Earlier this week, we were given the honor of being a judge in a graduate portfolio show for the Dallas Art Institute. The students got to show off their skills in design. Much of the focus was on design for advertising and many of the students had very good portfolios.
I was browsing CMO.com a few days and I found a really great chart describing the pros and cons of several high profile social networking sites. It’s a great chart to get you started using these sites to help advertise your site. One thing the chart does not mention is using these sites as places to put banner ads on. Due to the nature of many of these sites, they contain tons of consumer information that you can use to pinpoint target for your ads.
Boothe Media just finished a very short video about how you can boost your word of mouth advertising by using social networking websites on the internet. The example we chose was a doctor as most of our experience comes from Lasik advertising and medical advertising. We are planning to post many educational marketing videos, and would love any feedback you have to help us improve on this series.
Don’t forget to subscribe to our Channel on YouTube at http://youtube.com/boothemedia
Boothe Media recently got back from ASCRS in San Fransisco, and we came away with several ideas on improving your medical/lasik advertising. One of the main things that will help you, is knowing your future patients age. With the drop in the economy, many Doctors have moved from Lasik to IOLs, Cataract, and other surgeries paid for by medicare. For this particular entry, I will be using Lasik and IOLs as an example of how to market and advertise to the correct patient demographic.
IOL and Cataract Patients – The Traditional and Older Patient
The IOL and Cataract patients are the “baby boomers” and are a little older in age range. This demographic responds to traditional forms of advertising and if your medical practice is aiming at this group, you should use radio, tv, newspaper, etc. There is plenty of material on traditional advertising out in books and on the internet, so I won’t cover.
Lasik Advertising – The Young Patient
The Lasik patient is a younger patient and is responding less and less to traditional forms of medical marketing. This new generation reads the newspaper on the internet, reads blogs (much like this one), watches TV, listens to the radio, listens to pod casts. To many, this new generation is a complete mystery and advertising to this group can be a difficult task. When it comes to this generation, the internet is not being used nearly enough.
Simple Ideas on Using the Internet in Your Advertising and Marketing
There are some obviouse ways to make the internet work for you to improve your Lasik patient volume. One is pay per click (PPC). Organic listings in search engines is another really good way. This is about as far as some practices go to advertise on the internet. Consider using social networking sites to target your demographic. Produce some low budget youtube videos about your patients before and after surgery. Make your banner ads interactive or use compelling video/animation to draw patients in.
Knowing your audience isn’t always easy, but we have given you a few ideas to experiment with in your medical advertising campaigns.
Not too long ago, i ran into a post on linked-in from someone asking for tips on advertising their medical practice on a budget. I took a few minutes and answered the post, and shortly after realized it would make a good blog post here. Using my experience in Lasik Advertising with Dr Boothe, I’ve compiled a list of low cost medical marketing techniques that can really help your practice.
Become an Authority – By this i mean, show and publisize your knowledge about your field. This requires a little networking, but can be an effective tool. Give speaches on topics about your practice. Write press releases reguarding your practice. Start a blog and talk about what you know best. This works because if you are the one to educate someone about Lasik, or their eyes, or whatever it is you do, then they are likely to go to you because you are the authority.
Improve Your Website’s Search Engine Rank - If your doing the step above, then all you have to do is start adding links to your website on them. Search engines love legitimate links from other sites to your website. If you are answering questions and writing PR with links to your site, you are creating great links to your site. This can take alot of work though, and often it is best to get some help. There are some really great SEO firms out there (hint hint), but there are also some really bad ones. Make sure your SEO firm is giving you reports on what they are doing, and if you don’t understand them then make them explain.
Use Pay Per Click Advertising – This is a scalable type of advertising that is great! We had lots of success with it in Lasik Advertising. If you are on a budget and can’t quite afford the key terms you want, try using google’s adwords keyword tool to help you find less popular keywords. The less popular keywords can be more your price range and still be very effective in bringing in new customers.
Increase Word of Mouth – We all know word of mouth advertising is the best type for conversion. So work on increasing your word of mouth advertising. A couple ways is to start an email campaign to your recent patients asking them to refer you to their friends. Another is to cherry-pick the best patients you can and ask them to write a testimonial on various doctor and lasik center rating websites.
