Branding Archives - Medical Marketing Enterprises, L.L.C.

Boost Your YouTube Rankings and Views

February 20, 2019 by Randall Wong, M.D.

YouTube ranks videos based upon SEO (more in another post) and views. This article is going to focus on ways to improve the total views of your videos to improve your rankings with YouTube.

My clinical YouTube channel just broke 1,ooo,ooo views. Here are some of the tips on how my videos became so popular.

As Google ranks web pages, YouTube ranks video. Traditional SEO is tougher to employ with video, but it doesn't mean that ranking video is more difficult than improving the SEO of a web page. Well ranking videos on YouTube have increased views and SEO.

In short, just as popular movies are characterized by box-office ticket sales, YouTube videos are valued by "views."

3 Parts to Your Video

There are 3 basic parts to a video:

The Intro
Body
The Outro

The Video Intro

The Intro, aka the introduction, is at the start. The video Intro starts the process of brand recognition for your video. Keep your Intro short. The Intro for most of my videos is about 10 seconds. I use some moving graphics mixed with my logo to get your attention, but more importantly to signal to my viewers that these are "my" videos. I also use audio to build on this recognition (akin to a "jingle.")

The Intro allows your viewers to quickly recognize your brand.

The Body

While this varies in length, do your best to keep the video length to about 10 minutes. There are two reasons for keeping the length of your video short and sweet:

Long videos may bore your viewer
Long videos may not be watched completely

If your video can not be edited to 10 minutes or shorter, than consider breaking up your video into several parts. Create a series: Part 1, Part 2, etc.

There is SEO value to keeping the videos short. YouTube keeps track of completed views, that is, instances where the viewer has watched the entire video. Short videos are more likely to be watched until the end compared to longer vids.

The Outro

At the end, simply rerun the Intro, but add a CTA (call to action). In addition to running the same snippet for brand purposes, add your contact information. Your CTA is to "contact us" (hopefully to make an appointment).

Is Your Content Providing Value? | 5 Easy Questions to Ask

February 12, 2019 by Randall Wong, M.D.

As healthcare providers, we provide value to our patients all the time. Every time we make a diagnosis and a treatment plan, we provide tremendous value to our "consumers" and to our community.

Providing value on the Internet, however, seems to be less obvious to us. Perhaps it's because we do not really understand what's valuable.

Here's why value is integral to any marketing strategy and some very easy ways to gauge if our content has value. Providing value is very easy of all the other industries on the Internet. As healthcare providers, we are naturally the de facto authorities.

Why Value?

There are many reasons why we need to be creating value with our digital marketing. Here are just 3 reasons why:

Build Trust - the only way a patient is going to call and make an appointment is after you have become trusted. Every time a new patients says "I've done my research," they are saying they've vetted you and trust you. No one makes an appointment solely because your website was at the top of a Google search. You have to be on the top and then also develop trust.
Engage - valuable articles/content are interesting to the reader. Ergo, your content makes your article/website/SM platform more engaging. Engaging platforms encourage additional reading/learning and build trust very quickly.
SEO - content which is shareable (links back to your site) give a quick boost to SEO.

5 Easy Questions to Ask

Here's a quick list of questions you might ask about your content.

Does it educate? This is really easy. Educational content is easy for health providers to create. We educate all day and to every patient. Using some of these well rehearsed and frequent topics easily provides value to our readers.
Is it shareable? Would one of your readers consider sharing your content with someone else? Might they tweet or post on their own page? Shareable means valuable.
Can it be fact checked? Most of this is easy for healthcare. Everything we do is based on fact (evidence based medicine) and, therefore, can be easily fact checked. As subject matter experts (authorities), we provide tremendous value to our prospective patients.
Is this interesting? Your content may not be interesting to everyone, but it will sure appeal to those interested in that particular subject. As long as your article/content is interesting to a percentage of your patient population, it's interesting.
Does it solve a problem or answer a question? If your content directly answers a question someone is "Googling," then it's relevant and of value.

You must answer "yes" to only one of these questions. It's easy...and valuable.

Happy New Year! Tips on Marketing for 2019

January 28, 2019 by Randall Wong, M.D.

Happy New Year!

Let's set an agenda for your marketing goals for 2019. First, let's set some ground rules. Your marketing objectives should be:

Easy to achieve
Enjoyable
Appreciated and understood

Remember that healthcare and medicine is not comfortable with "marketing." The need for marketing is still poorly understood, but every year more and more of us are beginning to understand that healthcare marketing is necessary because our patients are expecting us to market. Marketing involves teaching our patients about their health and what services we provide.

Easy to Achieve Goals

Establishing goals which are easy to attain avoids disappointment and the feeling of failure. When I lecture, I often plead to the audience that your hope should be to implement something over the course of the next year and not everything. Trying to achieve everything is doomed to failure. Try to implement just one or two things learned.

Enjoyable Marketing Goals

Your goals will vary from group to group and organization to organization.

The larger your organization/group, the more complex your marketing needs and, unfortunately, the more difficulty in making every one "happy." Keep this in mind when planning a strategy.

Choose a strategy which involves or requires skills you possess and enjoy to utilize. For example, if you like to write, write new content. If you do not like to write, create a video (do something you enjoy, not stress over).

Appreciate and Understand

No matter how simple or difficult, why are undertaking this task? What is your goal?

Keeping your focus on this reasoning will keep your marketing plan streamlined and laser focused.

Ideas for 2019

Here are some really, really simple goals for 2019. Some may be more complex and other ideas may be for the practice just starting to understand marketing.

