Category: Direct To Consumer

For local, physician-owned medical practices emerging from the pandemic, correctly navigating how to acquire and grow a patient base is top of list.

Yes, traditional marketing methods remain, including physician referral networking, affiliations with organizations and word of mouth from comfortable patients.

But one element that has changed is digital.

Ensuring your practice is maximizing its online potential for finding new patients is more than important, it’s a must.

Know Your Audience, Because It Is Bigger Than You Think

Think about your own behavior during social isolation. On Valentine’s Day, could you have navigated Zoom? Confidently ordered groceries for delivery or restaurant takeout for pickup?

Even more important is volume … more Minnesotans are doing far more online far more often than even at the start of 2020.

Think of your own behavior. How many pageviews do you generate a day simply by checking your phone? How about on your tablet? Your laptop? More than you were in January, right?

Savvier digital consumers like you are spending more time online. These are your prospective patients.

You just need to get in front of them multiple times in multiple ways and you’re more likely to be top of mind when their ailment needs attention.

Pick Your Targets And Don’t Overshoot Them

That expanding digital activity generated by savvier Minnesota consumers every day means it’s never been easier to get in front of your likeliest prospects; nearby folks who don’t know who you are but need the service you offer.

In fact, digital advertising allows affordably targeting the handful of zip codes around your clinic, or further if the specialty or procedure warrants.

Beyond that zip code targeting, we are able to use Google ‘machine learning’ and artificial intelligence to find prospects in your zip code as they research their health condition online or shared characteristics with your existing patients.

Digital As It Has Never Been As Affordable

More Minnesotans doing more online more often has a two-pronged outcome beneficial to local business.

First, the greater inventory generated feeds the supply side of ad inventory supply-and-demand. The cost of a click, an impression or a video view has never been cheaper. Compared to traditional marketing methods, digital advertising is a bargain.

Second, the more Minnesotans search, the more pages they view, the keener understanding Google has of them. This feeds ‘machine learning’ and makes it easier for businesses to target them by what they are searching or by their behavior.

ROI Has Never Been Easier To Measure

The last point to understand is that tracking what site visitors do on your site is fully measured. 

We know when a Paid Ad visitor clicks a phone number, e-mail, ‘make an appointment’ or any other key element identified on your site.

Doing the simple math of the number of site conversions against the ad spend generates an ROI for an ad campaign.

You will know if your advertising is working and is profitable. If it isn’t we simply stop the ad.

Your Best Traffic Is SEO Visitors Finding You On Their Own

A known element of digital marketing is that Organic and Direct traffic converts at a 4x to 6x rate compared to Paid traffic.

It makes sense. People intentionally finding their way to your site are more motivated than someone who clicked on an ad we paid to put in front of them.

There are a variety of proven methods to grow SEO visits, particularly in health care. Creating new site content and adding specialty content from medical organizations play a role alongside side design and technical site refinements.

Here’s the best part: Once SEO traffic starts to grow it doesn’t stop unless we want it to.

Consider that conversion rates are relatively stable over time … same for the first 1,000 visitors as it is for the second 1,000.

The more SEO traffic we generate the more conversions you receive.

It’s simple math.

Another ‘golden rule’ of the digital experience is if you are doing something you think is clever and extremely useful, so are millions of other people.

Really.

Take Google Maps. I use Google Maps to get satellite images of locations in movies or that I read or hear about. I zoom in and use Street View to see what the neighborhood looks like. 

When Street View isn’t available for the location I’m disappointed.

I also use Google Maps like everyone else … type in an address, click “Navigate Me” and have ‘the lady in the phone’ take me where I want to go. Don’t even need to know what direction I’m facing!

Used to be a website is what kept you ahead of your competitors. Then it was a newly designed website. Now, are you wondering what is next?

Mobile phones and other new devices are pushing digital change faster, taking more of the time and attention of your customers. You need to be where your customers are now and where more of them are headed.

Accessing the new digital environment where customers are spending more time researching, following and learning is where smart business owners want to be.

But, how to get there?

If you owned a consumer-facing business in the 1980s the Yellow Pages is where you had to be, or so I am told. Including by several clients now working hard to extricate themselves from those contracts.

Local versions were delivered to homes and business across the country. A mainstay for homeowners, the book was an in-home advertising resource like none before, right? ‘Brick and mortar’ businesses that rely on people calling and walking through the door competed for space in ‘the book.’

Well, obviously, those days are long gone. Disappeared. 

First it was bulky computers and cathode-ray monitors with access to ‘the Internet’ in the late 1980s. Then it busted wide open when Netscape released the first ‘browser” and “www” entered the lexicon in the mid-1990s.