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Ty Allen SocialClimb Interview

Ty Allen Social Climb Interview

Today we’re going to be joined by Ty Allen, the CEO of SocialClimb. SocialClimb is Ty’s fourth successful business in the marketing and technology space. He is passionate about building systems that actually grow practices and improve patient experiences.

SocialClimb enables thousands of physicians to automatically attract new patients to their practices by building their online social reputations and automatically targeting ideal new patients. Delivering more than one million patient per customer interactions every month, SocialClimb helps practices transform themselves inside and out.

Ty and his wife have five beautiful daughters and live in Alpine, Utah. Ty enjoys golfing, and mountain biking, and we’re so excited for him to be joining us today as he shares insights into how your medical practice can benefit from reputation management, and reviews, and directory listings online.

In this interview we discuss:

  • Why reviews are so important for a medical practice
  • Where reviews should be posted (what directories are most important for healthcare)?
  • How can office administrators solicit reviews?
  • What technology exists for getting reviews?
  • Once you get a review, what should you do?

 Listen to the Medical Marketing Podcast:


Caitlin McDonald: Wonderful, thank you so much, Ty for joining us on our podcast today. To get started, we’d love to learn a little bit more about your story, and SocialClimb’s story.

Ty Allen: Great, thanks, Caitlin, I really appreciate the opportunity to participate in the podcast today, and maybe just to share a little bit about why we started SocialClimb and the reasons we’re so passionate about what we do for practices, is I think a great way to start.

So, my personal story behind this is six years ago, I was involved in an accident wherein I fractured my neck and at C4, and had a spinal cord injury. At the time of the injury, of course, I didn’t know what had really happened in my neck. The ambulance took me to the hospital, and the emergency room doctors did a great job, they quickly diagnosed my issue, and they knew that the fracture was there, and that I also had what is called a central cord syndrome.

And at that level in the neck, I was pretty lucky that I was still able to breathe. But when I first had been injured, I actually felt like I was a quadriplegic and then over the next half an hour, I started getting some sensation back and some functionality back, but I was actually in a lot of pain by the time they got me to the emergency room. So I remember vividly laying on a backboard after the doctors had gotten the diagnosis, and they came to me and said that my case was too complex for the small hospital that I’d been taken to and that I needed to either go to a larger hospital north of me or a larger hospital south of me, and the ER doctor said, “These are the names of the two physicians, spine surgeons, who are on call, one at each of the hospitals. I need you to choose which hospital, therefore which spine surgeon is going to do your surgery. You have five minutes to make that decision.”

And my wife was at the hospital at that time and I remember looking at her and neither of us had any idea how to make that decision. Eventually, we made the decision by asking a few other providers who were very reticent to give us any information, but we had to make a decision so we did. And in my process of rehab, so I had surgery, I went into a rehab process that… I was in the hospital for about a month, and went through inpatient and outpatient rehab and… And I’m doing very well today, in a large part to the great care that I received from a lot of providers

But there were probably eight to 10 decisions I had to make during that process about who would be my occupational therapist, who’d be my physical therapist, what inpatient facility would I have myself go to, what outpatient facilities would I use for rehab, who my rehab doctor would be, and just a lot of decisions that I just, as a consumer of Medical care, I did not have the data to make that decision.

So I realized, while, going through this process that there was a problem, that a lot of these practices and physicians don’t know how to tell their story in a way that consumers of medical care today can use it to find the right provider for them. So that’s where the genesis of SocialClimb came from.

We’re really passionate about helping providers, great providers, tell their story, and attract patients in the way that patients seek to find providers today. And that is the story behind SocialClimb. And again, it’s not a story I always tell every potential customer, or every person I talk to, but it is the reason that I personally am so passionate about what we do.

 

Caitlin McDonald: What a powerful story, and thank you for sharing such a personal story about why you started SocialClimb. And as a consumer of healthcare and a marketing agency that helps healthcare practices, we know how important reputation management and reviews are as a way to build trust and really showcase your own medical practice story as a way to bring new patients in the door. Can you talk a little bit about why reviews and reputation management is so important for healthcare centers?

Why are Reviews and Reputation Management so Important for Healthcare Centers?

Ty Allen: Sure, yeah. One of the things that I learned pretty quickly is that I’m not unique in the way that I seek for care, when I wanna buy a product, I take my phone out and do a search. I go to Amazon or Google and I do a search. And I do the same thing for medical care. Today, it’s a great thing that now we have a lot of this data available to us online. But it wasn’t the case even six years ago, a lot of it wasn’t available

So getting a physician or practice’s data online in the right way, so getting the listings, the optimization of those listings, and the reviews from real patients out there is super critical because the next potential patient is simply gonna take their phone out and do a search, they’re gonna ask Google in most cases, “Where can I get help with problem X? Or where can I find a provider that can help me with problem Y?

And if those reviews from patients are not out there, and if those pages are not owned by you as a physician, you are not gonna show up. Even five or six years ago, most practices and physicians thought, “Look, all I gotta do is get a website set up. My website has to be great, it’s gotta be optimized.” And it’s not to say that websites are not still valuable, it’s just that so many patients today do a search, find a physician because of their reputation online, choose that physician, even make the call to the practice straight from that listing, having never gone to the practice’s website. So a website is still valuable. It’s just that there are so many other ways to now tell the story of the practice, and the physician online in ways that patients actually find… Help find your practice.

 

Caitlin McDonald: And then where should these reviews be posted? What types of directories should a medical practice make sure that they are on?

What Directories Should a Medical Practice Use?

Ty Allen: Great, great question. So four years ago, when we first started this, we saw a lot of emphasis on a lot of different platforms, right. You’d hear people say, “There’s 70 different platforms that you should put your listings on and make sure they’re all correct.” And at the time that may have been a bit true. But today it’s coalescing. So we really think that Google is 80% of the value for a practice. Google is the focus. So, Google My Business pages for each doctor and each office location. In fact, if a physician practices in multiple locations, they really should have a Google My Business page in each location where they practice if they’re more than five miles apart, because local search is what’s going on here. When Google does a local search, it’s very first local.

So a great reputation downtown for a physician does not help somebody in the suburbs find that physician, but if that physician works two days a week out in the suburbs, having a strong reputation out there is really important on Google. Now, Google used to kind of be just the judge.

By that I mean you would do a search and Google would say, “Well, HealthGrades ranks this physician this way, and Facebook does this, and Vitals says this, and RateMDs says this, and Facebook says, or Yelp says this.”

And so, that summation of data from all those other areas would pull into the search for Google. We’ve seen a trend over the last few months, or… Sorry, a year, year and a half that Google is now the judge and the jury. So, Google seems to trust its own data on its own listing’s pages for doctors and practices, more than it trusts that third party data. So when a practice has done a good job helping Google understand that it does find work for patients by getting reviews from patients and optimizing pages on Google, then the Google results reflect that.

So we would say Google, number one. Facebook has some really interesting ways, with Facebook… The way that your patients can go on and they don’t necessarily leave reviews in a traditional way, that they are kind of recommendations. Yelp is often important. HealthGrades is very important. So, probably Google, Facebook, HealthGrades, Vitals and Yelp are the top platforms, that we see really having an influence on how patients find physicians.

 

Caitlin McDonald: So you mentioned Google has become judge and the jury for their own organization of those listings, do you feel as though they take a look at on­site SEO or is it really just looking at your Google My Business listing, seeing if that’s optimized and kind of seeing what reviews you have there?

What Do You Need to Have on Google My Business Listing to Stand Out as a Medical Center?

Ty Allen: Yeah, we see that they do both, actually. So we see that the link from your Google My Business page where you’re connecting basically to a doctor’s profile or to a practice’s profile on the website, if that link goes to a page, that has the same keywords that are in the doctor’s profile and in the doctor’s category on the Google My Business page, we see those pages rank more highly. So it is still very important to have a highly ranking website that you can link to from the Google My Business pages, so that the page, the Google page ranks higher, and if you get those keyword… Kind of that keyword triangle set up correctly, if the category chosen on the Google My Business page, those same keywords from that category on the physician’s profile page on the website, and those keywords also included in the business description on the physician’s Google My Business page, we see a nice synergy there that causes Google My Business pages to rank higher.

 

Caitlin McDonald: Okay, that makes sense. I can see how it all works together there. Now, are you recommending that in addition to having the medical practice have a Google My Business page, that each of the physicians have their own Google My Business page, as well?

Physician Google My Business Listings

Ty Allen: We do recommend that, yes. We’ve seen policy change from Google on that, and we’ve seen it become a really valuable way for a practice to attract patients. Now sometimes a practice doesn’t wanna do that and they wanna just promote their practice as a brand and they don’t really want their physicians to be front and center, and sometimes they’re worried that those physicians will then take that reputation and leave, and it doesn’t strengthen the partnership in the practice, but honestly, it’s more valuable in the search process if a practice will embrace the concept of each of the providers, each of the doctors, we don’t typically recommend this for PAs or nurse practitioners or even PTs, but the doctors themselves, having their own Google My business page, as well as the practice having a Google My Business page, that gives that practice more footprint in the market to attract patients and making those pages highly optimized is also very important.

