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.

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.

1. request geo-targeting for your city (this means, request the ads show up just for the cities you are targeting)
2. use some sort of tracking method, like google analytics, to ensure your ads are effective and worth the cost.
3. 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.

Source Article:

http://ophthalmologytimes.modernmedicine.com/ophthalmologytimes/Online+Only/Look-to-new-LASIK-advertising-methods-for-a-tech-s/ArticleStandard/Article/detail/508294