how to market a doctors office 2015 guide

+ Tidal Wave Marketing

5 Tudor City Place

New York, NY 10017 Phone: 347-690-5571

E-Mail: [email protected] Web: www.tidalwavemarketing.net

Medical Marketing How to market a doctors office

2015

+Tidal Wave Marketing Medical Marketing Agency

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Email: [email protected] Phone: 347-690-5571

One Size Does Not Fit All

This guide is an outline to successfully marketing within the medical industry. A key point to remember while going through this guide is that these techniques and suggestions must be tailored to your industry, location and demographic. Every practice has different goals for their marketing efforts.

Marketing Plans

No matter your industry a marketing plan needs to be meticulously laid out. Before getting into specific marketing channels and outlets time must be spent understanding the practice itself. We will describe the four steps above and how they relate to a medical practice.

Once we have a strategy defined and ready to be put in place, we will then go into specific marketing techniques and the most effective channels to use.

Measure Your Success

Educate and Align Your Staff

Develop and Outline Your Strategy

Define Your Goals


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Step 1: Define Your Goals

Defining your goals is the first priority. Are you looking to increase patient volumes? Highlight a new procedure? Bring brand awareness to a practice or center? How you answer those questions with change the approach to your marketing plan. The examples and questions below are based on the goal of increasing patient volumes. A successful marketing campaign will not just bring you more patients; it will bring you more QUALITY patients. Through a mixture of financial research and personal preference of the doctor you should clearly define what your ideal patient would be. Below are some questions that should be answered to help define your practice goals: Doctor Preference:

1. What is your ideal patient? 2. What demographic are you catering towards? 3. What specific procedures or treatments do you want to do? 4. How many patients do you want to see each day/week/month? 5. How do you want your practice to be perceived? (Ex. Boutique, High

Volume, Specialist, etc.) 6. Do you want to be an in-network or out-of-network provider? 7. Do you want to accept insurance at all?


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Often times doctors believe their patient demographic is not something that would be captured with digital marketing. According to Google research studies, Health and Wellness search volumes are almost identical across all generations.

Financial Questions:

1. What are your highest paying procedures or treatments? 2. What insurance pays the highest percentage of billed amount? 3. Where did those patients with high paying insurance come from?

Referrals? Online source? Private Company?


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These are just a few questions to start with that will help clearly define your goals. Having a concise focus on patient type, insurance, procedure and treatments will help greatly in defining your marketing efforts.

Step 2: Develop and Outline Your Strategy Your strategy will be based around your goals. Taking the goal of increasing patient volumes as our example you must develop a strategy that you are comfortable handling and investing in. Based on some of the answers to the previous steps questions a target patient volume should be determined. What is your average revenue for the “ideal patient” that you are focusing on? Take that number and based on your financial needs/goal create a target patient volume. Daily Target – Monthly Target – Yearly Target – It is important to remember that this number is only a target. It may fluctuate based on insurance, practice changes and things outside of your control. But by creating this target it provides a tangible number for your marketing efforts to aim at.


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When outlining your strategy the initially determined goal with sway what outlets you will focus on. If you are branding, re-branding or launching a location or service more traditional marketing avenues such as TV, print, and newspaper may be incorporated. With this goal viewership or impression make take first priority or as least be co-prioritized with direct patient bookings. With our goal of increasing patient volumes it is more difficult to draw a direct correlation from traditional marketing methods to patient bookings compared to digital marketing methods. The next two areas to determine are based around time and revenue. The intuitive answer that first comes to mind is, immediately. But you need to objectively look at your practice and determine at what time frame are you comfortable with seeing a notable uptick in patient volumes. The reason that this question is important is because existing and non-existing marketing efforts that may or may not be in place can greatly effect the time a particular channel needs to succeed. If you already have a doctor/practice website in place with long-term value that will aid in seeing a quicker turnaround. Based on your needs and what could already be in place you should then determine which outlets to focus on. Below is a general overview of some sample outlets and there time on return.