So when we say that, we believe there are 10 key components on a Google My Business page that really help it rank highly, so when our platform actually sinks a Google page in, it runs a scorecard analysis on each of those components, so the optimization score, and that is completely independent of the number of reviews. We actually see that a page can ranks more highly without any reviews if all the components on a Google My business page are properly configured. Then, of course, you add reviews to that, you add postings, you answer and respond to questions that get posted by patients, you reply to reviews, you do all those great things on a Google My Business page, and it just moves it higher and higher and higher, but the first step is claim a page for each doc in each location, optimize those pages, and then start the process of building a reputation.

 

Caitlin McDonald: Great, so it sounds as though an office administrator has quite a bit of work or they can turn to a service like yours to help them with this. So, what could an office administrator do to make sure that that they are soliciting reviews from patients?

How to Solicit Reviews from Patients

Ty Allen: Yeah, so the basics, and as you said, this can all be done manually. If an administrator has the time, they can go and claim the pages, go through each of the pages and get the pictures, the configuration, the hours, the description, the links to the website, get all of that stuff done, that’s all very doable. You can use Google’s interfaces to do that, to manage these Google My Business pages. And then once you’ve done that, you can say print a little card and hand it out to each of the patients. And on that card it has a link that they could type into their phone or into their computer and click that link and go out and leave a review for the doctor.

All very doable, and something that we highly recommend practices consider doing. Typically what we find is most practice managers or marketing people, or front desk people, and these practices are already overworked. So our approach to this is to automate all of that process. So I’ve already talked through claiming the page, optimizing the page, all those things, but let’s talk about how the best way to get patients to leave feedback.

So we’ve seen groups do everything from putting a computer in the lobby and asking patients to walk up to that computer, log in to their personal accounts on that computer and then leave a review for a doctor, to some groups, even as I said, handing out a card and hoping patients will take the card home and type that long URL in, and then get to a review page. So, most of those things can work, they’re just not as effective as actually sending a message, automated message, via text to each of the patients. So we actually recommend a text message that goes to the patients that has a nice link on it, a picture from the doctor, and an invitation for the patient to easily click the link, leave a review, typically a patient can do that in about 30 seconds.

The beauty of that process versus the other two that I just talked about, is those patients receive that text message or email on their phone typically, and when they click the link to leave feedback on Google or Facebook or one of these platforms they’re typically are already authenticated to Google, maybe they already have the Facebook app on their phone, that it opens into Facebook. So make it so that it’s so easy that they could do it in less than one minute, and then you actually get in a high enough response rate that you can really move the needle on the reputation.

There’s a couple of other problems I would point out when you try to do it more manually, is you hand somebody a card. It’s a complex URL, the chances of them actually doing it go way down, they’re not gonna type that in and go through that process. And if you ask them to do it in your lobby on a computer, they’ve gotta remember their passwords to log in, then you’ve gotta remember to make sure that that thing gets logged out so you’re not sharing personal data, so the next patient who might walk up to it. But then the worst thing about that option is if you’re making those reviews, many of them from the same computer, on the same IP address, the platforms start to throw those away, the review platforms start to ignore those because they know they’re coming from one IP address and they think they’re fraudulent. So, the most efficient thing to do is to get a message to a patient, on their phone that they can easily click and move through the review process as quickly as possible.

 

Caitlin McDonald: Now SocialClimb as a platform, this is exactly what you do. We have some clients who utilize SocialClimb and it is very straightforward, and very easy for patients to leave those reviews. Honestly, within a couple of hours of turning on the packages with you, we have as marketing managers of Google My Business pages, we have seen reviews come in, when prior to that, maybe one per month would come in.

And it really is making that process easy and simple for the patients as they’re leaving the practice, they get that text message notification. It’s top of mind and that ease of use is just right in their face. So it does make it very easy and streamlined to get those reviews.

 

Ty Allen: Well that’s great to hear that it’s worked well for your client like that. We see that with a lot of groups and as you pointed out, previous to making an effort like this, to invite patients, you typically only get one or two reviews, very few a month, and really unfortunately, they’re often the patient who wants to complain. So, what we’re really doing is enabling that silent majority of happy patients who walk away from a cycle of care with a practice, or a physician, who are very happy, right, they’re the happiest of the patients, but they don’t turn around and say thank you.

They don’t think about it, they’re not passionate about saying, “Thank you,” like a person who’s mad is passionate about saying they’re mad. So what we’re really trying to do is get 10%, that’s the goal, 10% of the happy patients, and we’re asking every patient whether they’re happy or not. Let’s talk about that in just a second. But, get 10% of those happy patients to turn around and say thank you by leaving a social media review for that practice or that doctor. And that adds up really fast and really makes a practice look… Or a physician look great online, because they typically are making 99% of their patients extremely happy.

And we ask those questions, when we invite a patient, we do not gate them. We don’t say, “Hey if you’re happy, leave a public review, if you’re unhappy, don’t do anything or leave a private review.” We ask the question per the policy of most of these review platforms to just invite everyone to leave feedback. The reality is most unhappy patients, given a chance, if you’re asking them how their experience was, they’ll actually turn around and wanna tell you without giving you a bad name online.

So, our process is, “Would you please leave feedback at these public review sites?” If they say yes, they’re taken to the public review sites, if they say no, they’re given an opportunity to say something that comes right back to the practice. So that’s the way to appropriately invite patients to leave feedback, and we typically see that great care providers get great reputations online through this process.

 

Caitlin McDonald: Now, one thing that across all industries, by opening up yourself to getting reviews online do is that you are opening yourself to get bad reviews. And one thing that’s always good to do, especially in the medical industry, is to think about what those responses are going to be for those negative reviews as well as positive reviews as commenting back on any review that you get can help show that you are also an active participant, and really care about your patients. Do you have any tips or insights about how to go about formulating those responses to negative reviews specifically?

 

Ty Allen: Yes. So your point is very, very accurate from my opinion. You wanna respond to any and all reviews. Really, we recommend that a practice responds to all the positive reviews, thank those patients. That is a courteous thing to do in normal human interactions. It’s also a very positive thing to do from Google’s perspective. If you’re getting lots of reviews and you’re actually responding to the reviews, you actually then rank higher. Getting a lot of reviews is great but getting a lot of reviews, that you respond to seems to cause your pages to rank even higher. So, our positive reviews, it’s an easy thing. We actually have a suite of replies, both positive and negative, that are built into our platform that are HIPAA compliant, that we recommend that a practice use.

So now let’s talk about negative feedback. So when you do get negative feedback, our suggestion is to think of it in two ways. First off, you wanna get this conversation offline. So you wanna reply in a respectful way that asks the patient to contact you privately so you can have that conversation offline, and you wanna do that so that everyone can see that you’re proactively and quickly responding to negative feedback. So, you don’t wanna wait a month, you don’t even wanna wait a day. If you get a negative review, you wanna reply within minutes to hours, and then you wanna get that conversation offline, and that helps the next patient who comes along that looks at your feedback then understands that sometimes things do happen

Something out of your control can happen but you care as a practice, and so you respond quickly. And then when you get that patient into a service recovery opportunity, which is what we recommend how you think of these, we actually have a process in our platform that makes it easy for you to track what you’ve done there, make notes on it, share it with your team and even build a little process around it, so that everybody in the organization understands what you got feedback on that didn’t work and that kind of socializes within your organization and also shows how many of those have been resolved.

So when the physician looks through all the feedback, positive and negative, that’s come in for them throughout that month or that week, they can see that anything negative has actually been dealt with or is in the process of being dealt with. So you have several different constituents you’re worried about here. Of course, you are worried about the patient, and responding to them, but as an administrator, you also want to make sure that your physician understands what’s going on, the feedback that’s being brought in, and that you’re actually dealing with it, and kind of solving those issues for them.

 

Caitlin McDonald: That’s such great insights and information there. Ty I see that we are running short on time. Are there any other tips or pieces of advice that you would like to give to our listeners today?

 

Ty Allen: Yeah, actually there is. So we’ve spent this time, it’s been great talking about the importance of building a practice or a physician’s ratings and reviews, and how that can then help them be found more easily online, and that that data is clear. We have thousands of physicians using our platform who see a significant uptick in their visibility and inbound calls and clicks. But to me, the most exciting thing is once a physician or a practice has built a great reputation online, there’s now a new emerging option that lets you take that reputation and easily leverage it to target more specifically, the patient types that you want in the areas where you want them.

That might be a topic of conversation for another podcast at some point, but what I’m really talking about is the ability that Google has recently made available to take a Google My Business page and convert it into an ad that carries that doctor’s great reputation into a targeted ad campaign that can easily be delivered into certain zip codes, or certain cities to go get the patients that a physician wants as they grow their practice.

