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

Creating Value on Your Medical Website

July 22, 2011 by Randall Wong, M.D.

Successful websites create value for the visitor. Does your medical website create value for your potential patients?

By creating value, you’ll attract more visitors to your site and more patients walking through your door.

For you to have a successful website with high rankings, a medical practice must give something valuable away for ‘free.’ Free develops trust and credibility. “Free” starts the social media conversation.

Create Value

The first step to attracting patients to your site is to create value. Creating value comes in different forms for a medical practice.

The simplest way to create value for your website (and therefore your practice) is to provide health information. Why? Because it’s what patients are searching for…answers.

80% of Americans are on the Internet Looking for Answers

By providing answers to their questions, you have created value.

Giving Value Away for Free

This is a tough concept for most physicians, but yet we do it everyday. It’s not services you’ll give away, it’s not your advice either, it’s just information about health, aka it’s patient education.

The best value we can create is to educate …and for free.

Why Give Away Health Information?

As health care providers, we are the authorities in our fields. Who better to educate than the experts?

Those medical practices that choose to recognize this need will be rewarded with;

high ranking web pages
increasing patient base
stronger relationships with existing patients
recognition as a trusted health expert

Improving Your Web Rankings

Providing fresh relevant content is the key to successful website optimization and performance. A website that provides relevant, refreshed and regular content will be rewarded with high rankings. (A simple fancy web design, or redesign, does nothing for your rankings.)

What is content? The content will be your articles and posts containing the answers to their questions. It’s simple and straight forward. Publishing articles on your website that provides answers….will move you higher and higher in the rankings.

This is the core of content marketing strategies. This is the core of medical SEO or website optimization for a medical practice.

Medical website optimization is the only way to achieve and maintain high rankings on search engine results pages (SERP).

Building Trust in Your Community

Regardless of how you define your community, whether it is within your local zip code or your virtual neighborhood, “free” opens the door to credibility and trust. A site that is credible and trustworthy says alot about its doctors and staff. Certainly much more than those practices that don’t even have a web site.

This is the modern way of distinguishing yourself from your competitors. Those practices that are able to establish trust and credibility will gain a healthy advantage over those practices choosing to remain isolated.

Does Your Medical Practice Have a Story?

March 24, 2011 by Amy Wong

Medical SEO, Telling a Story About Your Practice

Fresh out of law school I began my legal career with the Department of Defense. At the time I had thought DoD’s primary job was to ensure the production of tanks, planes, ammunition, and other war fighting paraphernalia. While those items are necessary and certainly a part of DoD’s story, the truth is that it is the people who fly the planes, shoot the guns and protect our nation that make-up DoD’s story.

Surprisingly, this information was not part of my initial orientation. It was not until I actually listened to the stories of the soldiers and civilian workers who had deployed that I realized they were my true employers, not DoD. This realization changed my perspective and gave me purpose.

So How Does this Relate to Your Medical Practice?

When you hire a new receptionist, technician, or office manager what do you include in your orientation? Do you start with all of the legal paperwork or do you start with your story, your purpose?

Who is the true hero in your story? For some practices the hero may be the patient, for some it may be collective heroism, meaning the staff as a whole and for some it may be the physician. Practice managers who develop their practice’s story and then market that story to both internal and external stakeholders will create purpose for their staff members and patients.

To give you a sense of reference, think of your story as collective pool of water. Each patient or staff member who comes into contact with the pool adds a drop of water. This pool of water is dynamic and is constantly adding to the collective vision. And this vision is continuously reflected out to your internal and external communities.

Why Storytelling?

By creating and retelling your story you give a purpose to your call of action. For employees, you inspire them to add to and continue the collective “pool.” For patients, you give them a sense of belonging and ownership in the practice.

Knocking Down The Ivory Tower

March 6, 2011 by Randall Wong, M.D.

Last week I posted an article challenging physicians to take down their diplomas and meritorious plaques and replace them with pictures of themselves, friends, kids, favorite activities, etc.

The goal is to give your patients some flavor of who you are instead of reminding them what you are. This concept is crucial to understanding social media.

Go ahead, “redecorate.”

Placing your favorite artwork on a wall, a picture of the kids’ soccer team, a picture of you sailing on a boat or fishing gives patients an idea that your doc is…um, human. They, too, are a person! It gives patients information and chance to bond with their physician.

It is a version of Social Media.

By giving a person a glimpse of who you are, gives the opportunnity for that person to engage you in a conversation. A true dialogue vs. the traditional monologue too often seen in doctors’ offices.

Here, Try This:

Imagine a medical school diploma on a wall. What does it say?

