Marketing and Practice Growth

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Marketing and Practice Growth

Business of Medicine
Author Credentials 

Angela Sturm, MD
Facial Plastic Surgery Associates
Houston, TX 

Christopher Chang, MD
Fauquier ENT
Warrenton, VA 20186

Module Learning Objectives 
  1. Recognize the basic principles of branding and its importance.
  2. Explain personal branding vs corporate branding.
  3. Describe what can be gained from public relations professional.
  4. Review the importance of word of mouth marketing.
  5. Describe the different types of advertising and the advantages and disadvantages of each.
  6. Describe networking strategies.
  7. Explain the extension of personal branding into online branding.
  8. Recognize how to and when not to respond to negative reviews.
  9. Review the basics of building and maintaining a website.
  10. Describe the basic principles of search engine optimization.
  11. Describe the basic principles of social media.
  12. Become more knowledgeable in utilizing social media in one’s practice.
  13. Become adept at monitoring the success of one’s social media activities.
  14. Learn how to use social media to help market one’s practice.
Strategic Planning
  1. What are your goals for your practice?
  2. What sets you apart?  Analyze your strengths, weaknesses and special skills that can help define your niche.
  3. Who is your target market?  What is the demographic that will most benefit from your specialized skills and are the patients that you want to attract?
Branding
  1. Branding is creating a consistent and recognizable message throughout your marketing and materials seen by the public.
  2. What are the things you want people to experience and remember you for?  How do you communicate that?
  3. Determine the “Voice” you want to portray.
    • Shameless self-promotion (you are the center of attention) hard-sell: “I am an expert in balloon sinuplasty. Call my office so I can determine whether this procedure is right for you.”
    • Being a voice of authority (you are a source of expertise and knowledge) which hopefully will lead to patient visits (soft-sell): “Balloon sinuplasty is when you insert a balloon carefully into the sinus cavity over a guidewire and inflate thereby opening the entrance. Here’s a video showing this being performed in a patient.”
    • Social interaction (you directly respond to inquiries on social media or not): “I see that you are having symptoms for which balloon sinuplasty may help. Please call my office for an appointment.”
  4. Message consistency is key. For example, this is found in the following, just to name a few.
    • The appearance of your website
    • Website, literature, and business card color scheme
    • Website copy written in your voice
    • Social media messages
    • Community organizations that you are involved in
    • Fundraisers you support 
    • Publications that you partner with
  5. Are you branding yourself or your practice?  
    • Most physicians benefit from personal branding.  
      • Patients come to a physician because they trust that physician.
      • You are your brand.  Be different. This encompasses your personality, your specialty and the entire patient experience that you want to create.
  6. Corporate branding works for large multispecialty groups.
    • The company name can give credibility to the doctors who are employees, like Kaiser Permanente. 
    • Personal branding may be more difficult in this situation depending on your contract (some employers forbid physician employees from social media, personal practice website, etc).
    • When considering an employed position (new job or contract renewal), try to obtain as much flexibility in your ability to market yourself whether online or offline. 
      • Should you be able to market yourself, clarify whether you are able to utilize corporate branding (logo, color scheme, etc).
Public Relations
  1. Determine if your practice would benefit from public relations professional.
  2. Describe your goals for your practice by using a public relations professional.
  3. Understand how to choose the best public relations professional for your goals.
    • A PR person can help negotiate advertising contracts, gain access to media contacts and certain social circles, and introduce networking opportunities.
    • However, many may not have medical experience or may not be efficient with your money or time.
  4. Understand how to efficiently manage that relationship with time limited contracts, frequent meetings, and clear goals.
Community Involvement
  1. Understand the importance of being involved in your community.
  2. Building personal relationships is the most effective way to build trust and your brand.  
    • Being involved in boards of local organizations or planning of local events introduces people to you and your brand.
  3. Supporting fundraisers and local charities that are in line with your brand can reinforce your brand and reputation.
  4. Give lectures on ENT topics at a Church, nursing home, hospital, Grand Rounds, etc.
  5. Participate in community health fairs.
Word of Mouth
  1. Understand how word of mouth is the most important part of building your practice. 
  2. Patients referred by word of mouth are more likely to trust you and to be loyal.