 

Caitlin McDonald: Yes, and that actually would make an excellent future podcast. We truly believe in the Google Ads interface, and their ability to optimize on the different ad sets and utilizing Smart Campaigns to really tie into the the Google My Business listing. So I would love to tap into your insights and your mind on that as well, and to hear how SocialClimb is able to utilize Google Ads campaigns as a way to further reach the right people online. I think that that’s very powerful for medical practices, and again, it shows how you can get all of these different tools working together to reach new patients and get new patients in the door.

 

Ty Allen: Yeah, awesome, let’s find a time to have that discussion at another time. I really appreciate the opportunity to have been here today, though.

 

Caitlin McDonald: Wonderful, well, Ty, you have shared such great insight talking about why it’s important to be on different directories and solicit reviews, what tools and technologies are out there, as well as what to do once you do get a positive and a negative review. So we really appreciate your time today. Listeners, if you are interested in learning how SocialClimb can benefit your practice, head on over to their website, SocialClimb.com. Ty, you have social media sites as well so I’m sure they can jump on over to Facebook to learn more about your business and the great work that you’re doing.

 

Ty Allen: Great, thank you.

 

Caitlin McDonald: Wonderful thank you so much!

 

Ty Allen Social Climb Interview

 

 

Ty Allen Social Climb Interview

Ty Allen Social Climb Interview

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Five Social Media Post Ideas for the Healthcare Industry

Five Social Media Post Ideas for the Healthcare Industry

In this video, we talk about how to keep that brand consistency on all platforms within your digital marketing strategy and what makes engaging social media content.
We understand that it can be difficult to figure out what to post about on social media and what your audience is looking for. We share 5 types of content you can create to build brand awareness and relationships with your patients.

Today, we’re talking about brand consistency and what type of social media content you should be posting.

Brand consistency and what type of social media content you should be posting

So let’s take a step back real quick, and let’s look at your digital marketing as a whole. Now, we’ve been talking a lot about video marketing, creating that content strategy, how to use Canvas for your images, how to use Instagram and Pinterest.

We cover a lot of topics, and being able to implement all of those is a lot. So looking at your digital marketing as a whole, so you have your blogging, you have your social media, you have your email marketing, you have your ad campaigns for Facebook and Google, you have your email marketing, you have your lead pages that go into your ad campaign, so you have all of these components, plus your website. So you have all these components that are tied in to your digital marketing strategy. And it’s not being a jack-of-all-trades, master of none; it’s becoming a master of all and being able to show that brand consistency on every single platform.

So as you are looking at when you write your blog post, the image that you create for your blog post should have the same thought and color scheme as the thumbnail image for your YouTube video, as the social media posts that are tying in to that blog or just all of your social media content. Everything should have the same look and feel. And this doesn’t mean using the same theme in Canvas for every single image, but it means having your brand identity. So looking at what are those brand fonts, what are those brand colors, what types of images are you wanting to use. This is something that really is a hard thing to overcome, especially in the healthcare industry, is using stock photos versus real photos. And if you are using photos from your center, from your patients, you need to make sure that you have the HIPAA-compliant form signed that they are okay with you using their photo, and that they’re okay with you using it on social media. They may just want to do a written testimonial, and they don’t want to have their image up. Some of them may not mind at all; some of them may say, “Okay, just get the side view,” so really making sure that it’s okay with your patients to use those photos and okay with your staff.

So, I think that, and we’ll get into this on the social media side, of what type of posts, but really showing that personality of your practice is really important. So using original photos, that is key, so that creates the brand consistency. And so, that leads me into what types of posts should you be putting up there for social media.

Here’s some two interesting facts:

That means your audience are looking at what you’re talking about, how often you’re talking about it, if it’s helping them, if they find it valuable, and that it’s a huge deciding factor for them if they’re going to call your clinic and come into your practice for treatment.

So, again, this kind of shows people will do business with people they know, like, and trust, and if they feel that they already have this relationship with the doctor and the staff, it makes it so much easier to build that relationship and that relationship loyalty. So I found that really interesting, how high those numbers were.

So let’s dive into the five social media post ideas for the healthcare industry.

 

Cause marketing

This is huge! You’re in the healthcare industry. You have to have a purpose behind what you do. Let’s say you’re a pediatrician, and your practice is, you see a lot of kids with type 1 diabetes. So maybe you partner up with Diabetes Association and you work with them on how to help kids with type 1 diabetes or type 2 diabetes.

Maybe you are an OB/GYN and your cause is to help premature babies, so you have a fund, you partner with somebody. So really showing that your office is more than just caring for your patients, you guys have a greater cause, you guys are supporting something.

Collaboration

So if you guys partner with a non-profit and maybe you donate services to them or you guys do community events together or a certain percentage of your proceeds goes back to that non-profit or however that works, but that cause marketing and collaboration is a really big piece of your social media strategy.

This shows your audience and your patients that you’re more than just a doctor, you’re more than just, “Okay, take this, do this, you’re fine.” You really care about the greater good. And I think that that’s really important to do.

Brand awareness

It’s important to showcase what you do as a practice. This can be the different services that you offer, maybe a service that’s not very popular. Maybe if you’re a pediatrician, you can also say, “Oh, did you know we do a kids’ cooking class,” or something like that, but that brand awareness, showing behind the scenes and highlighting the staff.

Again, being able to show your practice’s personality, that brand consistency, that personality behind the name, is really… That’s what people are going to connect with, and that’s what your audience will see.

Highlight a staff member every week with something that they love to do. Maybe they are an avid marathon runner. Showcase them running a marathon and also tag that marathon. That’s that collaboration piece as well. So, with thinking outside the box and highlighting a doctor, highlighting a nurse, that’s creating that brand, that shows that you are real. So that is three. Number three is brand awareness.

Education

This really should be the first one, because education is the most important piece. You really want to provide that valuable content to your audienc. Really, that’s what’s going to attract them to you in the first place – if you’re providing that valuable content that they feel, “Oh, wow, I didn’t know that. Oh, that’s awesome.”

Depending on your industry, this could be as simple as, you know, flu season. What’s going on in the news with the flu season? The corona virus is a topic of all conversations right now, and it’s important if you are a pediatrician or if you are a head of a senior retirement living, how do they stay safe from this? Washing hands, antibacterial cream. How can you educate them and give them peace of mind, whether this is if you’re working, again, with people that have diabetes, providing easy recipes that are made for diabetics, maybe it’s helping them with different types of the bands for their legs or the different socks or the different lotions, things that they are already searching for.

As a healthcare provider, you already know these things. So write that content that can help them. What are they searching for, and being able to educate them on that. This can be healthy lifestyle. This is another curated content, so sharing articles from other sources. So, this could be from the CDC website, this can be from Mayo Clinic, this can be from Allrecipes for diabetic… Diabetic recipes. So there’s a lot of different options you have for curated content.

Curated content just means sharing something that’s not from you, that’s not original. You’re sharing it from another source, and this is huge. Facebook really likes when you do curate a content and you’re sharing posts. That gives you kudos on Facebook.

Videos

We just did a blog on why you need to implement video marketing into your strategy. And videos can be time-consuming.

If you have a laptop, if you have an iPhone, you can record on those devices. If you have an older laptop, sometimes the quality isn’t that clear, but there’s options available, you can go on to Amazon. We just ordered cameras for one of our clients. I think they were maybe $45-$60-ish, just a camcorder or a computer camera that fits on here. The picture is very clear, microphone’s clear. Take the time to do your homework to see if the quality of your computer or your phone will work, the more authentic you are.

You don’t need to have a staged space, but these can be as simple as interviewing your doctors, having a nurse practitioner or even the front desk staff. Do one interview per month and asking questions to the doctor. This can be an FAQ.

So, you guys can compile questions every week of what your patients have been asking you, and put into, “Okay, this is our Friday FAQ, these are the questions that been coming in this week. We want to make sure we get them answered for you.”

You can have a little box on the front counter that says “Questions,” and you can start building that, again, that brand awareness of, “Every Friday, our doctor is going to answer at least five of these questions.” It doesn’t have to be a long video, but that content can then be turned into a video for YouTube, a video for social media. You can even use a transcription service and have that content put together in a blog for you.

So, those videos serve a lot of different purposes, and video marketing is huge. People want to see who you are, what your values are, and it’s important to highlight that staff, even if it is the front desk. They do a lot at that front desk, they see a lot of patients, they hear a lot of feedback. So, let them answer a couple of questions or give a couple of tips.

This education, the hand-washing tips. You can do a quick video on how to wash your hands, and what’s the right protocols. So think of your audience. Think of the questions they’re asking, think of the information that they’ll be searching for, and create those videos and that content around them, because at the end of the day, it’s about your patients. It’s about what they are searching for and what information you can provide them.

