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:

1. Easy to achieve
2. Enjoyable
3. 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.

1. Update Your Copyright - nothing worse to me than having an outdated copyright at the bottom of your website in the footer.  An outdated copyright date warns that your practice/organization may be outdated too.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.
2. Publish New Content - publish one new article to freshen up the content of  the site.  Remember that only refreshed sites get higher SEO rankings.
3. New Photos - consider new headshots of the docs and employees.  New office photos?  New photos can improve your brand and reader engagement.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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!
7. 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.
8. 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.
9. 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.
10. 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!)

Thanks for following and reading.  You may also:

A.  Follow us on "RussandRandy" on iTunes (our podcast on medical and healthcare Internet marketing) featured on Libsyn, Stitcher, iTunes, ReachMD.com and others.
B.  Visit RussandRandy.com - the website associated with the podcast.
C.  Be on the lookout for upcoming webinars (New!!!).

To Your Success,

Randy