  3. Word of mouth reinforces the brand that you have created.
  4. Understand that online reviews are the online version of word of mouth.
Advertising
  1. Describe traditional advertising and its advantages.
  2. Understand how print advertising can be useful for name recognition, but is usually not a call to action.
  3. Print advertising is most effective if you build partnerships with publishers and utilize nontraditional marketing opportunities.
    • In a partnership, the publisher should offer talks at events, preferential placement of your ad on their site and run promotions or editorials.
  4. Understand the benefit of television or radio ads vs paid segment television shows.
    • Being an expert on news segment is always best, but you need a media contact and good pitch.
    • Television and radio ads can be used for name recognition, but usually have low return on investment for surgical candidates.
    • Paid segment television shows can be useful if the viewing demographics are your target audience and the price is in your budget.
  5. Online advertising has better return on investment in both short and long term and is more economical than print, billboard, radio or TV advertising.
  6. Understand how to drive your own marketing.  
    • Be someone that provides quality information to others.  
    • Be an expert.
    • Provide blog content for websites or other bloggers.
    • Publish information online and in journals that can be a resource for writers or bloggers.
    • Provide story ideas to newspapers, magazines or television programs.
  7. Evaluate ROI every 6 months, but know it can take years for a lead to turn into a patient.
Marketing Strategies
  1. What is your marketing style and how does this reflect your brand?
  2. Who is your target audience?  Who do you want as patients?
  3. How does your marketing make your target audience feel special?
  4. Are you interacting with your target audience enough?  How often do you want to send emails, social media messages or print ads and what is the value of each?
  5. Are you going to entrepreneur courses?  
  6. Go to courses with people that you identify with, i.e., women’s groups, groups with heritage, your local chamber of commerce.  You are more likely to make a personal connection with people that share commonalities.
Networking
  1. Be active in networking events and groups that involve your target audience and are in line with your brand, i.e., women’s networking, parent’s groups, business owners, certain communities. 
  2. Evaluate all networking experiences.
    • Are you getting value for your time?
    • Are you giving advice away for free?  Your time and advice is valuable.  Don’t give it away unless that is part of your marketing strategy.
  3. Build social capital by meeting people in your target demographic.
  4. Listen to those you meet and discover what you can do for someone else.
  5. Never leave home without business cards and hand them out freely.
  6. Look up people at networking events on LinkedIn before you go.
  7. Go early and set goals for how many new people you want to meet.
  8. Follow up with letter or email.
Online Branding
  1. Understand that online branding is an extension of your personal branding.
  2. Have consistent color schemes, fonts, feeling to your site as your business card, office, patient literature and handouts.
  3. Extend your networking online. Connect with contacts after a networking event through LinkedIn, Facebook or other social media to maintain contact.
  4. Every post, statement and tweet is building your brand, make them count!
  5. Share the community activities, charity work and good you are doing in the community online.
Website Development and Maintenance
  1. Understand that the website is the centerpiece of your marketing plan that connects social media, print, and other traditional and non-traditional marketing platforms. Everything should reference back to the website.
    • Social media should play only a supportive role.
    • Understand effective web design for optimizing user retention including above-the-fold visibility, related articles at end of article, utilizing commenting system, etc.
  2. Keep your brand consistent on the website, ie color scheme, font, copy.
  3. The website should be an authority for your specialty that other sites can reference.
  4. It should be easy to contact your office from every page of the site.
  5. It should be mobile and desktop friendly.
Social Media Accounts
  1. Establish accounts with major social media companies.
  2. Establish accounts for analytics.
  3. Establish accounts for becoming efficient with social media activity.
    • Twitter (www.Twitter.com)
      • Be familiar with tweets (140 characters or less).
      • Understand that posts are placed on a timeline (messages will get buried over time quickly; has a short lifespan.).
      • Understand how to make lists.
      • Understand how to follow accounts you are interested in.
    • YouTube (www.YouTube.com)
      • Be familiar with how to make and publish videos
      • Understand how to effectively select keywords for search optimization
      • Understand how to make playlists to organize your videos