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Channels: Doctor / Practice Website: Long term (for non-branded keyword) Medical Directories/Review Outlets: Mid range term Paid Marketing Channels (Ex. Adwords, Yelp, ZocDoc): Immediate

Having an idea about the immediacy of your marketing efforts can help determine whether or not to remove certain outlets or shift more time into one channel. The next question in laying out your strategy is tied to the time requirements and its budget. Of course as long as there is a certain percentage return on your investment the budget would be limitless. The idea to determine a comfortable budget ties into the answer to your question on time. If you are comfortable with part of your budget building an online presence for you, such as a practice website, that will generally take longer to see returns on then you will also generally have a higher budget. A budget is relative to each doctor and practice and it is important to establish one that you are comfortable with. Additionally it is important to have some consistency throughout the initial stages to easily be able to measure the different channels efficacy. Setting a budget can quickly


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become overwhelming. Between a blend of availability to invest and time needed to see a return you can build a comprehensive budget specific to your practice. Below is an itemized list of some possible expenses. Marketing Expenses: Brand Development Website Development Content Creation Profile / Directory claim and build Paid Marketing Channel Management Reputation / Review system creation and management Building or sourcing a developer to create a modern RESPONSIVE site is important. If your site is not mobile and tablet friendly you are missing out on high volumes of traffic and could potentially be penalized by search engines. Additionally mobile researchers are 10% more likely to book appointment then traditional desktop researchers.


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Step 3: Educate and Align Your Staff One of the main objectives in creating and marketing a digital presence for your practice is to give the prospective online patient researching you a glimpse into what your physical practice is like. If your online presence is able to make a patient comfortable, fell welcomed and already have a positive attitude towards your capabilities it has succeeded greatly. Where a connection can be lost in when that online patient makes their first physical connection with your office. Be it scheduling an appointment online or calling the office that digital feeling must carry over into their physical experience. This has two very large implications towards your practices success.


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1. Customer Service – patients are given numerous platforms to voice their concerns, pains, reviews, content and any other emotion. They are also inundated with a “perceived” large amount of choice. They are one click or page view away from searching for or booking with another doctor. Giving the perception of a high level of patient care digitally should be carried over when the patient connects in person.

2. Explaining your services or specialty – the initial inquiry from a potential patient usually is made with your staff. What is it that they both have in common? No medical training. Like any private company your practice is a business. Your potential “customers” or patients first line of contact should be with an educated member of your practice. Your staff should clearly and concisely be able to answers questions about you, your point of differentiation, and the areas that you focus in. Such as:

a. Your medical background, training, and board certifications

b. Any associations, medical groups or medical placements you

hold

c. The procedures that you offer, and experience with them Below is a line graph showing the average number of searches a patient does online before committing to contact a doctor or practice. If you have made it through their entire digital research process you must make sure not to lose them at the point of contact.


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The education of your staff is so key that is could be hindering your efforts in bringing in new patients without you realizing. Take the below conversation for example:

Caller: Hi, is this Dr. Smith’s Office?

Office Staff: Yes it is, what are you calling about?

Caller: I am looking for an ENT that specializes in rhinoplasty. Is that something Dr. Smith does?

Office Staff: Yes, Dr. Smith specializes in the nose and performing rhinoplasty procedures.

Caller: Great. I was recommended to find someone that does open rhinoplasty procedures. Does the doctor offer that?

Office Staff: I’m sorry, no. All his rhinoplasty the doctors’ procedures are considered closed.

Caller: Oh ok, thank you for time anyway. Good-bye.


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The office staff was polite and handled the customer service aspect of the calling well. But did they have a clear understanding of the doctors’ experience and procedures? No. We have seen these types of phone calls hundreds of times and had them going unnoticed for a long time. After the staff is educated on some experience, certifications and distinctions in the procedures offered by the doctor the conversation goes differently.