So if you need help putting the strategy together and executing this, let us know, we are here for you. You can go on to socialspeaknetwork.com and schedule a free 30-minute consultation, and we can walk you through this and give you some insights.

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Five Social Media Post Ideas for the Healthcare Industry

Five Social Media Post Ideas for the Healthcare IndustryFive Social Media Post Ideas for the Healthcare Industry

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Website Development For Medical Clinics

Website Development For Medical Clinics

On today’s episode of The Social Speak podcast, we’re going to be talking a little bit about website development and specifically our process for website development for your healthcare clinic.

We specialize in creating websites that capture your brand, your voice, your expertise and best position yourself in your medical practice to be found by prospects. Now, when we build a website, we don’t view it as a one-and-done sort of thing. It’s not a brochure that you print out and then you have thousands of copies to hand out.

Healthcare Website Design and Development

A website is an ever growing and changing, and shifting presence online, where we recommend you are continually adding blogposts, uploading videos, creating resources and interviews to engage your prospects and engage your current patients.

So the reason why I want to do this today, is we just finished up a website for one of our clients and our main contact, the office manager sent over such a fabulous note. She writes, “I am beyond thrilled with how everything has turned out so far, and want to thank you so much for all of the hard work. Prior to starting this project, I heard horror stories from some friends and colleagues who have been in charge of website redesigns and had been dreading the process. You and your team made it so easy on us and we could not be happier with the way things have gone. We really look forward to our continued partnership moving forward.”

So this is just one of the many testimonials that we have from a local clinic who had an old website that frankly, they just weren’t thrilled about. The pages were hard to update, they did not include current information, and it was hard to really adjust the functionality, so that it attracted the right people to their organization.

Listen to the Podcast

 

How we create websites for clients

Now, the process that we follow for creating websites for our clients tries to make it as fun and simple as possible. I got a kick out of designing these websites because really I’m able to visualize what that end goal is.

Analyze your current website

Oftentimes, you start with the website and potentially you just can’t stand the look and feel of it. However if we go into the backend and we look and we see that everything really is set up very strongly for Google and you are getting patients and prospects from the website, we might actually tell you, “You know what, there are better ways to spend your budget rather than doing the website redesign.”

Now, if we look in the back end and things are just as messy as they are on the front end, we’ll let you know and we will help you work through a process that we follow for creating the new websites.

Initial conversation

So the first thing that we do is we have an initial conversation, they’ll be with myself, potentially, my business partner will be on the call as well or one of our account managers, and we ask questions,

  • Do you currently have a website, what are websites you like the look and feel of and what are some that you don’t?

This allows us to see if there are similarities between the ones that you like and the ones that you don’t like so that we can replicate by using your own branding and values and purpose and goals, though with items that you do like compared to the ones that you don’t.

  • What are the top concerns about your current website, what are the top goals for your new website?
  • How will you measure if the site is performing, what is the main call to action?

So new consultations booked, appointments scheduled, email sign ups, increased traffic, things like that, so we can track all of that as well as where they’re coming from.

  • Additional functionality that you’d like to see in your new website

Let us know if there are functionalities you’d like to expand on and carry on from your old website.

  • Questions about your current brand standards

Oftentimes, our clients already do have their branding all set and solidified. They have their logos, their fonts, their colors. However, if you are a newer healthcare clinic or want to go through a complete rebranding of your healthcare clinic, we can definitely help with that as well.

We have a few partners that depending on your niche will make a great fit for that branding side. However, a lot of times our clients come to us, their website is just not performing as it should, they’re all set with their branding, all set with their value selection, things like that and we just take that and move it into the 21st century.

  • What is your target market?

So in order to create a website that attracts this target, we need to understand:

  1. Who they are –  so we wanna know who your ideal patient is and understand some of those success stories.
  2. What were they struggling with beforehand and where did they come out the other side, once they were done working with your physicians, your doctors?
  3. What about you, what about your brand?– We wanna know the values and the passions of the doctors, as well as the admin, the administration, so that we can really understand how to capture your unique voice through the website.

We have some websites that we work through where we are rewriting all of the copy on the website, and running it through your medical director to make sure it’s all approved, and then we have other clients who write the content, or already have the content written and they just wanna make sure that it’s displayed the best on a new website.

We find that branding and layout and content really have to all work together in order to have a seamless website. It can’t just have images, and then content built separately. You need to pull them together. We also love to talk about the benefits of working with you. So what are some of those most impactful transformations that your clients realize with working with you?

Plan website’s structure

So once we have all of this information and we have our website kick-off call, we get to work. And the first thing that our team does and I am actually going to hold up a workbook, right here.

So, if you’re listening to the podcast, you can kind of visualize this basically, it’s just very rough sketches of what pages could look like. And this one right here, it has a header. It has icons, events, kinda scrolling testimonials. And so what we do is we take elements that we see on other websites that you have noted that you like the look and feel of, and we see how we can then incorporate similar items into your website.

We typically have a page layout for the home page, then another page layout for the top level services pages, so let’s say you have one service page for all of the different… Oh goodness, thinking of too many different industries [chuckle] for all of the different dental care options that you have. So that page would have one layout, however all of the sub-pages, that go into dental cleaning surgeries, cavity extractions, and things like that, would have a different layout. So those are three layouts there, a layout for your contact page and probably a layout for your about page. And so each of these pages, they’re going to have a similar look and feel, however we’ve found by differentiating them by layout a little bit helps to make sure that somebody can move smoothly through the website.

As we’re building the site, we also make sure that we really understand your page hierarchy. So, this means how do all of your pages and services relate to one another? How should Google be ranking them and how can we link between the pages to get that best search engine optimization for you?

Search Engine Optimization

While we’re doing that and putting the content on the pages, we’re doing keyword research. Potentially the wording and the language that you use within your practice isn’t what people are actually looking for on Google.

So we wanna make sure that we are writing for search engines, writing to showcase your expertise and then also writing to best position your practice to be the one that clients and prospects then choose to become a patient.

Web design and content approval

Now this whole process, we like to move through it actually fairly quickly, at least that design element. We recognize that it does take time for content to be approved, messaging to be approved. However, our process is typically a one-month turnaround, for smaller website projects.

Turnaround time

Within the first two weeks, we wanna get you a working design, a working layout that you can poke around and see where we’re going for that look and feel. Typically, at this point, we’ll have that home page, about page, main services page, sub-services page and contact page. If I haven’t said that, contact page, all kind of set, ready to go.

Then, if you already have the content and you have minimal additional functionality, maybe a blog on potentially lead capture form and we utilize Influx MD for most of our healthcare clinic websites. If you need that, again, typically a month, we can get most of the site all set ready to go and then just that approval process might take another month.

So we like to have a website started and completed within that same quarter. If you want additional functionality, such as payment center, maybe a more robust directory listing for your physicians, scheduling tools and things like that, might take a little bit longer.

Integrating Influx MD

If we are integrating Influx MD in there, they do have an onboarding process as well to make sure that we are tapping into the systems and processes that you already have and really bringing those to help your administration through the whole process of that initial scheduling.

Influx MD is a HIPAA compliant form system so that it really taps into your current processes, keeps everything secure and allows us to then, moving forward after the website’s done, move into lead collection for your healthcare clinic. And that’s where our ongoing marketing really ties in with search engine optimization as well as running sponsored advertising, writing blog posts, doing doctor interviews and posting to social media, all of which tie into how people that interact and utilize your website to achieve their goals.

Conclusion

So if you have any questions about how your website currently is working, I’d love to do an audit on your website, so we can talk about what your goals are and see if it’s actually accomplishing them. Or a small tweak might be able to better align your website with what you’re hoping to do.

If we find in that process that a new website is going to be the best course of action, I’ll send over that website onboarding form and we’ll schedule a call from there to really dive into what those goals are and that look and feel that you’re going for that website. So I can’t wait to talk with you about your medical marketing website, and I hope that this has been insightful about some of what that process looks like for working with our team.

If you like this episode, and you want to learn more about healthcare marketing, please subscribe to our podcast, subscribe to our YouTube channel and jump on over to our website to check out the additional blog posts that we have over there.

Website Development For Medical Clinics

 

Website Development For Medical Clinics

Website Development For Medical Clinics

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How Patients Find and Select Healthcare Providers and How to Use it to Your Advantage

How Patients Find and Select Healthcare Providers and How to Use it to Your Advantage

Not too long ago, patients relied on word-of-mouth referrals from family and friends when looking for a healthcare provider. Others would browse through the Yellow Pages and find a hospital or practice closest to their location. Today, however, the internet has become a major force in patient decisions.

With volumes of information available online, it has empowered prospective patients to find the care they need in the moments that matter most. Patients no longer have to rely on their gut instinct, guesswork or their friend’s advice.

If you want to reach new patients, then you need to know how patients are looking for providers online. Use them to your advantage to convert those searching prospects into patients.

