This week in Healthcare Marketing Made Easy, we discuss how to take advantage of opportunities to grow your brand and your practice with social media.

One of the biggest challenges for healthcare providers practicing today is figuring out how to attract and engage patients without wasting marketing dollars on expensive, ineffective campaigns. More and more, traditional outbound marketing strategies are generating less return on investment, while simultaneously rising in cost. Here at our healthcare marketing headquarters, we foresaw this trend some time ago. So, to best serve our clients and provide effective marketing strategies that are also cost-effective, we pioneered a new approach centered on content-led inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing simply means using high-quality, original content to promote your health practice — articles, blog posts, videos, podcasts, social media, and more. So instead of broadcasting your marketing out to prospective clients, you draw your prospects in. Here at Paramount/MD, we say — Don’t chase prospects down. Compel them to come to you. This is the basis of inbound marketing.

Inbound marketing and social media are made for one another. Social media is changing the nature, frequency, and ease of interactions between patients and providers. Inbound marketing is about using interactions to build your practice. The two are a perfect match.

Social media not only gives patients an open channel of communication with health providers. It also empowers patients to take control of their own healthcare and health needs. According to an extensive survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers Health Research Institute, patients want their health providers to be even more active on social media. Over 70% of patients say they want providers to use social media to communicate the availability of appointments, issue appointment reminders, and provide specialist referral services.

Of course, this isn’t to say that using social media is a sure-fire way to attract and engage patients. There are excellent opportunities there, no doubt about it, but social platforms can also be a colossal waste of time and energy when used in the wrong ways.
How can you better seize the opportunities on social media, and use this powerful inbound marketing tool to your utmost advantage? We have written about this before, and recommend a quick read of the following if you’ve not done so: The Skinny on Social Media Marketing (It’s Easier Than You Think!. So now let us defer to none other than the American Medical Association, which has identified a number of social media opportunity areas for health providers. These are:

• Listening to users to discover areas for improved customer service
• Getting patient feedback on the effectiveness of treatments, and treatment side-effects
• Giving patients helpful educational information
• Investigating the competition to determine areas for improvement
• Identifying needed or desired services or products

Given the powerful benefits of maintaining an active social media presence — establishing and growing relationships; showcasing your practice; engaging your audience; building your reputation; expanding your online visibility; promoting health compliance; improving patient retention; increasing recommendations and reviews; and we could go on and on! — it’s clear that health providers who ignore these tools do so at their peril. Especially when used as part of a comprehensive content-led inbound marketing plan, providers in every area of healthcare can significantly benefit from the robust results and low cost of implementation.

We’re here to help. If you have questions about social media, inbound marketing, content development, or other healthcare marketing approaches we’d love to hear from you. Connect with us directly, or visit us online to get instant, hassle-free healthcare marketing support from Paramount/MD.

San Anselmo, CA | May 14, 2013:  The 11^th annual meeting of the prestigious International Vein Congress commenced in Fontainebleu Miami Beach on May 2-5, with Paramount/MD (paramountmd.com) Principal Victor Sirgado amongst the distinguished faculty invited to participate.

Mr. Sirgado addressed the meeting’s attendees, made up of the nation’s leading physicians and specialists in the venous care arene, educating them on how to enhance their success in today’s changing healthcare climate. He spoke specifically about the significance of effective branding.

“One of the most important yet least understood assets for any organization is its brand,” said Mr. Sirgado. “As healthcare organizations contend with challenges related to the implementation of healthcare reform, the development of a strong, trusted brand is more important than ever.”

Drawing on his expertise executing successful social media campaigns for health practitioners, Mr. Sirgado also discussed the use of these marketing tools, and how vein care physicians can employ them effectively.

“I’m proud to share with my colleagues my personal and professional experiences as they pertain to social media development,” Mr. Sirgado said. “Meeting the demands of today’s consumer requires a healthy, integrated, and technology-driven social agenda. My ideas about how to properly craft detailed social media marketing plans that drive real world influence and outcomes as part of a multi-channel marketing effort are key for practitioners to understand. That said, examining the issues that will shape marketing strategies targeted at population health management, and preparing for value-driven healthcare, will be key in understanding group or individual planning processes.”

International Vein Congress (IVC, ivcmiami.com) Course Director Jose I. Almeida, M.D., a board-certified vascular surgeon with the Miami Vein Center in Miami, FL, said the meeting’s reputation and success depends on having the nation’s top professionals present as faculty members.

“As the premier venous course in the country, IVC relies on leading experts to serve as faculty. We are pleased to have someone of Victor’s caliber joining us. Victor will address the important subject of helping physicians market what they do,” said Dr. Almeida, who founded the IVC in 2002.