Caller: Hi, is this Dr. Smith’s Office?

Office Staff: Yes it is. What are you calling about?

Caller: I am looking for an ENT that specializes in rhinoplasty. Is that something Dr. Smith does?

Office Staff: Yes, Dr. Smith is highly experienced in rhinoplasty procedures. He has been performing them for over 10 years. He is also double board certified in otolaryngology and facial plastics.

Caller: Great. I was recommended to find someone that does open rhinoplasty procedures. Does the doctor?

Office Staff: Dr. Smith only performs a closed rhinoplasty. Throughout all his experience he has always preferred this method for all his patients. Would you like to schedule a consultation with the doctor so he can explain your different options?


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Caller: That would be great. Can I come in tomorrow?

Office Staff: Yes, we have 3pm available. Does that work?

Caller: Yes, I will see you tomorrow then. Thank you, good-bye. Which method do you think helps bring in more potential patients?

Step 4: Measure Your Success It is important to create a system where you can have some measure of your marketing efforts level of success. Many practices are simply content if the plan as a whole is a success and the patient volumes and revenue are increasing. This is a top-level measure of the success of your practice and can be enough if the margins are high enough. Our recommendation is always to place some points of conversion into the plan to have a better understanding of the success of each channel within the plan. Below are a few examples of some measures you can implement to track your successes and failures.


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1. Online Appointment Scheduling – with goal or event tracking 2. Call Forwarding – use of a masking number to measure a particular

sources inquiries 3. Secondary / Backline Phone Placement – use of secondary office

lines as inbound call line for a particular source 4. Key Conversion Pages – office location or contact information with

goal or event tracking 5. Email Collection or Newsletter Signup – if you are collecting or

distributing an email list


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Marketing Channels and Techniques

Researching, building and maintaining a digital marketing campaign within the medical industry is very unique. There are many options and outlets within the 3 key areas to focus. But having an understanding of each, as its own interconnected entity is paramount to seeing their necessity and use.

Uniformed Practice / Doctor Information There are numerous sources that pull businesses information and feed that out to hundreds of business directory sites. Google has stated that over 70% of medical searches were name specific. Patients are looking for you or your practice by name. With multiple review and directory outlets doctors must ensure that key contact information like address, name spelling, specialty and more are up-to-date and uniformed across all those outlets.

Focused Marketing Channels

Reputation Development and Management

Practice / Doctor Information


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The best method is to use the template file that Google provides in their article here and keep this uniformed in any business submission or description. Google Business Listing Article - https://support.google.com/business/answer/3370250?hl=en When this area is overlooked many times you could be losing direct off-line referrals or be losing that referral to another doctor doing online marketing towards your specialty. While business listings and medical directories often contain the same information it is important to realize their difference. Often times medical directory sites like HealthGrades, Doctor.com, and Vitals use a combination of data sources. This is your business or practice information along with your medical data provided in NPI databases. The source of the data can vary state to state but often times you already have an account with profile information that you can update immediately. National NPI Database – https://nppes.cms.hhs.gov/NPPESRegistry/NPIRegistryHome.do - can be updated by phone New York State Physician Search – http://www.nydoctorprofile.com/dispatch?action=display_search_parameters - attached to ecommerce state account. Varies state to state.


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New York State Health Commerce System – https://commerce.health.state.ny.us/public/hcs_login.html - physician information section. Online source varies state to state. Ensuring your information is up to date in all these areas is important. But fully utilizing the profiles within each medical specific directory is also important. Each site has different options in terms of what can he highlighted and what kind of content you can showcase. This is where distinguishing between business directories and a health directory is important. Going into the individual health directories and completely optimizing the accounts is pivotal but also developing unique content in the “About/Biography” sections and “Procedures” section is important too. These explanations about you should be unique because you need to consider them an extension of your website. If you are just copying information and pasting across all of them, search engines can see this as duplicate content and suppress the listings. As you can see below branded medical sites are shown as having the highest percentage of time spent on them when in the research phase.