Social media

More than 3.5 billion people are using social media. 54% of them use it to research products, services, and even healthcare providers.

Although word-of-mouth still ranks high as a method for finding healthcare providers, social media largely contributes to how patients choose one. Many prospective patients, millennials in particular, are apt to solicit input through social media. They put a lot of trust in unbiased opinions and recommendations from other patients.

According to a PwC Health Research Institute report, 41% of patients said that social media content impacted their choice of physician or hospital. Always bring value to your patients and give them a reason to follow you. This is one of the best ways to establish a trustworthy reputation for your medical practice on social media. It can be as simple as giving tips on how to stay healthy, reminding patients of essential vaccinations or sharing information about current illnesses.

Patients turn to Google  

The internet is a fantastic source of medical information. When patients do not feel well, they don’t usually think about scheduling an appointment with their doctor. Rather, they would consult Dr. Google first and research their symptoms to learn more about their condition.

Once they have a good understanding of their condition, that’s the only time they would search for a medical practitioner. They would key in keywords such as “cardiologist near me” or “diabetologist in Miami”.

If you want to reach new patients, then you want your page to rank well on Google. That means, your name must land on the on the first page of Google search engine results page. Otherwise, prospective patients won’t find you.

Use SEO to rank higher on Google. Start by dominating long-tail keywords. Research keywords that are relevant to your practice and create content based on that keyword.

Long-tail keywords are easier to rank for as the competition is lower. That means, it will take less time and money to rank compared the big and popular ones.

They read online reviews

Majority of patients would conduct online research even after receiving a recommendation or referral. They want to know what being your patient is like before scheduling an appointment.

88% of patients use online reviews as a step towards finding a new doctor. This helps new patients make a more informed decision about who to choose. They will quickly eliminate providers with poor reviews.

In the age of internet, your reputation is whatever Google says it is. If prospective patients do not find reviews online, they’d think twice about making an appointment. As a healthcare provider, you want to have a positive online brand reputation that earns the trust of patients.

A great way to improve your reputation is to list your practice on doctor review sites such as Zocdoc, WebMD, RateMDs, Vitals, and Healthgrades. These sites that can help you improve your reputation, generate new patient leads, and gain trust.

More positive reviews will ensure that you are listed ahead of competitors in search results and will drive traffic to your website.

Location-based services

Convenience is a key factor in selecting a new doctor. In fact, according to Healthgrade’s data, location is a highly significant consideration when a patient chooses a doctor or a hospital. Majority of them prefer physicians and healthcare providers within their area who can assist them with their needs.

Building your local search presence will help you gain a significant step over the competition. Google My Business is a great tool that can do wonders for your local SEO. It puts your business on the map so potential patients can find you.

It is also a good idea to optimize your website for local search. To boost your local SEO, make sure that you include your location in keyword phrases across your website. Instead of using keywords such as dentist, use dentist in Phoenix.

How Patients Find and Select Healthcare Providers and How to Use it to Your Advantage

 

How Patients Find and Select Healthcare Providers and How to Use it to Your Advantage

 

How Patients Find and Select Healthcare Providers and How to Use it to Your Advantage

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How to Use Canva for Your Medical Practice

How to Use Canva for Your Medical Practice

A question that we get asked a lot by our clients is, how do you create professional looking images for your social media posts and your blogs?

It can get a little pricey if you have a graphic designer that’s creating every single image for your digital marketing strategies. Every social media image, every Pinterest image, every Instagram, every blog. And so, we wanted to talk to you today about a tool that we use for our clients called Canva.

Reasons why you should use Canva

It’s affordable

The one thing I really like about Canva is, it’s really affordable. Now we’re talking about your social media posts and your blogs.

If you are needing images for your website, your branding materials, we highly recommend working with a graphic designer, and a branding expert to really pull in that voice. Once you’ve worked with a branding expert, you usually have a set of thoughts and brand colors that then you wanna be able to incorporate into your social media posts and your blogs.

With Canva, there is a free site and a paid site. I think the paid site is only, $14.95, and I highly recommend it.

Maintain brand consistency

One piece with social media is really to make sure that you have that brand consistency. So whether they’re looking at your website mobile-y, on the computer, they have a brochure, a business card, social media posts, they know that it is your practice from your brand’s colors.

If you look at any large company, they follow through with that. Their TV commercials to their promotional products, their social media, their website, everything has the same look and feel. And that’s exactly what you want to do with your social media marketing strategy.

You can also upload your brand kit, which is really cool, because like I said, we have those brand colors, those brand thoughts and we want to make sure we have the right logos. So, we can upload the logos in here. You can upload the exact brand colors and your brand thoughts.

In every image, our three brand fonts are gonna be this playlist correct? This one the playlist here and then Raleway. And so on each of our images for our blogs or our social media, you’re going to see one or all three, depending on the text of these fonts. You’re also going to see our brand colors.

Now, if you look on our website, you’re going to see more of these teals and the light mauve and beige. Sometimes what we have is aspect color, so we have a logo that is this yellow and this teal and that helps kinda just make up that image pop, but it’s still within our brand’s color, so we may not use this orange all the time, but we may use it as an aspect color on one of the images. So this is a great way to really stay true to that brand that your design team have put in place.

Create images for your digital marketing

The other thing with Canva is, if you click on Create A Design, they have every size you need. So this makes it really easy. You can do a poster, a logo, a card, you can do brochures, but most importantly, you have all of your digital marketing templates in here too. You have a YouTube cover. You have, if you need help making your Twitter header the right size, or your Facebook page, but most importantly social media.

So, the social media template is what we use for Instagram and for Facebook, it also does work on LinkedIn.  Canva does link to Pixabay. So there’s free images in here and there are paid images.

Resize images for you

The one thing that’s also really good about Canva is you can resize them.

So let’s say you want this image you’re doing and you did a video to go with it, but you want to resize it to the YouTube thumbnail. You can click resize and you can either create a custom size Pinterest, you can type in YouTube, so this can be the YouTube thumbnail. It will look just like this, but in the YouTube thumbnail size.

So it’s going to be easy to upload, keep that brand consistency, and not have to recreate that image. Like, okay, what size was this? What did I have here? It does all the hard work for you. So that is a great tool.

Free ready to use templates

So, with Canva it will tell you if something is free, or if you have to pay for it. And they have by categories too. So if there’s something that specific that you are looking for, so let’s just type medical and they have all these different templates already in here.

Now some of them are free and some of them are paid for. One thing that I recommend if you’re looking at, let’s say you love this template, but it is not free, you can purchase it. They’re usually between $1 and $5 and then you can re-use them, but you can also create that image by yourself without having to pay for that template.

How to use Canva

This is my favorite part of social media, creating the images. It’s also the most time-consuming because you want that image to be perfect.

And so, what I always recommend and what we do for our clients is we create different templates. So we may create 7 to 10 different templates for that client. Let’s say these are the recent ones I’ve used, and so, they’re all gonna be within these 7 to 10 templates with their branded colors, their brand fonts and we rotate that.

Choose a template

Start by choosing a template. So let’s say we want to use this one – It’s world day for safety and health at work today.

So sometimes, this is the National Nurses Day, happy National Nurses Day, so sometimes they already have templates in here, and you can come in here and just change the brand colors, so we can just change this to the colors that we would have for our client.

Make necessary changes

As I have said earlier, we can change the colors to suit our brand colors. Then, we can add our logo on to it. We would change the content here, so if we wanted to change this to an accent color, but then keep this message, we can do that, or we can take out this content all together and put in our own content.

Edit texts

Now, the fun part of the text. So February is National Heart Month, so let’s add in this. So we wanna make this larger, so they have obviously different sizes that we can have, maybe I wanna make this really big, and then do this. And then National Heart Awareness Month. And let’s make this larger. So I’m using my brand colors and I can move that content wherever I want it.

So we go back to that template that we liked, we have the content here, maybe we want this to align with that there, and then we wanna have, we want this to come up a little bit, and then we wanna have in our just like our website down here, www.heartplus.com whatever your website is. We want to bring this down here with maybe some contact information.

Pick an image

Now, we obviously need something here. So you can type in a keyword. It will show you that these are the paid ones. If you click on to here, it will say free, and then you can apply filters.

So you can pick any image that you want. And again, this is where it can get a little time consuming, so you do have to play around with this a lot because it’s important to know how to search for the different images.

Play around with templates, images, and texts

I also like using ones that have the image in the back with the text overlay. I think that those are very clean and you just want to make sure that whatever your brand message is, whatever that message is, you just make sure that this image is clean and easy to read.

So maybe you’re talking about healthy eating. So again, you can just drag this image over on top of the image that’s already there and it will automatically replace it.

So now, you can change out your content here, you can change the background color if you want it to be one of your brand colors, you can do that.

Save the image for future use

So all you have to do is come in here each month when you’re creating your content, and there’s two ways of doing this. If you come back to the main page here and you go to all your designs, you can copy this design for each week.