Mr. Sirgado was the only faculty member to be invited who is not a practicing health provider, further highlighting the special honor of being asked to participate. He gave his sincere thanks to Dr. Almeida for the opportunity to present at the meeting.  Other members of the elite faculty roster include M.D.’s from leading universities, vascular centers and institutes, hospitals, and premier health organizations such as the Mayo Clinic.

The IVC meeting is one of the most respected and well-known venous courses in the country, attracting attendees from around the globe and boasting a growing number of participants. Following this year’s highly successful conference, IVC leaders are hinting at exciting changes to come in 2014 – advancements that promise to further participating members’ practices and propel the Congress into the future.

About Paramount/MD

Paramount/MD, with headquarters in San Anselmo, CA, is a leader in 21st-century healthcare marketing. The national agency serves physicians, medical practices, dental practices, hospitals, and other healthcare organizations and corporations, helping to grow revenues and attract new patients with current and comprehensive marketing practices. Paramount/MD’s areas of expertise include: direct healthcare marketing services – print and online marketing, website development, content development, social media marketing, physician referrals, brand and reputation development; onsite and offsite consulting; and education through seminars and other resources. Learn more at www.paramountmd.com.

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Your front desk reception staff are the first personal point of contact for prospective patients. Do your staff have the training they need to effectively convert inquiries into appointments? Do they know how to talk to doctors to build or solidify referral relationships? The knowledge required for your front desk and marketing staff to contribute to practice growth may not be intuitive, but it is teachable. You can empower your staff to help boost your ROI by training them in three areas: 1) Converting first-time callers into new patients; 2) Building referral relationships with new doctors, and strengthening existing relationships; 3) Providing customer service that enhances patient experiences. By giving your staff the skills to do their jobs more effectively, you can build a better, bigger practice, while allowing your employees to feel like active and engaged members of the team.

Read more tips and in-depth articles about healthcare marketing and healthcare advertising at http://paramountmd.com/blog.

This week in Healthcare Marketing Made Easy, we discuss some common marketing mistakes that cost health providers and healthcare practices substantial sums in wasted money.

Effective healthcare marketing isn’t necessarily intuitive. But applying some common sense strategies — like thorough research and planning, intelligent execution, and meticulous tracking and monitoring — goes a long way to minimize costs, reduce risk, and maximize return on investment.

Nonetheless, one person’s “common sense” can be another person’s misunderstanding, lack of experience, or lack of knowledge. Truthfully, we encounter this phenomenon quite a lot as healthcare marketing experts. In our years on the job, we’ve come across a multitude of marketing mistakes that health practices make — usually as a result of being uninformed. After all, it’s still the rare physician who’s also a professional-grade marketer. When the mistakes are made by large hospitals with in-house marketing departments (if they deserve the name after committing such transgressions!), it’s a little harder to understand. So look carefully at this list of mistakes, because if you’re making them then you’re probably losing money.

Relying solely on outbound marketing. Outbound marketing means sending your message out to your audience via TV ads, magazine or newspaper ads, direct mail, and the like. While outbound strategies have their place, and can be useful in reaching otherwise unreachable segments of your target population, exclusive use can be a costly proposition. As a general rule, outbound marketing is more expensive than inbound marketing, and can also be harder to measure ROI if you’re not very careful and organized.

On the other hand, inbound marketing is highly cost-effective and comparatively straightforward to track and monitor. Briefly, in contrast to sending your message out, content-led inbound marketing draws your audience to you. It involves using original, compelling, high-quality content — videos, blogs, articles, social media content — to promote your practice and engage your patients. It is highly effective for today’s healthcare providers. (Read more about inbound marketing in this recent article: http://paramountmd.com/blog/healthcare-marketing-made-easy-the-awesome-power-of-inbound-marketing/)

Neglecting to track and monitor results. We can’t understand how some “marketing professionals” still make this mistake, but we’ve seen it with our own eyes many times. You must know what’s working and what isn’t in order to increase ROI and revenues. It is absolutely essential to have a reliable and quantifiable system to monitor your marketing strategies and results. It is one of our mantras: Marketing done in the dark is marketing done wrong.

Failing to effectively train staff to communicate marketing messages. Too often, office staff are not sufficiently trained to communicate the messages you want conveyed to new patient prospects. Staff are an important part of delivering a cohesive marketing message. Reception staff are often the first to talk to patients making new inquiries, putting these personnel on the front lines of patient conversion. Unfortunately, though, staff often haven’t received the necessary training. This not only results in a lost opportunity to gain a new patient, but it also wastes the money and effort that were invested in marketing and advertising to get that patient to call your practice.

If you are making any of these mistakes, it’s time to turn the ship around and rectify these errors. You’ll be amazed at the difference in revenue that will result from doing so.