A. It says that this person went to medical school. No kidding, really?

Now, replace with the cycling picture above: Now what does it say?

A1. Likes cycling
A2. Likes exercise
A3. Likes to be healthy
A4. Prefers a certain type of cycle.
A5. Likes solitude
A6. Uses a particular brand of helmet.

Etc. Get it?

Just as a pictures says a thousand words. A diploma doesn’t say much more than anything you don’t already know. A diploma reinforces the “ivory tower,” whereas, mementos start to reveal a person tucked beneath the white coat.

Patients of today are looking for anything human to relate with their chosen doctor. They are not looking for just another doc. There are tons of those.

So, too, on the Internet. Doctors willing to share just a bit about their office, their staff or themselves are more likely to develop a following than those that don’t bother.

3 Secrets to Writing Great Copy

January 31, 2011 by Randall Wong, M.D.

Great SEO copywriting for the web means writing articles that appeal to both your readers and the search engines. Your goal is to write content that interests your readers and is search engine optimized! Good SEO practices will allow your pages to rank higher.

Copywriting, or posting for your blog, is different from writing an English essay or a research paper. These 3 “rules” should help you achieve your goals of attracting both readers and high rankings.

Choose One Topic Per Post

One of the difficulties I had when getting started was trying to whittle down my message. I tried to stuff way too much information into the same article. In short, I was trying to say so much that it either diluted my real message or completely lost my reader.

Two reasons to limit yourself to one topic. First, it focuses your task of copywriting. By staying with one message, it is easier to construct meaningful titles, headlines and sub-titles that are necessary to grab your readers attention and, just as importantly, achieve great SEO.

Second, most people searching the Internet have a very specific question. Thus, they are searching for a specific answer. By limiting yourself to one topic, you are more likely to grab the attention of your readers as you’ll be providing a more direct answer.

“O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?”

You will not be reviewed by your colleagues. You are writing to your potential patients. Close your eyes and imagine one single person, patient or client to whom you are writing. Write in a style and use words that will appeal to that imaginary person, not your colleagues.

In a way, this is like writing a love letter, you want to reach out and appeal to your reader. Your writing has to strike home and make a connection with your audience. Don’t write to “show off.” Your readers will “bounce” away.

Effective writing requires that you communicate at the same level as your reader. Unlike most of your technical writing, you must write “down” to your reader. Writing “above” the reader will bore them.

One simple tactic I’ve used is to write down the hundreds of well rehearsed answers (lectures) I have given to patient questions. Over time, we all have our “pat” answers to commonly asked questions. As you know,these answers are well rehearsed because we have given them thousands of times. This is a great source of content…and you’ve already created it! Just write it down.

Size Matters

This is easy. You want your article to be about 300 – 600 words in length. Too short and you won’t index well. Too long and you’ll bore your readers and your “bounce” rate increases. Remember that your posts must grab the attention of the search engines and your potential clients!

In the next article, we’ll cover proper formatting to capture the attention of your readers!

Does Your Web Page Market Your Practice?

January 26, 2011 by Randall Wong, M.D.

Top 10 rankings for your web page should be your marketing goal.

Does your web site market your medical practice effectively? Chances are your web page is “pretty good” and serves more as a reference site, but not as a highly effective marketing tool.

Your Patients Already Know You…

A typical medical practice has constructed a web page that serves only as a resource, or reference, for new and existing patients. It may contain hours of operation, participating insurance carriers, pictures of the office staff and a bio of the doctors.

This is a great resource for existing patients, but does not have any ability to attract new patients surfing the Internet looking for a new doctor.

How to Attract New Patients

The key to attracting new patients with your web site is to achieve high “top ten” rankings on search engine results pages. These are the results that are listed after you search, or “Google,” a particular subject.

Imagine your rankings souring to the “top ten” and the visibility you’ll receive!

SEO to Achieve “Top Ten” Rankings

The key to getting great search engine rankings is by adding fresh, relevant content to your web site on a regular basis. There is no substitute. This is technique is referred to as search engine optimization (SEO).

By simply adding new content (articles) to your web site, your site will become more noticeable. Get in the habit of routinely adding an article to your web site every month or every week…just make it a routine.

As a reward for your efforts, Google (Bing and Yahoo, too) will start list your web site higher and higher. It will recognize that your web site contains relevant and refreshed content…on a regular basis. Your site will start to rank higher than your competitors on search results pages.

Patients looking for a new doctor will start to see your web site as it rises through the rankings.

Maximize the power of your web site by providing content on a regular basis. Your web site has the potential to be the most powerful marketing tool you own to promote and grow your practice.