Let’s say February is National Heart Awareness Month. And so then now you have created this template. So then next month, all you have to do is come in, change February to March and put in whatever March’s National Awareness Month is.

Change out the logo if you need to, or move it down here, add more content, or contact information. So now we have two templates, so we’re going to do the same thing. We’re going go to add new page and go to templates again. Now, if you didn’t like any of these, you can use any of these that you want and change it around.

I always like to be able to look back at the images and especially if you need to make a change, you don’t have to re-create that image all over again. So you can come in to here and you- can, the templates that we have created right here, we can then just click this and do make a copy, and then you can label them every week.

So week of February third, week of February 10th, and then you have five or seven templates in here with the content, so you can just download them.

Canva has templates based on holidays

Again, I would take some time with this to really look at which templates you like. Are you doing a lot of testimonials? Testimonials are a great way to promote your practice. So maybe something along these lines, you can do something like this where you have the testimonial here with maybe pictures of the staff that, that patient is talking about, there’s a ton of different templates in here and the thing with Canva is they’re always adding new templates based on the holidays.

So if you wanted to put out a Happy Valentines Day, you’ll find some templates here. Even if you want to use this template, you can change these colors to your branded colors. And so that’s a really great way to still have that, those posts that are, Happy Holidays, Happy Valentines Day, Groundhog Day, whatever you wanna talk about, but still keeping that brand consistency.

So take some time scrolling through here to really figure out which templates you want, and you don’t have to always just use those 10, maybe you have a brand template of 20 of them.

Final thoughts

Canva is simple, it’s fun to use. It does take a little bit of time in the beginning, but really once you have those brand templates down, it’s just changing the content and being able to download those and implement them in your social media strategy.

If you need help on how to create your branded templates or if you would like help with the management of your social media marketing, we are here for you. You can head on over to socialspeaknetwork.com and schedule a free 30-minute consultation, and we would love to see how we can help you with your digital marketing strategy. Have a great day!

How to Use Canva for Your Medical Practice

How to Use Canva for Your Medical PracticeHow to Use Canva for Your Medical Practice

 

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How to Use Instagram to Promote Your Medical Practice

How to Use Instagram to Promote Your Medical Practice

At this point, it’s no question whether or not your practice needs to be on social media. Almost everyone understands the importance of having a solid social media presence. However, most are overlooking the benefits of Instagram as a marketing platform.

Why Instagram?

Instagram is one of the most popular social networks on a global level. It has grown immensely over the years, with over 1 billion monthly active users.

Whether you’re a dentist, dermatologist, cosmetic surgeon, plastic surgeon or an oncologist, marketing your practice on Instagram is going to bring you the business you seek.

Here are some tips on how to make use of Instagram to promote your medical practice.

Plan out your grid

Instagram is a predominantly visual platform. If you’re looking to turn your viewers into followers, then you’ll need to put aside time to visually plan your feed.

Your Instagram feed is one of the first things a visitor sees when they land on your profile. You want to create a cohesive Instagram aesthetic while still showcasing content that aligns with your field of specialization. This will give visitors a feel of what your brand is about in a matter of seconds. Plus, they are more likely to follow you if they see a visually attractive and cohesive grid.

Share images people can connect with

As a medical practitioner, the last thing you want is to put off your audience with gory surgical images or pictures of intimidating medical equipment.

There are 3 things you want to accomplish when planning your Instagram content:

  1. Engage your audience
  2. Provide content that is informative, interesting, and inspiring to potential patients
  3. Highlight a service you offer.

The goal is to share images people can connect with. If you’re a plastic surgeon, you may use your Instagram feed to show before and after photos. Consistently post photos of your best cases to keep people coming back for more.

With patient approval, you may also post about your patient’s success stories. This can go a long way toward alleviating fears and finding inspiration through a life-changing illness.

Use your captions to prompt discussion

While we agree that photos matter most on Instagram, that doesn’t mean that the caption should be treated as an afterthought.

People like to know that you value their thoughts and opinions. Ask them questions, tell a story or ask for their opinions. It shows you care about them and you’re interested to connect with them. Really get in there and converse with your audience.

It may seem awkward at first but go for it. You’ll be surprised at how many of your Instagram pals will be chatting and engaging with you.

Add video to your content

A picture paints a thousand words, they say. But videos can convey even more. Video has been found to drive more interactions and provides more opportunities for you to stand out. It gives you an opportunity to reach a much larger audience, show your personality, and educate your audience.

Videos can be shared in stories, in the newsfeed, and can be used to create a high-converting ad campaign. To maximize your use of video, make sure that the first few seconds of your video is attention-grabbing.

Find something that will set yourself apart

With one billion monthly active users, Instagram has become an integral part of every brand’s marketing activities. If you’re looking to amplify your presence on Instagram, then you need to up your Insta game to cut through the noise.

For instance, Dr. Sandra Lee (aka Dr. Pimple Popper) is a big hit on social media. She has more than 5 million subscribers on Youtube and over 3 million followers on Instagram. She has both entranced and grossed out her followers with her knack for popping.

Find something that will set yourself apart and give your audience a reason to keep coming back.

Hashtag strategically

Hashtags are a great way to categorize your content. It makes it easier for users to find you and reach out to your prospective audience.

Use trending hashtags to get in front of more people. Make sure, though, that these hashtags are related to your niche. You may also consider using a branded hashtag. It could be something as simple as your name or your tag line.

Prompt your followers to use your custom hashtag, and you’ll soon learn just who your superfans are.

Collaborate with influencers

These days, social media influencers are like modern-day celebrities. Consider reaching out to other influential Instagram users if you’re looking to increase your visibility.

When looking for influencers, look beyond the follower count. You want to find an influencer who will resonate with your audience and drive engagement amongst the community.

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Why Medical Practices Need to Invest in SEO and How to do Keyword Research

Today, we’re going to be talking about search engine optimization for healthcare clinics, for medical practices, and why this is so important.

In our blog post, we also have a video that specifically is about how to do keyword research, and the ins and outs of search engine optimization so that you can actually do it, but this podcast is mostly geared towards why you need search engine optimization and the benefits of it.

To start off, why is Search Engine Optimization for Medical Practices important?

  • One-third of patients today are using their telephones or tablets to research and to book appointments. You need to make sure that you’re being found online.
  • 58% of healthcare marketers are using blogs and that’s compared to 74% of all marketers. This means that there is room for you to grow in that space.
  • And 62% of smartphone owners use their phones to search for health information. So it gives you a chance to actually answer those questions.

What Does Search Engine Optimization Do for Health Care Practice?

Search engine optimization does more that just get your website ranking higher on Google and other search engines. SEO has other ways that it is useful. SEO as a piece of medical marketing allows you to:

  • Build trust with prospects
  • Share valuable and education content
  • Make sure you are appearing in Mobile search results

Additionally, there are different types of search engine optimization that you can pursue in your digital marketing strategy. SEO is not a one-and-done thing. There are tactics you can implement to make sure you continually are increasing your SEO. Search Engine Optimization is made of two main strategies – On-site and Off-site. Below is a list of the Social Speak recommendations for how to boost website traffic and grow your network of prospects online.

Types of SEO for Medical Practices

Off-Site SEO for Medical Practices: This includes building links from referring domains, backlinks, directory listings, and submitting your website and blog posts to syndication websites. Typical 1st-page listings on Google have exponentially more backlinks than those on the 2nd or 3rd page of search listings. These referring in-bound links need to be high-quality, as well. 10,000 links from websites with a low domain authority can be less valuable than 1 link from a well-established domain. Activities we recommend are:

  • Research your competition at NeilPatel.com. This is a free keyword research tool that allows you to see what websites are ranking for select keywords, their domain authority, and how many backlinks they have into their website.
  • Write high-quality blog posts (see on-page SEO below) and reach out to webmasters of websites in your industry to pitch adding a link to your resources.
  • Find websites in your niche that accept Guest Blog Posts. Write an article with a link back to your website.
  • Add your website to directories and optimize the content.
  • Comment with a link back to a resource on your website in forums and on other blogs

 

On-Site SEO for your Health care website: On-site SEO includes making sure your website is both up to date and that you are consistently producing keyworded content.

Starting with Keyword Research

How to find topics and keywords to use in Medical Marketing?

Why your medical practice, why as a doctor, you need to be focusing on search engine optimization.

In the video above, I show some of the tools that we utilize to find what keywords to focus on for your medical practice to build up that search engine optimization. So I’m going to share my screen and the first thing that you are going to see here is a tool Ubersuggest. Now Ubersuggest is Neil Patel’s tool, and it is a free tool that you can utilize. I am signed in right now, but this is free. It’s something that you just sign in with your Google account. And then by doing that, you can hook it up to your website so that you can measure things like traffic and the number of backlinks you have, any new backlinks that are showing up and things like that. It takes all of Google’s tools and compresses them into reports that you should be taking a look at for search engine optimization.

