The world of medical services is changing fast. Traditional word-of-mouth marketing and life-long loyalty to one medical practice is being eroded by rapid developments in the online world. Your customers now use the internet to connect with other customers, find and evaluate services, products and conduct extensive research on topics that matter the most before making decisions.
This article gives you insights into the current trends and explains how you can make the most of them.
Image is important:
Not so long ago marketing a medical practice was simply a matter of putting a sign up and choosing a nice font. Now your customers expect more. Today a website is an essential tool for strengthening current relationships and assisting potential patients learn about what you stand for and even connect with your practice. However, simply having ‘a website’ is not enough. A poorly executed online presence can backfire, result in disappointed users and may even damage reputations. News spreads fast in the online world! On the other hand, a considered online marketing strategy and a well-designed website is your chance to appear inviting and professional.
Before you run off and build a new website make sure you have thought about the ‘image’ you are have chosen to convey. Of course ‘trust’ is a given but there are other important decisions you will need to make about your chosen persona. For instance, do you want to be seen as friendly, professional, modern or traditional? Good web agencies will help you understand your options in regards to colours, layout and language and how these link to your personality.
What is important is finding the thing that makes you ‘different’. Ask some of your patients. They may have some valuable insights that you have failed to spot.
Help people find your site:
As anyone who has searched for a ‘doctor’ on Google knows the web is a very big place. In fact Google has now indexed well over 1 trillion web pages. So having a website gives you no guarantee that anyone will see it. You need to think beyond ‘website’ if you are to get results and ensure you do not waste your budget on a solution that will become obsolete or too expensive to maintain or expand.
Fortunately, a good online marketing strategy does not need to cost the earth – in sharp contrast to traditional channels such as newspaper, radio or TV. It takes some careful planning and a little bit of time but it will be very beneficial. Much of it comes down to choosing the right partner to supply you with sound advice and solutions.
Optimising for search engines:
Part of any build phase of a new website should be ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ [SEO] which is the combination of a number of strategies employed to make your website easy to find. To some extent the ease with which potential customers can find you through search engines comes down to the way the site is built. So make sure your web agency has a good understanding of this. The words you opt to use on your site will also affect search ‘efficiency’.
Search engines rank sites on original content so avoid copying text from other sites. Make your text clear and easy to ‘skim read’ and ask your web development company to give you a list of commonly used ‘key’ words to include: The more you use the better your results from web search activity.
Creating well ‘optimised’ website text is not rocket science. Just be sure you get professional guidance before you start.
Online advertising:
There are many types of online advertising available but the most common, and by far the most cost effective, is search engine advertising. You probably have seen this form of advertising when performing a Google search. They are called “sponsored links” which have been designed with smaller businesses in mind, and can be very effective. But don’t assume this is the right choice for you.
There are many ways to run a search engine marketing campaign and getting it right can save you a lot of money. Look to partner with a company that has experience in this field and work with them to set targets and budgets.
Directories:
Online directories are a simple way of raising your profile. There are many online directories available in Australia including Sensis, Yellow Pages, AMA and other official medical directories.
Some directories are free but many charge for a listing. Before you take the plunge and pay for a listing make sure you know the profile of the directory’s viewers. If the operator of a directory can’t provide that type of information it may be a sign that it’s unlikely to work for you.
Utilising social networks:
Social Networking seems to be the buzz word of 2009. In fact, online social networking has existed for a very long time. What’s new are services such as Twitter and Facebook having recently taken off. Networking sites may come and go but what won’t go away is the desire of your customers to connect and share thoughts and information. Developing a Social Networking strategy will be worth the effort.
Depending on how you want to approach the market you may want to make this a big part of your overall plan or just a small addition. Either way it is worth remembering you can’t do everything. Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, article writing and participating in forums are all forms of social networking and it is easy to get caught up trying to influence all of them. A far better approach is to identify where the people you want to communicate are found and target a few areas that will help add to your reputation.
Understand the rules:
Doctors hold a special place in society so advertising can get tricky. The Medical Practices Act and State Medical boards will have information on rules and regulations around marketing your practice. Spending some time reading and understanding these documents will help you avoid any pitfalls.
Measuring success:
After doing your research, optimising your site and fine-tuning your online marketing strategy, you’ll want to know how successful it is. The obvious way is to look at your bottom line. But building a brand name takes time so getting some higher level data is necessary to check if you’re on the right track.
Make sure your website has an analytics device attached so you can see who visits your site and how long they spend there. This knowledge is essential in achieving success with your online efforts. Luckily Google offers site analytics for free. The information gathered will give you a greater understanding and assist in the allocation of your marketing budget to further strengthen your online marketing efforts.
Act now:
A wide range of new technologies are changing the way everyone is using the web. The global financial crisis has just added momentum to that trend as individuals and firms switch to more cost-effective and valuable ways of communicating and marketing. There is no better time to take advantage of this shift and build yourself a great online presence and strengthen your reputation.