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When someone is looking for you by name or practice you want to have control over as many of the listings as possible. By crafting unique content it allows as many of these medical profiles to rank along with your website. This gives you control over a high percentage of your digital reputation. While the content should be unique there are a few key points to keep uniformed in the descriptions.

1. Doctor or Practice Name

2. Practice Address

3. Practice Phone Number

4. 3-5 Keywords that cover your area of specialty or procedures (Ex. Deviated Septum Surgery, Sports Chiropractor, HIV specialist, etc.)


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This is information about you and your practice that should never change. If it does change that a complete digital update would be required. Reputation Development and Management The meandering path of patient research can go through dozens of “digital touch points” where you are being judged by prospective patients before they even meet you. Your outstanding patient care and command of specialty must extend from the walls of your office. Firstly, simple paths must be established for your patients to review you in key outlets. Secondly, those and other source data outlets must be constantly monitored to maintain your positive reputation. Medical reputation management is key to building the first connection of patient trust. In a recent online study the reputation of a doctor was placed at a higher priority than whether it was clear if the patients insurance was accepted.


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While there are hundreds of reviews sites the top three regardless of industry are: Google Business Listing - https://www.google.com/business/ Bing Business Listing - https://www.bingplaces.com/ Yelp Business Listing - https://biz.yelp.com/


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Within the medical field there are some more specific signals to search engines that a listing is pointing to a doctor. These have been identified as the top ten sources. While you cannot post reviews on all these sources it is important to claim and optimize them all and monitor the ones you can. After the top three listed above these should be focused on creating natural, positive reviews on.

Collecting emails can be a helpful tool in many regards. But the easiest and most direct use is for asking patients to review you in a specific outlet. If you have the time and resources within your practice is it best to


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individually select who you are going to request a review from. This is beneficial for two reasons.

1. You can select the people who are most likely to post because of the rapport you built with them

2. You can include something specific to that person in the email. We found it very effective to mention something personal that they shared in your meeting them. Whether is it a birthday, sports team, trip or restaurant personalizing the request for a review helps get more and impresses the patient further.

If you do not have the time or resources to dedicate to this personalized approach there are many services that can help in creating and distributing to mass email lists. Real Self – http://www.realself.com/ - can send bulk emails through your account HealthGrades – http://www.healthgrades.com/ - prints review cards that can be distributed in person MailChimp – http://mailchimp.com/ - email gathering and tracking service


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There are numerous services and ways to build up your online reviews. The most important thing is that you are getting them naturally and consistently. More recent reviews give a better signal to potential patients and to search engines, which can greatly affect your rankings.

Focused Marketing Channels Your doctor or practice website should get the most exposure. After that the top three results usually interchange between Yelp, LinkedIN, Google Plus, Healthgrades and several more. Maintaining your information on those sites will capture people searching directly for you. Marketing yourself to specific procedures and ailments within these channels will allow you to capture patients looking for your expertise. The idea of focused marketing channels relates to the idea of being focused in terms of what is it that you are showcasing. What procedures you offer, what ailments you treat and what medical specialty you are under. This focus can relate to several marketing channels, which are but not limited to:

1. Content – articles, photos, videos and graphics 2. Google and Bing Adwords – search results ad placement 3. Featured Doctor or Listing – within review and medical directories 4. Re-targeting – focused ad placement to past site visitors 5. Social Media – ad placement, showcase profiles and online

connections


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The methodology of how you target your content or specify the demographic targeting in paid ad placement is the same. There are three tiers that your promoting should cover.

The image below is a snapshot of how people research and eventually book medical appointment online. Where most doctor or practice sites are “external” in the sense of high promotion of brand and practice specific treatments, these are the two lowest volume areas in terms of patient research.