Update Your Copyright - nothing worse to me than having an outdated copyright at the bottom of your website in the footer. An outdated copyright date warns that your practice/organization may be outdated too. At the very least, you aren't interested in keeping an updated website.
Publish New Content - publish one new article to freshen up the content of the site. Remember that only refreshed sites get higher SEO rankings.
New Photos - consider new headshots of the docs and employees. New office photos? New photos can improve your brand and reader engagement.
Newsletter - Consider starting an electronic newsletter. If you are already writing content, your new content can automatically be distributed to your email list in the form of a an electronic newsletter.
Market Internally - you should properly (patient's need to "opt-in") collect email addresses from everyone of your patients. Your electronic newsletter can automatically be distributed to the entire email list to share news of the practice and your great articles.
Update/Claim Review Sites - Facebook, Google Business, Healthgrades, Yelp, WebMD.com and many others already have your business listed on their database. These are places where potential patients can find you. What's more is that these are also places where a patient can leave a review. (BTW - this is also a great way to improve your local SEO.) Don't forget to add your new pics of the docs!
Ask for Reviews - only do this if you are comfortable with the idea of asking your patients to give you a review. We recommend selecting only one or two places where a patient can write a review.
Social Media - start a social media platform. Choose a platform (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) that your patients commonly use. Most likely it's Facebook. Start only if you are able to keep the content fresh and relevant.
About You - remember that your About page is the second most important page on the website. Rewrite your About page in the point of view of the first person and talk a little bit about who you are as a person. Share some transparency - it's much more relevant and meaningful to your patients than a list of your academic achievements and research prowess.
Answer Reviews - learn to monitor the Internet for all positive and negative reviews. Respond to all reviews in a timely fashion, if nothing else than to thank the author for taking their precious time to recommend you and your practice. If it's a negative review, breath deep, don't engage about right or wrong, but respond positively (better yet, give us an email or ask your partner or office manager to deal with this!)

Guest Blogging to Increase SEO and Backlinks

October 26, 2017 by Randall Wong, M.D.

Share your knowledge on other websites. This can result in increased website traffic to your own site and improve your SEO. By contributing content to other websites, you expose yourself to a new and different audience and get better website rankings.

Guest blogging, HARO and participating on community forums are just three examples, but there are more. The basic message is that you might consider sharing your expertise on OTHER websites and make sure your contributions are cited in the form of hyperlinks back to your own site. These hyperlinks are called “backlinks.”

Quality backlinks can significantly improve your SEO.

Help A Reporter – HARO

This is a database where JOURNALISTS find reliable SOURCES when researching an article or story. Journalists post queries looking for expert SOURCES who belong to the site. Health providers (you) function as a SOURCE.

HARO sends out 3 daily emails of journalists looking for Sources. If interested, you will respond via email, thus connecting you with the journalist.

Usually a short interview is conducted via email or phone. If your content is used in the final story, your contribution should be cited. You gain exposure to a new audience. Ideally, you will also get a link to your website.

The HARO website is www.HelpAReporter.com.

Guest Blogging

As a “guest” you will write an article for someone else’s website. Ideally, you will write an article on a related website, i.e. health related website, on a topic of which you are an authority.

The article will be written exactly as if you were writing on your own site, but with the exception it will be published on a foreign website. In return for creating content for the host, you, the guest, should insert 2-3 hyperlinks (backlinks) to your own site.

Again, this gives you exposure to a new community AND, through backlinks, improves your SEO.

Forums, Chat Rooms and Bulletin Boards

There are many forums, chat rooms and bulletin boards where patients share information about health concerns or ailments they have in common.

As a healthcare authority, you may choose to join in their conversations to educate this community to share your knowledge and educate this new audience.

As with the other examples, this will expose you to a new community and give you the opportunity to build backlinks.

All the best,

Randy

Patient Persona | Target Your WritingWhat is a Patient Persona? | Write to Your Perfect Patient

March 16, 2017 by Randall Wong, M.D.

Have a favorite type of patient to treat?

When you are writing for your website, write as though one single person is sitting in front of you. That single person is your ideal patient (favorite clinical situation) and is also known as your patient persona.

Physicians and healthcare are used to addressing a large audience. We give lectures. We teach. While it may seem counter-intuitive, when writing on the web, you will be more effective if writing to a single person.

You are not writing as if you are on stage addressing a huge audience, but rather you are addressing one person, your “imaginary perfect patient,” who is sitting that audience.

Your Perfect Patient

We all have our ideal patient. Your ideal patient is your patient persona and has a specific personality, manner of learning, education and concerns.

Addressing that particular person when writing will make you more credible, authoritative and, most importantly, engaging. Your writing becomes more personal, and thus, becomes more valuable your reader.

Close your eyes and pretend your perfect patient is sitting in front of you. By the way, this will be even more engaging if you write in the point of view of the first person.

BTW – you will likely develop more patient personas as time goes on, but for now, start with one.

Defining Your Perfect Patient

You may already have your perfect patient in mind. If you do not, here are a few ways to help you get started.

Survey or talk to your favorite patients and get to identify certain personality types, how they learn, what kinds of concerns they might have and what they like about you. This will help you relate to them.
Talk to your office staff and ask the question, “Who is my perfect patient”? Getting an outsiders point of view will be very insightful.
Look at analytics – you can see who is reading your articles and visiting your site. There may be data about demographics which can help you. How are your readers getting to your site? WebMD?
Use social media (search by #) to find out what questions are frequently asked (e.g. “#diabeticretinopathy #willIgoblind)

Just as you see patients one-on- one in the office, write to them one-on-one, too.