Last week our Chairman Rob Cameron gave a speech to the Melbourne Junior Chamber of commerce. In it he described what is happening to our economy and how it is effecting companies. Have a read of the document below to see his thoughts.
Recent article from the Chicago Tribune (April 27, 2009)
“While just a few years ago the mediums were associated with the teenage and 20-something sets, that’s changed. Two-thirds of all online users visit social networks and blogs, according to data from Nielsen Online. And the largest growth in social media users last year came from the 35- to 49-year-old group.
With the average age of its readers approaching 40, BradsDeals.com didn’t consider social media the best fit until this year.
“When we started on Facebook a few weeks ago, I wasn’t sure we were going to connect with people because our demographic is older,” said Brad Wilson, founder and editor in chief, who also began using Twitter recently.
The company has attracted 2,500 followers through Twitter since March 1 and nabbed 1,200 Facebook users since launching a fan page this month. Now, traffic to BradsDeals.com is streaming in at more than 1 million hits a month, up 150 percent from a year ago, Wilson said, adding that consumers’ focus on frugality also factors into the site’s growth.”
We’re not going to pretend that we know everything about newspapers. Nor are we saying we can somehow magically see into the future. But some things just seem obvious to us. Let us know what you think.
He said that he was ‘mad as hell’ at what he saw as intellectual property theft.
News aggregators like The Huffington Post and Google News recently came under fire from Dean Singleton, the chairman of Associated Press. He said that he was ‘mad as hell’ at what he saw as intellectual property theft. From Mr Singleton’s point of view social networking and search engines are killing the newspaper industry. He sees a future where people pay to log on to their content and other sites pay to link to their articles. Unfortunately for him this attitude is going to put him off side with a large portion of his potential market.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently told the Newspaper Association of America that newspapers were very close to committing suicide by alienating their online customers, the fastest growing segment. What’s more a recent study showed that the generation who grew up with Google and Facebook love news aggregators and free news. The study says “Not only are teens not rushing to pay for content but they also struggle to envision in what realm they would need to pay for content…. Ask teens where they find news, and they typically say Yahoo!, Google, AOL or MSN”.
Frankly it sounds like newspapers struggle to understand the opportunities and rules that govern the online world. There is a whole generation that has grown up with the concept of freemium economics. Try to charge them for something they have always had for free and you’ll lose them altogether.
They need to remember that their main customers are advertisers.
Newspapers are in the business of collecting and delivering information. They have to be agnostic and flexible about the method of delivery if they are to avoid being trapped in outdated and inefficient channels. The old model of monetising this information is on the way out. Even the term “newspaper” is starting to sound like a relic. They need to remember that their main customers are advertisers. If they embrace the new mindset and employ direct marketing principles there is a world of new commercial opportunities out there.
Here’s what we think hold the most amount of promise:
1 – More engaging advertising
One of the most difficult transitions for newspapers going online has been understanding how to sell advertising space online. Banners are OK but many of them are just annoying and get ignored.
Newsprint was a simple platform that advertisers could use to get a message out. Online newspapers need to create a new advertising platform. Develop a collection of tools that not only track users behaviour but allow advertisers to sell their products more easily.
Currently many advertisers create landing pages for banner ads. These pages pass on detailed information, get users to sign up or even make a sale.
If the digital arm of a newspaper were to develop easy to manage tools that allowed advertisers to perform these tasks, thus reducing the overall campaign cost and timeframe, advertisers would be over the moon.
Not so long ago we developed an online application for the Herald Sun’s sponsorship of the Melbourne Marathon. This application, utilising RFID technology, allowed each and every runner to see a video of themselves. With a bit more development time could have added targeted advertising to this type of application and created a platform that could be used for multiple events.
It is this type of thinking that advertisers are looking for.
2 – Utilise the Twitternet
Micro-blogging is here to stay. Twitter is currently the market leader in this space but who knows what will happen in the coming years. What’s certain is that 2009 is going to see the tipping point for Twitter. Well worded headlines can easily drive traffic to the source of the news. Again, The New York Times is already doing this. When this article was written the Times had more than 500,000 followers and this number will keep rising.
There are huge opportunities here to increase overall traffic.
There are huge opportunities here to increase overall traffic. Twitter lets people connect with ideas and information, and ideas and information are what news sources are all about.
3 – Realise that the brand is a social centre
Newspapers are brands with a customer base that identifies with it like any other brand. More than ever newspapers need to remember that fact and learn to leverage it. Connecting with local communities and encouraging them to add content.
Currently many online newspapers are concerned about moderating any user generated content and create rules and dedicate resources to achieving that end. An alternative and much better approach is to get other members of that community to vote on comments or images. Sites like ‘Digg’ do this very well. If a user posts an abusive remark it is very quickly voted out of the time line. Recently President Obama launched a website that did just that. Read more about it here.
This influx of user generated content can then be monetised. The Cincinnati Enquirer has a site that does this. CaptureCincinnati.com is a user generated photo sharing site. They have been selling a coffee table book and a DVD of this content and expect it’s popularity to continue to be strong. There could even be the possibility of users ordering photos to make a customised book through the site.