We utilize Ubersuggest as a way to find really specific content that you can include on your website and then also to get a sense of how many things like backlinks or the page rank of your competition. So I did a search already for pediatrician. We worked with a lot of pediatrics offices, and so I thought this might be a great thing to start with. So as you can see, when we do a search for “pediatrician,” we have a list of keywords over here and these are just suggested keywords that are similar to “pediatrician.”

The volume of the searches, cost per click if you were to bid on this using Google ads, page difficulty and then the SEO difficulty. So for most websites, if you’re seeing competition having a SEO difficulty here of 62, 65, 46, these are going to be pretty difficult for you to rank for, especially if you haven’t built that foundation of keywords that Google is already ranking you for. So we recommend scrolling down on the list until you find that SEO difficulty that’s a little bit lower.

Using Filters to Narrow Keywords

Now, you can use this filters technique. And so here, you can set what you want the search volume to be as well as the SEO difficulty. And so we actually utilize that, but for the purpose of this video, I want to show you kind of all the keywords that show up here. Then, over on the right hand side of the screen, you’re going to see the actual results that show up in Google. So for “pediatrician” for example, we only see a lot of WebMD, HealthyChildren.org, Verywell Health etcetera, pediatrics – a lot of very highly ranked websites with high domain scores. The domain score is how positively Google sees you. Most likely, trying to rank for the word “pediatrician” probably isn’t going to be good for you to start.

Build a foundation of keywords to then rank for more difficult keywords

However, as you build up that foundation of keywords below that, you can slowly work up over time for a top keyword like pediatrician. So let’s see what keywords we should be focusing on. So if you scroll down, there are quite a few for pediatric urgent care or for specialties that you might have.

“Pediatric urgent care near me,” for example, that has 20. And so this is the type of search that people do when they’re on their phones, so they’ll rather than typing in, they’ll actually say, “Pediatrician,” or “Pediatric urgent care near me.” So you want to make sure that you’re including language like that on a blog post or on a page on your website. Here we’ve got “urologist.” So that’s a different one. Even “pediatric clinic” has a lower SEO difficulty score. So rather than just going after pediatrician, you could have “pediatric clinic near me,” “pediatric urologist.” So again those specialties are good to highlight as well. I saw it down here on… Let’s see. Pediatrician for kids.

These are called long term keyword phrases. And so as you’re writing content, again, don’t just focus on that top keyword. Think about those secondary and third keywords that make up phrases for you to write content around.

Here we go, “pediatrician near me that accepts Medicaid.”

So if you accept Medicaid, this could be something to make sure to put in a blog post or on your website at somewhere just because it is absolutely something that is getting quite a few searches.

And yes, these are national numbers. But still, it ranks up here and that has that lower SEO difficulty. Now, one of the things that I like about this table here is the tool Ubersuggest also allows you to look at related keywords, questions, propositions and comparisons all of these make fantastic blog posts because they are really answering the questions that people have.

Specific Keywords for Pediatricians:
  • “pediatrician when you are pregnant” – you could have a blog post specifically about how to find a pediatrician when you’re pregnant or when to start talking to a pediatrician. Even answering things like, “Will a pediatrician prescribe birth control?” I am assuming that you probably aren’t, however, this is a question that people are asking and it’s something that you’d be able to rank in the eyes of Google for and start building up that foundation. So over time, you can start focusing on those keywords that 100% you need to be ranking for.
  • “Pediatrician accept Medicaid”  – if you do accept Medicaid, this may be a great topic to rank for and write about. Describe the process, have a doctor interview, etc.
  • “Pediatrition for ADHD” – you could have a post that’s specifically on why your pediatrics office, the pediatrician office near them, is the right fit if your child has ADHD and you’d want to make sure to include this exact phrase right here.

Let’s say you do end up writing a blog post on Pediatrician for ADHD. You would then be able to come over here to see who else is ranking for that keyword. Now, if we take a look here, these domain scores all also do have… They are all fairly high as well. So what you can do is you can reach out to the author of, let’s see what’s this, everyday health protocol is, ‘Find the right ADHD specialist,’ and you could email the webmaster or the editor of this article and see if your article, if it is educational and provides great information you can actually email them to see if they wouldn’t mind adding you as a resource that they link to within their blog post. Now, getting these high-quality links back to your site are incredibly important for search engine optimization. We do see, for example, right here. So this person eastbaypediatrics.com. They don’t have any links. They are on the second page, so you can see the number of visits does go down, but their domain score is seven. So if you have the right content that’s related to Pediatrician for ADHD and you start building backlinks from these higher articles here in higher websites, you’re going to be showing Google that your content is very well written and it’s relevant and that people want to read it.

Pediatrician for ADHD could be a great topic to talk about.

Another option on Ubbersuggest Keyword Tool is comparisons. I love writing articles with comparisons. I think that this is a great way to stand apart from your competition, to provide great value.

A recommendation here could be for pediatrician writing one about “pediatrician or family doctor.”

What’s the difference? Why would you choose one versus the other? If you are a family doctor, this is a great topic to talk about as well. Other examples are: family medicine versus family doctor. With pediatrician or family doctor, for example, it only has 90 searches. However, that means combined with this page difficulty of five and the SEO difficulty seven, most likely you’re going to make an impact by writing about this topic or having one of your doctors answering this question, and you would be more likely to be able to place on the top pages of Google fairly quickly for this, especially if you then go out and get those backlinks.

Read the rest of the transcript for the video on How to Do Keyword Research with Ubersuggest for Healthcare SEO

11:26 CM: So one thing, once you have a topic or a handful of questions that you’ve found that people are asking about your specialty, you can then write up an interview for your doctor. And we love doing this just because it allows you to get multiple media at one time. So you have the audio if you ever want to start a podcast. You have the visual component through the video. And then you also easily get a transcript of this keyworded content of questions that people are actually asking that then you can put on your website. We have a full blog post. I’ll link to it down here that is about how to utilize interviews or videos in order to make transcripts that can then be turned into a blog post. You’ll see even with this video, we had that podcast. The podcast is the intro to this blog post and then this tutorial is really the bulk of that blog post. So we’ve talked about Neil Patel’s Ubersuggest tool. This is a free tool. There are plenty of paid tools that are very similar. Keyword Finder is one that we’ve talked about in the past and that is just kwfinder.com. The problem with this is they now are… And you’ll see it’s a very similar layout to Neil Patel’s.

12:46 CM: However they restrict the number of searches that you can do on the free account whereas Neil Patel’s tool really is a free tool. Yes, if you are linking up your website, they are probably collecting data on the number of visitors and the backlinks and everything. However this is a great free option.

13:27 CM: So, there is that Keyword Finder. Moz has a SEO tool, I think. HubSpot has a website grader. That’s always good to look at. But this again, the Neil Patel one, it is a great way to dive into how well the backbones of your website are even performing. Are there pages that don’t have Header 1 tags? Are their pages that are missing Alt tags on images? Can you improve the number of pages that are linking together kind of things like that? Neil Patel’s tool really showcases that very well. The last thing that we do, however, when we are doing keyword research is we actually turn over to Google and we take a look to see what other people are actually writing and to see if Google has any other recommended search results. So I’m going to do this. The pediatrician or family doctor, and I just go right over here to Google. Now oftentimes, I will be in the incognito mode, and that’s just so that I can really see everything that they have. But you can take a look to see what other people are talking about. So, you’ll notice a lot of these folks are using that keyword that we just searched for, “pediatrician” or “family doctor” in the title of the website or of the article.

15:00 CM: And here, if you don’t see that happening then make sure 100% that you are writing on that topic, ’cause you would, by having keywords, that phrase, in the title of the page as well as in the URL, it can be a great way to show Google right away, “Hey look, I’m actually talking about this whereas my competition isn’t necessarily talking about it.” But you can get a sense of what other people are writing about. So, how to decide, how to decide? So this one is “choosing a pediatrician for your new baby.” I’m sure in here, in this kid’s health article somewhere in there, it has “pediatrician versus family doctor.” Oh, this a… This looks like a forum. So forums can be great places to then get more backlinks into your website. So if you write an article “Pediatrician versus Family Doctor,” absolutely post it. This from 2011. So it’s not too current, but post it as, “Hey, we just wrote this great resource that it might be helpful for you as you’re deciding whether to utilize a pediatrician or a family doctor,” and add the link into a forum. Quora is another great place, Q-U-O-R-A, for you to do things like that as well.

