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

Search Engine results - Organic search vs paid search

Through organic search, you can reach potential customers at the very moment they are considering a purchase and provide them information exactly when they are looking for it. While many businesses are attempting to connect with their potential customers through paid search, the opportunity to reach these customers through organic search = the results that are algorithmically generated rather than paid for – remains largely untapped. In fact, 88% of online search dollars spent on paid results, even though 85% of searchers click on organic results. Search is a fairly unique opportunity to connect with your potential customers

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

www.medicalmarketing.com.hk

How You Can Use “Word of Mouth” Apply to Medical Marketing

Use word of mouth marketing to make your clinic more profitable, how to spend less on marketing, and how to make your patients happier. It cannot be denied that the world's most respected and profitable companies get their best customers for free through the power of word of mouth.
Five essential steps that make word of mouth work and everything you need to get started using them. Understand the real purpose of blogs, communities, viral email, evangelists, and buzz-when to use them and how simple it is to make them work.
Understand why everyone is talking about a certain restaurant, car, band, or dry cleaner-and why other businesses and products are ignored. Discover why some products become huge successes without a penny of promotion-and why some multi-million-dollar advertising campaigns fail to get noticed.

Five T's in Action

• Talkers: Who Will Tell Their Friends About You?
• Topics: What Will They Talk About
• Tools: How Can You Help the Message Travel?
• Taking Part: When Should You Join the Conversation?
• Tracking: What Are People Saying About You?

Word of mouth marketing isn't deception. It's the opposite.
Open your eyes to a new way of doing business. You'll see that honest marketing makes more money, because customers who trust you will talk about you. Learn how to be the remarkable clinic that people want to share with their friends.  

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

www.medicalmarketing.com.hk