Be Found – Make sure your medical practice is listed on as many local sites as you can. A few big ones are maps.google.com, citysearch.com, and kudzu.com If patients can’t find your practice, then your advertising is an ultimate failure.
Support A Charity – Get your office staff pumped about a charity. Not only are you doing good for the community around your practice, but you get a great PR piece out of it.
So if you are into Lasik advertising or some other medical marketing, hopefully these ideas will help your practice grow on a budget. Please write comments on Low cost solutions that have worked on your practice.
While searching through the internet and reading various blog posts, I found this interesting article on opthamology times. The article is titled Look to new LASIK advertising methods for a tech-savvy generation and that being said, it had some pretty good content on it. If you’ve read any of the other blog entries here on boothe media about lasik advertising, then you will know how much I speak about the need to advertise in new media. With the baby boomers getting older and the internet and technology is replacing old mediums of entertainment, it’s vital for advertisers to devise new ways to reach people. While this article had a great message, i’m not sure I agree with all of it.
Lasik Advertisng on Social Network Sites like Facebook
I’m going to start with advertising on facebook. If you don’t know what facebook is, check it out. It is a social networking site, where people can keep track of their friends and talk to them. Advertising on social networking sites can be great, and if you can afford to advertise on facebook, it can be a great investment. Another great social networking site to check out would be MySpace as it has the largest userbase and can be affordable. When looking at social networking sites, here are a few tips on what to do.
request geo-targeting for your city (this means, request the ads show up just for the cities you are targeting)
use some sort of tracking method, like google analytics, to ensure your ads are effective and worth the cost.
try making the ads interactive to grab the viewers attention. These sites are really engaging, and if your ad doesn’t match, they won’t click on it as much.
iAds and Remnant TV Ads The article mentioned iAds, which are described as TV ads, where the user can interact by clicking the ad with their remote. I’ve done a little searching on the internet, and i get alot of different results for iAds. I will admit, i have never used this form of advertising for lasik, but based on how it is described in the article, i would say that i would not pay any more for this type of ad. For me, clicking on an ad on TV sounds frustraiting, because the interface on TV is frustraiting. The user has no keyboard to enter information to you, and thus this form of advertising sounds a bit immature still. I will also argue against remnant ads on TV. They may be innexpensive, but if you are a lasik surgeon advetising on TV then ou are going to expect results from an ad that costs that much. These ads are inexpensive for a reason, and that is because other people don’t want those times. I would suggest not wasting your money in these types of ads.
Using Effective Radio Ads The article mentions that radio is still an effective medium, and i would agree with this very much. Radio is still probably one of the best forms for lasik advertising.
“We try to get people on their way to work. We don’t want it to play 5 or 7 p.m. as they’re going home,” Malley said. “Why? The clerical is closed. We want our spots when the clinic is open.”
I don’t agree with everything in the above quote. between 5-7 you can get a considerable amount of calls, because people are in their car, stuck in rush hour, and listening to the radio. This is a really good time to have radio ads, and if you arn’t taking advantage on these times, then you are losing out. Put someone in your office at that time to answer phones, or outsource your phone bank.
Conclusion:
While I focused alot on the negatives of this article, i do think it was a great article. Hopefully this article and the presentation that went with it got people thinking about ways to advertise lasik to a younger crowd using new methods and mediums.
We have a new Doctor listed on My Lasik Dr! Dr William Boothe is now listed in our Dallas Lasik section of My Lasik Dr. Please visit his profile and tell us what you think. Also, while you are poking around the website, feel free to leave a comment on any of the articles we have posted thus far.
In case you are not familliar with Dr WIlliam Boothe, he is the most experienced IntraLASIK surgeon in the world and has done over 100,000 Lasik procedures. He practices lasik in the Dallas Ft Worth (DFW) area. And while we are most definately biased, we believe that he is the best lasik surgeon in DFW.
If i were to ask a lasik surgeon if they advertise with a listing in the yellow pages, many would probably answer with a yes. In fact this trend probably goes beyond just Lasik as an industry. But over the past 10 years people have been moving away from yellow pages to look up Lasik surgeons and onto the internet. If I want to search for a Lasik surgeon, I would probably get on google and start searching “Dallas Lasik”. Okay, I really wouldn’t, but i am a special case. The average consumer is going to hop onto their favorite search engine and start searching some combination of “lasik” and their city name. Now if you come up on the first page for your city and/or have a little PPC advertising going on the search engine, your work is not done.