We’re here to help. If you have questions about your practice’s marketing strategies and the results you’re seeing, we’d love to hear from you. Connect with us directly, or visit us online to get instant, hassle-free healthcare marketing support from Paramount/MD.

Successful Healthcare Marketing Includes Reliable Tracking and Monitoring

Effective healthcare marketing means using multiple mediums to attract new leads. Many healthcare providers use the pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, static online ad placement, content marketing, newspapers, magazines, and/or TV ads. No matter how many channels you’re using to market your practice, it is extremely important to track and monitor where your leads are coming from. If you don’t know which strategies are working to generate your new patient inquiries, and which ones might be dispensable, you will waste money and resources. Implement a reliable and effective lead monitoring system today and start reaping the benefits tomorrow.

Read more tips and in-depth articles about healthcare marketing and healthcare advertising at http://paramountmd.com/blog.

This week in Healthcare Marketing Made Easy, we discuss the importance of patient interaction, and how you can foster more quality interactions to improve patient retention.

How much do you invest to attract new patients? How much of your marketing budget is devoted to converting new prospects? If you’re like most health providers, it’s probably a substantial amount. This is as it should be. But adding a new patient to your practice is only part of the equation that equals bigger revenues and positive growth. The other part is keeping that new patient you just worked so hard to get.

Patients may leave a health provider for a variety of reasons — many of which have nothing to do with the quality of care they received or their overall experiences with the office. Some examples are limited finances, leading busy lives, and basic inertia.

Patient interaction is therefore an important factor in increasing your patient retention. Fostering quality interactions with patients doesn’t have to be time-consuming or costly. In fact, we’ve found that “the little things” can make the biggest impressions. Here are a few ideas to help you increase and improve your patient interactions:

The follow-up phone call. A short phone call to a patient after they’ve visited your office is an easy way to convey that you care. In addition, since few patients will be expecting it, the follow-up phone call tends to make a lasting, highly positive impression. This is also a good way to address any concerns or questions the patient may have after leaving your office, and to encourage them to adhere to the health plan you devised, if appropriate.

Interactive blog. You can use your blog to give patients a place to comment on the articles you post, ask questions, or even submit health topics they’d like to learn more about. Be sure to respond in a timely manner to any patient comments.

Request feedback. Asking your patients for feedback on their experiences with your practice is another easy way to connect and open the lines of communication. Even if they don’t have anything specific to offer, just knowing that you care enough to ask will have a positive effect. If you have a procedure for requesting testimonials or reviews (which you should! See this related article for more: http://www.paramountmd.com/healthcare-marketing-made-easy-getting-those-all-important-testimonials/) this can serve as an equivalent opportunity to interact.

Be social on social media. Use social media to create a community atmosphere for your patients. Promoting quality interaction on Facebook, Twitter, and all your networks can include things like organizing peer support groups, hosting health challenges, soliciting patient success stories, and having open discussions about relevant health conditions and treatments.

Patients who feel like their provider truly cares about their health and well-being, and that they have an open line of communication, are more likely to maintain a long-term relationship. That means that a little bit of effort toward patient interaction can go a long way toward building your practice.

We’re here to help. If you have questions about how to improve patient retention at your practice, or bigger-picture marketing strategies, we’d love to hear from you. Connect with us directly, or visit us online to get instant, hassle-free healthcare marketing support from Paramount/MD.

Better Healthcare Marketing Online

More and more web users are accessing the Internet using a mobile device. This includes using devices like smartphones, tablets, and wireless readers to search for health information and health providers. If you rely on your website to attract and convert patients (and you certainly should be using online marketing to grow your practice), that means you’ll want to make sure your site is mobile friendly. Even if your medical website is current, most sites will need some extra updating to work well with these devices. So ask your website developer, or contact our expert website development department for help, and take your Internet marketing to the next level.

This week in Healthcare Marketing Made Easy, we discuss the motivations and psychology behind online sharing, including why people share and how health providers can use this knowledge to get their content shared.

It’s an interesting question, really — Why do people share online? Indeed, of all the studies and all the talk about social media and online sharing, none have offered much insight into the psychology and motivational forces behind all this sharing.

As eternal information-seekers here at Paramount/MD, this leaves quite an unsatisfactory knowledge gap in our view. After all, if we don’t know why people share, and what factors influence their sharing behavior, then we are limited in our ability to foster increased content sharing. No doubt, our meticulous  tracking and monitoring provides excellent insight into what content web users share — that is, which articles, social media content, videos and etc. our clients’ patients are passing around. But just imagine the power of knowing upfront why people share online, and being able to put these insights to work!

