your healthcare profession and formed your own practice. As a medical professional, you’ve spent years training and honing your skills in your specific specialty. You focus on being the best you can be and learning from each patient to give all of your patients the best care you can provide. Why then, when it comes to marketing your practice, do you try to take on this specialized task alone? Your strengths are in healing and are valued in the medical field. Well, there are also professionals who specialize in specific medical marketing niches that you can tap into so you don’t work harder or longer hours to try to build your practice.

If you’d like to work smarter, instead of harder, to build your practice or if you want more insight into all of the different areas a healthcare marketing specialist could help you.

The most successful practices do what they do best – treating patients. No one would have surgery performed by a web designer, so why should a well trained and specialized doctor think they could develop a website as well as a professional web designer who builds them every day? Did you or a staff member create your marketing materials? If so, the chances are that they are not as high quality and will not have the same kind of returns that hiring a professional would have.

Take your web site, for example. A specialized web professional would know that not only does your website need to be visually appealing and user friendly, it needs to be search engine optimized. They’ll know how to identify the most common keywords specific to your practice that prospective patients are using so you can compete for Google placement. They know what Google looks for, what tends to work best and how to test for your specific specialty to make sure that you continually get a high return on your web marketing investment.

Successful medical practices work smarter by hiring professionals to develop their brand and to create all of the necessary marketing communication tools to make them stand out in their patients mind and their referral sources. This allows them to focus on treating their patients. Marketing specialists can also assist in training staff on the proper marketing techniques and essentials for effective tracking and compliance to Code of practice.

For more enquiries, please call us at 852-25801058 for more information.

www.medicalmarketing.com.hk

Facebook’s Facelift: Does your practice need one too?

In keeping with the social media theme, Facebook’s CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg just announced one of the largest profile revisions to date on “60 Minutes” with Lesley Stahl this past weekend. The profile shift will emphasize photos, personal information, and increased usability.
The new look is designed to be more interesting to Facebook users and to display information in an easier way to understand. I’m impressed with how flexible Facebook is and how they are constantly adapting to make the Facebook “experience” the best possible. Healthcare practice owners can learn a lot from this.

Facebook remodeled the format of the profile page after listening to feedback from users and watching trends. A strong emphasis was put on photos and sharing personal information. The main profile photo’s size is larger, leading to an emphasis on it being a profile page about a specific person, just as your face and personality should be front and center in the marketing of your practice.  The site is now more collaborative, allowing a user to make groupings on their profile of friends, family, music, sports, or projects that are important to them.  Similar groupings on your website would allow for easier browsing.  What a referring doctor might look for and what a friend of a patient looking to find out about a certain procedure and then book an appointment are very different, yet equally important paths you should have.  Understanding what current patients and referral sources want from your practice will help give you a wider range of subjects to consider.

The idea behind the new profile design is similar to the suggestions I gave in a previous blog post about how physicians and healthcare providers should try to develop more personal connections with their target audiences. This can be done on your web site, Facebook fan page and your marketing resume. Creating connections are important to helping patients feel more connected to you as a person as well as their physician.

Are you open to reformatting your business from feedback and trends?  Successful medical practices remain flexible and look for new opportunities to expand. Understanding that change is part of the future and embracing that idea will help your practice grow with your patients.  This change in a major social media leader leads to the question of “How important is appearance and adaptability?” Patients coming to your office for the first time will take in your personal appearance and the layout of the office. When they visit your practice website, they will look to see if the information they find important is near the top and easy to understand.  Whether it’s your qualifications, a professional photo, how to make an appointment, your services, or simply how to contact you, your patients will appreciate you taking their feedback into account and the effort you display in remodeling your web site, and your practice as a whole, in an effort to better serve them. It will also enhance your practice’s brand.

For more enquiries, please call us at 852-25801058 for more information.

www.medicalmarketing.com.hk

Few Steps to a target keyword List for your target patients

Follow these steps to start developing a good keyword list:

1.       Brainstorm a list.

Start by brainstorming. Put down your clinic names, and other pertinent clinic names. Include any words or phrases that relate to your products. Ask staff, friends, and patients to add to the list.

2.       Use a keyword suggestion tool or two.

Next, you need to analyze the list that you’ve brainstormed to find real-world searches that people use. This is something that people often miss. The quickest way to confirm keywords is to use a keyword suggestion tool. It will return a list of those words and phrases that have actually been searched earlier in the year. It will also tell you how many times they have been searched in a given period. This is your real-world proof that people are searching on these terms.

3.       Identify your words and phrases.

This is important if you have more than one niche and you run a targeted ad for one of them. You want to make sure you use those words that you identified for that segmental patient. If your niche audience is comprised of gamers, you’ll want to target different segments in each ad.

4.       Begin using and testing your list.

Now that you have a list of keywords, use them to optimize your practice website. What you are trying to do is find the most direct words, phrases, and even acronyms that potential customers will use to find you.Testing is a key part of this process and can be taken in two steps. First you want to test whether the keywords you put into a search engine actually bring up searches that are right for your product or services. That’s an “eyeball” test and can be done by going through and performing several searches. The second step is testing whether the campaigns you set up with the keywords actually succeed in bringing traffic.

For more enquiries, please call us at 852-25801058 for more information.

www.medicalmarketing.com.hk