      • Understand how to follow accounts you are interested in.
      • Understand that how the video is presented can influence the kind of audience it will appeal to and how readily it might get shared
    • Blogging
      • Identify the major blogging platforms available (WordPress, Blogger, Drupal, etc).
      • Understand implications of self-hosting your blog or utilizing a service.
      • Understand how to write a blog post and publish.
      • Understand how to effectively select keywords, incorporate search description, and add pictures for search optimization.
    • Facebook (www.FaceBook.com)
      • Be familiar with how to post.
      • Understand that posts are placed on a timeline (messages will get buried over time quickly; has a short lifespan.).
      • Understand how to follow (or Like) accounts you are interested in. 
    • Miscellaneous Social Media
      • Many other social media companies, but less penetration in the public.
      • Other very popular social media programs are not conducive to healthcare use due to HIPAA (ie, Instagram)
      • Pinterest
      • LinkedIn
      • Google+
Social Media as Effective Marketing Tool
  1. Understand strengths and weaknesses of different social media and online platforms.
    • Posts on a Timeline (Twitter, Facebook, etc) 
    • Content on a Website 
    • Content on a Blog
    • Video Content
  2. Effective marketing is utilizing the strengths of a particular social media platform efficiently AND having them all work with each other.
  3. Understand importance of content for effective social media marketing
  4. Understand importance of timing when posting on a timeline (Twitter, Facebook, etc)
    • Different audiences will be reached depending on what time you post.
    • The size of the audience that will see your post will vary depending on what time you post.
  5. Determine optimal frequency to post on social media
    • Post frequently enough to strike a balance between informative (gain patients/customers) and annoying (lose patients/customers).
    • Risk of NOT posting frequently enough is you lose connection with your audience and lose engagement.
    • Use analytics to determine right balance
    • Starting point:
      • FaceBook: 1-2x per day
      • Twitter: 3 or more times per day with at least 3 hours between tweets
      • LinkedIn: Once a day
      • Google+: 1-2x per day
  6. Come up with a system that works for you and stick with it!
  7. Promotion from traditional and online media
    • Advertising on practice website the big 4 (Twitter, FaceBook, YouTube, and Blog).
    • Show the web address on print media.
    • Use of QR codes if space is tight.
Analytics
  1. Understand that most social media platforms offer analytics to track how well your posts are doing.
  2. Google Analytics offers free comprehensive analytics for website and blogging platforms.
  3. Understand how heatmaps work.
  4. Understand visitor paths / user flow to help optimize user retention.
  5. Be aware of products to help compare your analytics with another practice / competitor (www.SEMRush.com, etc).
Efficient Social Media Use
  1. Be aware of programs (social media organizers) that allow one to access multiple different social media accounts from a single webpage (ie, Hootsuite, TweetDeck, etc)
  2. Be aware of programs (ie, IFTTT) that allow one to automatically post to different social media accounts with certain triggers (for example, a post to Facebook would automatically trigger an action whereby the same post will be sent to Twitter.
  3. There is feeling that the “BEST” way to post is to personally post in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc. rather than using such social media organizers. Social media platforms may “downgrade” posts thru such programs whereas personal posts will be granted greater audience exposure.
    • One needs to decide whether the time saved thru using social media organizers is worth the potentially more limited audience exposure.
Social Media Content Recycling
  1. Understand how one can utilize programs to recycle old posts without active participation on a regular basis (ie, Bufferapp, Jarvis, Edgar, etc).
  2. Downside of automation is that social media platforms are starting to recognize the use of such robots and will “downgrade” its exposure to your audience.
Search Engine Optimization
  1. Understand what SEO is; understand the goals of various search engines and how to align your SEO plan with those goals.
    • Typically one wants to appear first on search results… or at least on the first page
  2. Understand the factors that improve a website’s SEO ranking.  These change every few years, so stay current or have a management company that is current.
    • Established domain names
      • Lease versus purchase
      • Keep it short, memorable, easily spelled, and relevant
      • It is best to avoid changing domain names frequently. A domain name that has been established for a long time is better than one that has existed for only a short time  
    • Original and quality text that is relevant to frequent searches
      • Quickly write blog articles that is currently popular in the media
      • Google Trends for ideas
      • Traditional Media health news section for ideas
    • Blogs are great ways to constantly add new fresh content