An online community based around a newspaper brand is a fruit ripe for the picking.
An online community based around a newspaper brand is a fruit ripe for the picking. You only have to look at the comments on any news site to see how eager the audience is to get involved.
4 – Personalisation
Some websites get it right but many don’t. Personalisation on the web is huge and is only going to get bigger. Google has a product called ‘iGoogle‘ that let’s you personalise a page. Stuff.co.nz is a news site that lets you order some elements of the page. Underlying these examples is an understanding that the end user has specific interests that they want information about. News site are uniquely positioned to be able to deliver that information in a very targeted way. If they focus on user experience people will flock to their sites.
BBC.co.uk have made an admirable effort with their widgetised home page, taking more than a hint of inspiration from iGoogle. You can drag the sections around, customise them a little, and add more from other areas of the site. However it’s only skin deep. The big leap will be developing this idea to a point where users have control over the whole experience, not just what they find on the home page.
5 – Open up even more
APIs or application programming interfaces are driving the progress of the web, and newspapers need to embrace them. APIs allow third party developers to connect to websites and deliver customised content. I know this sounds counter-intuitive but it is already being done. The New York Times Developer Network allows developers to create applications that deliver their content to the end user.
What The Times has realised, that many other news sources have failed to do, is that what they really have is an information platform – rather than an online newspaper, or even a website. Giving third party developers access to this opens up opportunities to deliver advertisers messages in a more direct way, allowing them to increase the size and value of their user database and cut down the cost of developing their own applications by only partnering with developers that get the formula right.
6 – Change the printed material
The news media industry is in transition, one day printed newspapers will be history. The industry needs to think very carefully about how they structure and deliver printed matter now and in the future. Design is paramount. The customer now has a choice. It’s time to respect that choice.
I think this recent TED talk demonstrates the proposition very well.
The world economy is in state of disarray. As companies fail we can take some small comfort in the fact that these types of events help markets evolve. So what is going to happen to marketing on the internet over the next few years?
Before we dive into that it is worth looking back to other major technological booms and their influence on the marketplace. Electricity and rail were both boom industries when they first hit. They were new and exciting and everybody wanted to get in on the action. in both of these industries there was an initial burst of investment and some people got very rich very quickly. Then the bubble burst, and the many of the companies that had set up to take advantage of these new technologies yet had unsustainable models failed. Standardisation, centralisation and ubiquity followed.
The dot com crash, starting in the year 2000, had much the same effect on internet based business. This has caused the IT industry to mature over the last few years. The economic models are better and there has been a lot of effort devoted to standardisation.
The real difference between the internet based industry and other technological bubbles is that the internet is decentralised by definition. In the case of the dot com crash, the rest of the world’s economy was incredibly buoyant and was able to absorb the impact of that crash. What we are seeing now is that the stage of internet ubiquity is moving incredibly fast. It is most other industries that failing now.
Banking, automotive, retail and media, comprising of print, television and radio are all suffering. These industries are going to have to evolve to survive. It is widely understood that the way the market was interacting with each of these categories was changing, due in large part to the way the market was using the internet. The current environment is only going to speed that process up. In many ways, banking, media, retail, automotive and many other industries were already in trouble. This recession was simply the straw that broke the camels back.
One thing that we do know is that we can’t tell what the world economy is going to look like at the end of this economic slump but it is going to be very very different to what it looks like now; and the internet is going to be at the centre of everything.
Going back to the topic of this article, how is this going to effect internet based marketing? Simple answer; massively.
Over the next few years far more transactions are going to be moving online. With internet’s potential for marketing campaigns to go viral most industries will have to start thinking about sales beyond their own geographic boarders. As a user’s activity can be tracked with far greater accuracy than most conventional media so the definition of what marketing is and the whole advertising industry in general will have to change as well.
There are still a lot of unknown factors about the future of internet marketing. What we do know is that all research suggests that the internet seems to following the famous Moore’s Law. By all estimates it will double in size about every five years. At this rate it will surpass all other media in the very near future.
The future is unmapped, and to many the unknown is terrifying. To others it is the most exciting time to be alive.
Further reading:
Chapter One of ‘E-Marketing’ (Fourth edition) by Judy Strauss, Adel El-Ansary and Raymond Frost
According to the recently published Power of Direct Marketing report from The Direct Marketing Association, Direct Marketing-related advertising will account for 53% of the total US ad spend in 2009.
Peter A. Johnson, PhD, DMA’s vice president, says the report confirms that the trend to move advertising dollars towards Direct Marketing is continuing.
“Despite the current uncertain economic times and sluggish, even declining periods in the latter part of 2008, direct marketers should realise 3.7 percent nominal annual growth in sales this year,” says Dr. Johnson.
“Direct marketing’s integration of multiple sales channels and highly targeted offers means that businesses utilising direct marketing typically outperform their competitors, even when sailing into financial headwinds,” continues Dr. Johnson.