Layman terms and Symptom Targeting

Speciality and Procedure Targeting

Brand Targeting


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1. Brand Targeting – This is the simplest and most direct form of targeting. These are a person already searching for you by name, brand, address, phone number and anything else that is unique to only your practice. Capturing these searches should show the quickest results. This relates to the uniformed business / doctor listings that was covered in the beginning of this guide. There is an added benefit when marketing for terms that are unique to your practice. You are capturing additional space in the results pages that you control directly. Often times people may be brought to your profile within another companies website. To have access to or contact you through the other companies website there is often times a barrier of account creation or some other additional step. By capturing and driving branded traffic to a site you control completely you remove any barrier to contact.


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2. Specialty and Procedure Targeting – This is one step further away

from your branded terms but directly relates to your medical specialty and specific procedures that you offer. This is where you will determine what category or categories you want to showcase and market your practice as. Also what exact procedures you want to be offered. Examples such as:

a. Specialties

i. Otolaryngologist / ENT ii. Facial Plastic Surgeon

1. Both A and B if you are offering functional and cosmetic care

iii. Infectious Disease Specialist iv. Ophthalmologist v. Podiatrist

b. Procedures

i. Septoplasty ii. Rhinoplasty

iii. Testosterone Replacement Therapy iv. Cataract Surgery v. Plantar Fasciitis

These are medical categories and terms for your specialty and the procedures that you offer. It is important to extensively layout any of the possible labels that you could be put under and any and all services that you offer. This list should be consulted on the build of every new marketing outlet so all key taxonomies and tags can be highlighted.


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3. Layman terms and Symptoms targeting – this is the category you

should spend the most of your time on. Online keyword research with free tools like Google Keyword Planner -(https://adwords.google.com/KeywordPlanner) and Bing Keyword Volumes - (http://www.bing.com/toolbox/keywords) will be helpful. Additionally asking your patients what terms they associate to your specialty and how they went about researching their medical needs would also be extremely helpful. Below are a few examples of questions you should ask yourself to help create a list of keywords to target:

a. What are the signs and symptoms that cause the ailments and procedures that you offer? – Examples follow.

i. Chronic Sinus Infections ii. Deformed Nose

iii. Vision loss as you age iv. Muscle loss from disease

b. What are some of the things someone might be experiencing

that could be a precursor to your specialty? – Examples follow. i. Puffy eyes and dark circles

ii. Partial blindness iii. Unable to regain muscle

c. What are some things that a potential patient might be going

through? - Examples follow. i. Excessive snoring

ii. Extreme vision loss


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iii. Floaters in eye iv. Extreme fatigue and muscle pain

d. What are non-medical terms associated to my specialty and

procedures? - Examples follow. i. Nose Doctor

ii. Nose Surgeon iii. Eye Surgeon iv. Foot Specialist

Once a comprehensive list is built out covering the three areas of brand, specialty, symptoms and layman terms this should be your reference when setting up any focused marketing channel. Whether you are writing content, creating Adwords groups or choosing taxonomies to market, your list should be laced throughout all of them.


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Overview Each of the three areas are noticeably different in there approach and execution and should be given ample time to research and structure separately. But it is also important to understand the interconnectedness of them as well. Determining which areas to place an emphasis on will be unique to your practice and its needs. While these tools and strategies can be implemented by anyone it is our suggestion to consult and work with a specialist in the medical marketing field. Thank you for taking time to read the 2015 Guide, How to Market a Doctors Office, written and presented by Tidal Wave Marketing. To contact Tidal Wave Marketing, Medical/Doctor Marketing specialists you can reach us at the information below. Email: [email protected] Phone: 347-690-5571 Website: http://www.tidalwavemarketing.net/contact-us/ You can also follow us online to learn about medical marketing articles, insight, posts, and papers at: Google Plus Page - https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/105882932904000777259/+TidalWaveMarketingNewYork/posts LinkedIn Page - https://www.linkedin.com/company/tidal-wave-marketing

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