    • Consistent formatting
    • Consistency in the web address, address, phone number, email on your site and every site that references you, i.e., rating sites, doctor finding sites, yelp, yahoo, etc.
    • Effective use of meta tags, especially on webpages
    • Good webpage titles as well as naming of .html documents
    • Include pictures or videos with posts
    • Keywords should be utilized on every webpage, blog, video, etc. Must be consistent in spelling, punctuation and capitalization in the appropriate ratio to other text (~1 keyword to 100 other words)
    • Understand difference between long and short-tail keywords
  3. Services (i.e. Google Adwords Keyword tool) exist that can help determine the most searched keywords.
  4. A good website architecture that improves SEO ranking include:
    • Loads quickly
    • Mobile responsive
    • Good link structures with few broken links
    • Crawlable links
  5. Links from other sites are helpful if they are well known, well-established sites, like Google, Yahoo or MSN
    • Too many links will slow down the search engine and drop your ranking
    • Links from spam websites will hurt SEO ranking as well
  6. SEO can be improved through purchased services (such as Google Adwords as of the time of the writing of this article).  But this can be expensive.
  7. Always evaluate your website’s performance in an ongoing manner to adjust your strategy.
  8. Decide if you want a separate SEO management team or have it managed with your website.  Advantages to having your website company manage your website include: 
    • Updating your website and adding content will help your SEO 
    • A more user-friendly, helpful and content-rich site also helps SEO
Online Reviews
  1. Understand that online reviews are your online word of mouth.
  2. Understand the advantages and limitations of online reviews.
  3. Describe how to enable happy patients to give reviews ethically.
    • Provide handouts or emails with instructions on how to give reviews.
  4. Do not provide services or items for online reviews.
  5. Evaluate the benefits of using a reputation management company.
    • The company can respond to good and bad reviews for you in a timely manner.  
    • They can help generate positive reviews.
  6. Understand how HIPAA impacts how you can respond to reviews (see OtoSource Modules on HIPPA and Patient Privacy in Clinical Fundamentals and Business of Medicine).
  7. From Section 1171 of Part C of Subtitle F of Public Law 104-191 (August 21, 1996): Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996. Section 262, Paragraph 4B. ((45 CFR 160.103)): A physician cannot identify the person as a patient, share any demographic data relating to past, present, or future physical or mental health or condition; the provision of health care to the individual; or the past, present, or future payment for the provision of health care to the individual; and that identifies the individual or for which there is a reasonable basis to believe it can be used to identify the individual. Individually identifiable health information includes many common identifiers (e.g., name, address, birth date, Social Security Number). The fact that a particular individual received health care services from a health care provider may be considered PHI.
    • Since you cannot identify them as a patient, you can respond with “If you are a patient…”
  8. Disclosure of the PHI by the patient does not mean that they waive their privacy rights.  So, if they identify themselves as a patient, you still may not acknowledge them as a patient or give any identifiable information.
  9. Learn how to respond appropriately to negative reviews.
    • Thank the reviewer for their feedback.
    • Write in a “human” voice.
    • If necessary, apologize
    • Address the issue directly in the response
    • Respond with general treatment philosophies, no specifics
    • Take the conversation offline.  Invite the patient to come back in and/or call the office to address the issue.
    • Explain measures that you are taking to remedy the issue
    • Consider future readers
    • Counter with positive reviews.
  10. Be aware that soliciting for online reviews may occasionally backfire
    • Patient may use online reviews as a way to blackmail for services
References
  1. Baldassari C, Payne S, Chang C Schreibsten J, Sturm A. Marketing Yourself and Your Practice in the 21st Century. Miniseminar presentation at the American Academy of Otolaryngology/Head and Neck Surgery. September 2016.
  2. Rezac, Darcy. Work the pond!  Use the Power of Positive Networking to Leap Forward in Work and life. Prentice Hall Original Trade Paperback. October 5, 2005.
  3. Vivian Lee, MBA, MD, PhD. Transparency and trust – online patient reviews of physicians. N Eng J Med. 2017 Jan 19;376(3):197-199.
  4. American College of Surgeons: ACS Practice Management Online Course.
  5. American Medical Association: AMA Stepsforward. 
  6. Given the nature of social media which is constantly changing, there is no set reference that is ideal over time. Rather, here are some references that explain about social media in general and the strategies that go into being successful at it.

 

Resources 

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