That’s why we were so excited to read a recent study that tackles this very topic. Conducted by The New York Times and the Consumer Insight Group, the study is aptly called “The Psychology of Sharing: Why Do People Share Online?”. In collaboration with Latitude Research, investigators used a three-phase study design to illuminate why web users share content. First, researchers conducted in-person interviews with study participants. Phase two involved a week-long “sharing panel.” Finally, researchers surveyed 2,500 medium to heavy online sharers and performed segmentation to identify the main types of sharers.

We strongly recommend reading the entire study report, as it contains a wealth of fascinating information. If you don’t have time to read the whole thing, here are some of the interesting points and highlights:

• Sharing is not new, it is human nature (this is obvious when you think about it, but it’s nice to be reminded).

• In our current “Information Age” we share more content, from more sources, with more people, more often, and more quickly.

• 85% of participants said that reading other people’s comments helps them better understand and process information; 73% said that sharing helps them process information better. (This goes to show how important it is to compel readers to share your content if you want them to remember and learn from it!)

• Some of the main motivators for sharing: to bring value and entertaining content to others; to give people a better sense of who the sharer is and what they’re interested in; to grow and develop relationships; to feel more involved in the world; to get the word out about brands, products, causes, and etc.

The study then discusses six main personas of sharers, followed by key guidelines to propel users to share content. We will absolutely be incorporating the cutting-edge knowledge from this research into our healthcare marketing campaigns and are certain we’ll see an increase in content sharing as a result. We’ll look forward to reporting back, and welcome your comments on this exciting research.

We’re here to help. If you have questions about content development, social media, and how to get your content shared, we’d love to hear from you. Connect with us directly, or visit us online to get instant, hassle-free healthcare marketing support from Paramount/MD.

Healthcare Marketing with Local SEO

Using social media and online marketing to attract and engage patients is a must in today’s wired world. But on the web, where networks of users criss-cross the country, how can you target the patient populations you want — the ones that are actually located in your area? You can use location-based social media and other online tools. That includes setting up accounts in Google Plus, FourSquare, and other local review sites. By enhancing your local signals, you will not only better target patients who live in your region, but you will also improve your Google rankings when patients in your area search for a physician. And that’s a win-win for healthcare marketing success.

Read more tips and in-depth articles about healthcare marketing and healthcare advertising.

This week in Healthcare Marketing Made Easy, we discuss the webpages that every medical website must have to effectively inform and convert new site visitors, in addition to keeping current patients happy.

When building an effective medical website, there are a lot of different elements to consider. From the behind-the-scenes SEO infrastructure, to the color and design elements, to the ease-of-use and presence of quality content — creating a custom healthcare site takes some serious thought, planning, and skill. One of the most important aspects is making sure that your medical website stands out and conveys the unique qualities of your practice. Even today, we continue to see too many medical websites that are “plain vanilla.” These bland, cookie-cutter sites don’t communicate anything unique about the health practice, and typically don’t convert many visitors.

But as important as it is to make sure your medical website is custom branded for your practice, there are also certain standard elements that every site should have. Here, we’re going to talk about some of the web pages that must appear on every medical website, and what to include on each.

Home Page. The home page is the front entryway to your healthcare website, and frequently — though certainly not always — the first page that site visitors see. The goal of the home page is to drive visitors to learn more about the health practice or the services offered. The home page should have obvious links to the ‘About Us’ or services sections. It should also have highly visible contact information, including the practice phone number and location.

About Us / Why Choose Us Page. This page, or section of several pages, is where you clearly and effectively convey what makes your practice special. This is the place to wow! visitors with your expertise, and communicate your practice’s mission. Including a physician interview video is always a great way to introduce patients to their doctor and allow them to identify with him/her. At the very least, include photos of key medical staff.

Services Pages. Develop a complete services section, including information on each of the services you offer. Pay special attention to search-engine-optimization and content strategy here. It is important to perform background research on how patients find your website, and what keywords and phrases they are searching for. Testimonials and patient success stories are ideal additions to your services descriptions.

Blog Posts / Articles. Including quality content about relevant topics not only helps to attract site traffic and boost online visibility, but also conveys your expertise in your area. Blog posts and articles allow you to educate patients while building trust and confidence in you and your practice.

Contact Us. The contact page must give patients an easy way to get in touch with your practice, either to make an appointment, schedule a consultation, or get more information. It also helps to include a map in addition to the physical address, phone number, and email.

There are numerous other custom elements that give medical websites a competitive edge and help to convert more visitors, but the pages/sections described here are essential for every site. After these are well developed, strategies like SEO and content-led inbound marketing will ensure that patients find your website, and that all your new traffic effectively converts.

We’re here to help. If you have questions about website development, search-engine-optimization, or other healthcare marketing approaches we’d love to hear from you. Connect with us directly, or visit us online to get instant, hassle-free healthcare marketing support from Paramount/MD.