Online Directories
Chances are, if you searched your city name and lasik, you found a few sites that don’t belong to a specific doctor. Many of these are probably some sort of lasik surgeon directory. And in honesty, if you have marketing money going into yellow page ads, it might be the time to shift that money to an internet directory. The reason you would do this, is you want people to see your name in more than one place.
Are All Online Directories Worth It?
There is no concrete answer to this question. It really depends on the cost per lead ratio. The best way to find out is to try it out a bit, and keep track of the statistics. How many people visited your page on the online directory? How many people come to your site from the directory? How many people came to your site, and contacted your office? You may not be able to catch all the data you need, but you should be able to gather enough to make an educated decision on wether or not you want to continue to stay in the listing.
When Would I Stay In the Yellow Pages?
If you do more than just Lasik surgery, you might not want to pull all of your yellow page ads. If you do a considerable amount of cataract surgery, then you should consider keeping an ad in the yellow pages. Yellow Pages are definately and older demographic, but even that is starting to change.
Boothe Media just launched a new site today called My Lasik Dr. This sites targets Lasik consumers and Lasik Doctors alike.
For Lasik Consumers
My Lasik Dr is a way for consumers to learn more about how lasik works and what the big deal is all about. They can learn stuff as basic as how their eye works, to some of the more complicated jargon used in the Lasik industry. The design of the site is really aimed at trendy 20 somethings and attempts to get them really thinking about Lasik
For Lasik Surgeons
My Lasik Dr can also be a way for Lasik doctors to reach out to their consumers. By getting listed in the “Find a Doctor” Lasik Directory listings, potential patients can search them out by location. Leads gained from My Lasik Dr go directly to the the surgeons office, allowing them to reply quickly. Lasik Doctors will also be invited to post articles on My Lasik Dr to help educate the visitors and gain aditional exposure.
Let’s face it! Advertising in traditional media can get really expensive. And while I do not suggest cutting your traditional marketing, I do suggest adding Online/Internet Marketing to your budget. But where do you spend your money on the internet?
Figuring Out Where to Spend Your Money Online.
Let me start off saying that there is no sure fire answer to this question. But I can give you some ideas and pointers to lead you in the right direction. First off, it might not be a bad idea to have a small questionare for your younger patients asking them what websites they frequent. I can guarantee you sites like myspace and facebook will pop up frequently, but I bet most Lasik surgeons don’t know what a myspace is, let alone have an account on myspace.
Also, consider many of your local newspapers. Younger patients arn’t going to be reading the newspaper anymore. They read the news on internet. So you could consider running banners on some local newspaper websites.
Search engines like Google and Yahoo are another place that people are flocking to find their lasik surgeon. These are probably the most obvious places to advertise and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a big plus to get first page ranking.
Pitfalls of Online Advertising
Well, I just mentioned SEO, and most Lasik surgeons have a company doing SEO for them currently. But sometimes your SEO company is doing nothing at all, or even causing damage. Here are a few tips to keep your SEO company in line
Ask for weekly progress reports from your SEO company.
Keep your SEO company in the loop. Let them know what’s going on in your practice. Sometimes Online PR can do good
Gather testimonials from your patients and send them to your SEO company for content
Have your SEO company explain everything they are doing to build your site’s rank
Read up on SEO. It’s not really as complicated as they want you to believe, it just takes work.
Other pitfalls come from putting your banners on a site cluttered with banners or that use pop-ups. There is a thin line of creating online advertising that is eye-catching while not annoying the viewer. I have found that creating interactive banners can do really well in catching and keeping the attention of the viewer.
Final Note
There is no sure fire easy way to succeed in online marketing, but I have seen the cost per call (CPC) of internet marketing for lasik and it can be much lower than the CPC for traditional marketing.
Earlier this week, we were given the honor of being a judge in a graduate portfolio show for the Dallas Art Institute. The students got to show off their skills in design. Much of the focus was on design for advertising and many of the students had very good portfolios.
