Start Winning in 2018 with these 5 Simple Marketing Strategies

Get off to a fast start in 2018 by following these 5 simple marketing strategies. If you’re interested in learning more, please join us for our webinar, where we cover these strategies in depth.

Alright, welcome listener, this is another episode of the Medical Practice Marketing podcast. Today we are going to be talking about 2018 basics. In the year 2018, what you should be thinking about now is making sure you have the bases covered in your marketing. If you’re listening to this podcast and are interested learning more about this we are going to be having a very in-depth webinar coming up on the 28th of January which we will go through a lot of the detail here. But right now we go through some basics to sort of prime you up for what’s going to be talked about in that webinar.

Also through these basics, you should be able to get some of the things you just need to make sure you’re thinking about as you move into 2018 and you want to get your practice to grow faster. Now we work with a lot of different quadrants, but what we’re going to do is sort of break these out. There’s paper click advertising. There are Facebook/Instagram ads, then there’s content and social. And I’ll explain that in a minute. If you think about Facebook advertising, that’s one of the most critical elements right now. But also we want to really think about what’s happening in the background of trying to communicate with customers who exist. So we really want to look at email. I think this is a real missing component for a lot of practitioners. E-mail re-targeting, resurfacing potential customers and then reputation. OK, so we have really, these quadrants, pay-per-click, Facebook, content, social media which is combined and then e-mail and reputation management.

So think about these major six topics or major five topics, again I’ve combined social media and content together in this particular example. I think it really makes sense in how we do it.

So pay-per-click advertising, there are three things you want to make sure that you’re doing. You want to run regular ads which are basically ads that have a link back to your website with information about the particular let’s say condition or potential solution that you have for someone’s issue. Then we’ve got the call only, so basically on a mobile phone that only shows an ad that you can basically make sure that you get a click from. The only way you can get clicked is if they actually make a phone call. Call only ads are a great way to start to engage with your customer without even getting them to your website. Again 70% of people start the patient journey on a mobile phone, and to get them on the phone for an appointment right there it’s great.

Then we have to retarget So we want to do these three types of ads, retargeting is the banners that will follow you around the internet as soon as someone comes to your website. Depending on the category, we can retarget them with those banner ads and that always helps practitioners who have a specific medical situation where we can actually do. Some things we can’t retarget just because of the nature Google. Mainly the regular ads and call only are the critical ones.

So in Facebook, we want to look at sort of targeted ads right which are the regular ads. And then we will look at lead only. Targeted ads are basically ads that click back to your website, lead ads stay within Facebook and the targeted ads and the lead ads can also have some categories which you want to make sure you’re doing. You can do video. You can do slide shows. You can also do Carousel ads. And you can also do a little bit of what we would consider sort of the last bastion of imaging ads. We really don’t try and push image ads because they don’t convert. Video slideshows are really good right now. Facebook and carrousel ads from time to time we use. But the video is the number one attraction because there’s action and people look at it.

So content and social, this is why I combine the two. Because we usually blog post for clients or you can do your own blog posting with content. And so we take the blog and then push it into the five different categories of social. So we’ll have a blog post posted on a website, you know whatever topic you could pick it or condition or solution for a condition or treatment and then we’re pushing that blog post down through automatic posting into the social. So we’re posting that on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest sometimes Facebook groups if you have a Facebook group, that’s also super helpful and Twitter. So we do sometimes do Google+ but it’s kind of a dying industry.

So we really try to combine blog posting with organic social and that would relate to things that are going on in the office and things we can use like videos from the office, we can either boost these posts as ads but usually we really use the content as a vehicle to push it into the social profiles and that can get you, if you’re doing 10 blog posts a month, 50 different posts into your social calendar. We can do multiple posts as well. But think about these quadrants.

The last thing is email before we get the reputation management. E-mail marketing should be used for awareness. You can do educational and the most important is appointments. So again just sending out a rehash to your customer base to say “hey we haven’t seen you in a while” and instead of sending them consistent “hey we have a monthly newsletter” really use that to say “hey we were looking to have a new potential patient for a new procedure” or it could be somebody who’s on the list that has not been you know through the system or into your schedule.

Again using this for appointments is great. All of this as we tie e-mail together with lead capture, with ads, with pay-per-click, with retargeting and that’s sort of like the funnel right? This is the funnel marketing that we do, that basically drips all these things together.

Now reputation management, you’re really talking about getting reviews on Facebook, Google, ZocDoc, HealthGrades, and a few others. Facebook and Google are the most important right now. Run automated programs, so we put people into an automated scheduler and get them into a simple process where they can click directly on those review platforms. So these are the five things, pay-per-click, Facebook/Instagram ads e-mail, and reputation. These are the basics so if you can get your basics down.

You can start really advertising yourself very well. And certainly, we can help you if we need help. But these are things you really think about for 2018. Again on the 28th of January, we’ll have a webinar that will go through this in detail.

Happy patient gathering and we’ll see you in the next episode.