Archive for May, 2011
How to Market to Your Current Patients
May 27th
If you’re like most doctors in your area, you’ve invested a significant amount of time and money in advertising and marketing your practice to attract new patients each month. While drumming up new business should always be a priority, don’t overlook the value of marketing to your existing clients and patients who have received at least one treatment or procedure with you within the last year.
Marketing to your current patients keeps you at “top of mind” when that patient is back in the market for another procedure, or even when they are looking to refer a doctor to someone they know.
Taking steps to market to your current patients could actually keep your practice busier — with less effort than acquiring a new patient.
Here’s how you can tweak your marketing strategy so that you are reaching out to current patients regularly:
- Expand your services. Offer extended hours, host free workshops and seminars for existing patients, or set up an open house where patients can learn about the latest treatments. Offer the opportunity to schedule an appointment at a discounted rate.
- Encourage patients to post reviews on online sites. Get in touch with past patients and ask them to post a review or testimonial about their experience on doctor directory sites and local listings sites. Positive reviews can help you attract new patients and also improve your reputation in your community. Making the request for a review is an opportunity to contact your patient personally and include some type of incentive for them to return for another appointment.
- Send birthday letters or holiday greetings. Keep in touch with your patients by sending out birthday cards, holiday notes and other positive letters as an act of kindness. These patients will remember the personal touch.
- Host a themed event. Host an event such as “Girl’s Night Out”. Encourage current clients to bring a friend, offer incentives such as free Botox injections, teeth cleaning, massages, free samples or procedure discounts. Hold short educational presentations on new procedures and equipment your medical practice is offers. Serve drinks and appetizers.
Remember that all patients have a choice — possibly several choices — when it comes to selecting a doctor, medical professional or surgeon in their area. Make your practice their top choice by keeping yourself front and center, making yourself accessible available, and by proactively seeking out the opportunity to offer a new service, treatment or product that can benefit the patient.
Talk to a PracticeDock specialist today to learn more about effective patient marketing strategies.
Related posts you may be interested in:
- On Demand Webinar: Use the Web to Double Your Patient Leads and Revenue
- Need Help Marketing Your Practice Online?
- 3 Simple Ways to Build Your Practice’s Social Presence
- Picking Powerful Keywords for SEO
- Bing Gaining Search Engine Market Share on Google
Picking Powerful Keywords for SEO
May 19th
If your practice website or LocateADoc.com profile page doesn’t contain copy with the right keywords and phrases, the search engines won’t even “see” you.
Picking powerful keywords offers a great SEO benefit by helping the search engines index your site quickly and climb to the top of search engine results pages.
Confused about how this works? Talk to a PracticeDock specialist today about improving your content. We can provide you with tips and SEO tools to better optimize your website for the search engines.
The Power of Keywords
When your patients are looking for information about your practice, searching for surgeons in your city, or are interested in a specific procedure, they are likely to use one of the major search engines to conduct their search. Your patients will be typing in a certain keyword — or string of words — based on what they are looking for. Any pages of your site that contain these keywords and phrases will show up higher on the search engine results pages than those that don?t. So how do you know what keywords your patients are using?
Some of this seems like common sense. For example, patients looking for breast augmentation doctors in their city might simply type “breast augmentation doctors + city name”. But, research shows that this isn’t always the case. Thanks to Google?s Keyword Selector Tool, we can find out what people are typing in the search box on a given topic or category. It turns out that a good number of patients in your city are actually using the keywords “boob job” or “breast implant doctor” when conducting their searches.
Given this information, it’s important that certain pages of your site contain these other keywords and phrases.
Performing a Keyword Analysis
In order to find out exactly what your target patient is looking for, you’ll need to run a keyword analysis. This can take some time, and in some cases, could be a trial and error process. Let one of our experienced PracticeDock specialists guide you with the tools that will help you attract your target customer and generate more patient leads!
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Bing Gaining Search Engine Market Share on Google
May 13th
ExperianŽ HitwiseŽ, a part of Experian Marketing Services, recently announced that Google accounted for 64.42 percent of all U.S. searches conducted in the four weeks ending April 2, 2011. Bing-powered search comprised 30.01 percent of search respectively. The remaining 69 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis report accounted for 5.58 percent of U.S. searches.
What does this mean for you and your practice?
Your practice website needs to not only rank high on Google, but also on Bing and other search engines that are now attracting more users. If your website isn’t optimized for the search engines, you could be losing traffic to a competitor.
Bing uses a different formula, or algorithms, than Google to index websites, but all search engines are looking for quality websites that contain unique information and for sites that are updated regularly.
High-ranking practice websites typically have the following characteristics:
- Contain quality content with relevant keywords — the keywords and key phrases that your patients are using to find the types of services you offer need to be used frequently on relevant pages. If your website doesn’t have enough quality content, major search engines including Bing, Google and Yahoo! won?t be able to find you and crawl your site.
- Designed with good SEO practices — your website’s navigation, links embedded on your site, and just the right amount of keyword-rich copy will attract the attention of the major search engines. These elements will also help you get indexed higher and faster.
- Add video to your site — video results are not just two times or even 10 times as likely, but 53 times more likely to show up on the first page of search engine results than text-only pages. Brands using online video have seen lifts of 20% to 40% in terms of incremental buying, with conversions that are twice the rate of other media. Source: Target Marketing Mag. Click here to see a PracticeDock video sample.
- Contain relevant images that are tagged and titled with relevant keywords — before and after pictures, images of your office and any other relevant images related to the services and products you offer can help to attract more traffic. Images also have an SEO benefit.
Need help understanding how you can rank higher on the major search engines? Send your questions to a PracticeDock Consultant by clicking here or call 1-877-665-6798 today!
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On Demand Webinar: Use the Web to Double Your Patient Leads and Revenue
May 5th
Are you taking full advantage of today’s most effective online marketing tools to promote your practice? If you’re still struggling to attract new patients and generate more revenue, join us for a complimentary, on-demand webinar on Monday, April 25, 2011.
“Use the Web to Double Your Patient Leads and Revenue” is a fifteen-minute presentation that will cover key concepts and strategies for attracting more quality patient leads and increasing revenue!
PracticeDock online marketing consultants will show you how to use social media tools, PPC advertising and other marketing tools to build your online presence and attract more high-quality patients.
Here’s what you’ll learn from the upcoming presentation:
- How to take full advantage of doctor directories such as www.LocateADoc.com to attract more quality leads and boost your online presence
- How to improve search engine rankings on Google, Yahoo! and Bing
- How to subscribe to directories and optimize your website for search engine optimization (SEO)
- How to use social media tools such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIN to promote your medical website
- How to get the most out of pay-per-click (PPC) advertising
PracticeDock on-demand webinars are an indispensable resource for all types of practices, and will help you and your staff members learn exactly how to improve your patient marketing efforts.
Learn more about all of our upcoming and past PracticeDock webinars here, or get in touch with a PracticeDock Online Marketing Consultant today to find out how we can help you attract more patient leads and generate more revenue!
Register for this FREE webinar today!
Past PracticeDock webinars:
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