16:26 CM: So if you see somebody asking a question “pediatrician versus family doctor” there, you can add your content and a link there as well, and that counts as a good backlink too. Let’s see, Revere Health, so they have “pediatrician versus family care doctor.” So they have just, “Pediatricians, family physicians, how to search?” So this is a very short article. Imagine if you had this article and then three videos of different doctors answering specific questions about when to utilize a pediatrician when family physicians are appropriate and then comparing the two of them. So by having that multi-media, it allows you to have much more content very easily on your website. Additionally, right here, we’re not seeing any videos popping up. However, there would be a chance that your video would be able to show up. Let’s see, so there are some folks who have talked a little bit about “pediatrician, family doctor, pediatrician,” “the difference between family medicine and internal medicine.” So, no one specifically, at least on this first page, has answered the pediatrician versus family care doctor or family doctor.

 

17:48 CM: This’s one, like another forum. So this could be a great one to talk about. Just going to keep on going down this rabbit hole. [laughter] People are asking their peers for their insights about whether they should utilize a pediatrician or a family doctor or go to one specialist or another. This is an excellent opportunity to jump in and see if you can also write content or have your doctors film content about the topic. So it’s important to have your website again ranked on Google, just because most folks, most prospects that you have are looking for your specialty online or they’re researching the referrals that they get. They want to make sure that you are the correct choice for them and for their family. And by doing keyword research, you can start to understand what language they’re actually utilizing and what questions they actually have as they’re going through this decision-making process? Search engine optimization has the ability to drastically increase the ROI that you get from digital marketing, just because it gets you shown more frequently on Google as well as increases the brand recognition and quickly increases the fact that people will know, like and trust you and that you’ll become more of a household name.

19:22 CM: So, we highly recommend utilizing search engine optimization. And when you’re going through and first starting out, please take a look at Neil Patel’s tool. You can do a Google search for Ubersuggest or its app, neilpatel.com/ubersuggest. And you’ll be able to get there. From here, type in that top-level keyword that ultimately you do want to make sure that your website ranks for and then take a look at the related, the questions, prepositions and comparisons to see if there are any sub-topics that are going to be more likely that you will rank for quickly. And as you start growing that baseline, you’ll be able to target those higher and higher-difficulty keywords in the future

Read the Medical Marketing Podcast Transcript on Why SEO should be a part of your Digital Marketing for Healthcare Strategy

00:00 Caitlin McDonald: Hello everybody, my name is Caitlin McDonald, and I’m here with the Social Speak Network on the Social Speak Network podcast. Today, we’re gonna be talking about search engine optimization for healthcare clinics, for medical practices and why this is so important in our blog post, we also have a video that specifically is about how to do keyword research, and the ins and outs of search engine optimization so that you can actually do it, but this blog post is, or excuse this podcast is mostly geared towards why you need search engine optimization and the benefits of it so to start off, why is it important? So, one-third of patients today are using their telephones or tablets to research and to book appointments. So you need to make sure that you’re being found online. 58% of healthcare marketers are using blogs and that’s compared to 74% of all marketers. So, this means that there is room for you to grow in that space. And 62% of smartphone owners use their phones to search for health information. So it gives you a chance to actually answer those questions.

 

01:30 CM: Additionally, 75% of patients use search engines prior to scheduling a visit. So we view search engine optimization as being incredibly important for your medical practice. Number one, it increase your online visibility. So, blogging is a huge part of search engine optimization, it’s your ability to create content but then is answering questions that folks are looking for online so increases your online visibility, you wanna make sure that you are actually found online. So without that content, let’s say your page just has doctor Profiles on it, information about some of the services that you offer your specialties, and then has the scheduling people are wanting more information. And so again, that second part of this, we’re actually gonna be diving into how to do that research, but for now, just know that if you weren’t found on the first page of Google most likely you’re not going to be found online. Search engine optimization, and being found organically online allows you to bring in more valuable visitors. So the reason why this is, is because of, being found first on Google, and having a presence on Google on Facebook, on LinkedIn and really on all of these other directories helps to boost consumer confidence in your facility in your clinic.

 

03:09 CM: And so you want to make sure that people know, like, and trust you, let’s say it’s the first time that they’ve dealt with the symptom they’re looking for answers about it. And you come up time and time again, they’re already going to start trusting you before they give you a call for that initial consultation. The third thing is that being optimized online helps to reduce your other digital marketing cost. So typically when we’re working with a healthcare center, we are running ads for them. This is a great way to reach people talking about top-of-funnel right when they’re searching for your specialty however, when you rank online as well, they’re more likely to click your listing down below, rather than the ad so it allows you to transfer some of that budget that you would be spending on clicks to people who are clicking on your free listing anyways, so it allows you to transfer some of those clicks as well as reach people who are just searching for lots of different things and they are wanting to make sure that you are legitimate and also to be able to find you and also positioned you above your competition if you’re showing up higher than them online as well.

 

04:35 CM: We have seen this to have a great return on investment and so traffic that you are getting from organic searches tends to be a little bit easier to convert. They aren’t seeing an ad and then wanting to do more research. You are the research that they are finding. So it’s a very cost-effective solution that has a high return on investment, and there are a few things to keep in mind as you are doing search engine optimization.

 

05:12 CM: One is you wanna make sure that you are thinking about mobile users. So about 62% of folks who are doing these searches are on their mobile phones. Often times, we even see search traffic up in the 80% for some of our clinics that we’re working for. And so you want to make sure if somebody’s doing a mobile search for your clinic, you’re also showing up there. Typically, people are starting to use voice searches. So rather than typing in a keyword, or two or service that they want, they are literally searching for a orthodontist near me or a pediatric office near me. And so you wanna make sure that you’re showing up for mobile users, and most importantly, for local mobile users, so put your clinic name, your location, and information like that in there so that people know that you are the one to visit.

06:13 CM: Let’s see, there are a few different ways that you can make your website stand out for search engines in 2020. And the first alluded to this with the blogging and how there is the gap for healthcare with blogging and a gap that you can fill by creating content that people are looking for. And so this is called on-page SEO, this is creating new content with keywords in it. Another thing that’s very valuable is building backlinks, so this is getting other websites, other directories to link into your website and having backlinks is one of the key indicators that Google is currently, looking for because it’s showing that other people want to link to your site. There’s a whole strategy behind this.

 

07:12 CM: I’m gonna be talking more about keyword research in the second part of this and how you can utilize that blog post, however if you are interested in the backlinking strategy, please just reach out to us schedule a consultation, we would love to chat with you in more detail about how to pursue backlinking for your healthcare center. However, this blog post is focused more on the front end of keyword research, creating content, things like that, then there is building links between pages. This is very easy to do if you are creating new content for your website basically on a blog post, if you mention a doctor’s name, link to their profile on your website if you are mentioning a service or a specialty, link to that specialty page. And so, just to wrap things up, in this part it is just very important to have search engine optimization as one of the key elements to your digital marketing strategy for your medical center because people are searching for medical practices and for specialists online if you want to meet them. Yes, you can create a referring partner relationships. However, a lot of folks are doing research themselves, and trying to figure out who’s gonna be the best person or best medical center to that they can trust to help heal them.

 

08:52 CM: So if you have any questions, please again jump over to that blog post, you’ll be able to read the full tutorial over there as well as watch our tutorial video and do not hesitate to reach out if you have any questions on how your practice can utilize Search Engine Optimization and keyword research and backlinking to boost the number of new appointments that you are seeing. Thanks so much for tuning in and I will see you next time on The Social Speak Network podcast.

Why Medical Practices Need to Invest in SEO and How to do Keyword Research

Why Medical Practices Need to Invest in SEO and How to do Keyword ResearchWhy Medical Practices Need to Invest in SEO and How to do Keyword Research

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7 Digital Marketing Resolution for Healthcare Professionals

7 Digital Marketing Resolutions for Healthcare Professionals

January marks a time for new beginnings. Now that 2020 is just around the corner, it’s time to start thinking about your New Year’s resolutions.

For busy physicians and other healthcare professionals, resolutions to improve medical practice and maintain work-life balance are ideal. But it is also a good idea to include some marketing-related resolutions to your list. After all, the start of the year is the perfect time to set ambitious goals to ensure that your practice is more successful than the last.

Here are 7 digital marketing resolutions you should make this year. Keep these resolutions in mind, and you could be well on your way towards making 2020 the best year for your practice.

Plan ahead

Content marketing is a powerful and cost-effective way to reach your audience and establish authority for your brand. Unfortunately, doctors and other healthcare professionals fail to set aside time to create content.

We know you’re busy. But planning everything at the last moment is the worst possible strategy. If you aim to build an online following, then it’s vitally important that you publish content regularly.

Creating a content marketing calendar will make your life easier. It will not only help you save time, but it will also keep you on schedule and ensure that your content marketing doesn’t end up on the back burner.

Tap into social media

Who said doctors can’t be social? Social media provides a way to reach a new audience, promote your practice, and stay in touch with patients outside the office.

People have all kinds of questions about diseases – symptoms, treatments, prognosis, etc. Many of them turn to the internet for answers. Social media allows you to lend your insights to a larger audience and get a sense of what they want from their doctors.

By staying active on social media, you’ll be able to reach a wider audience, build a relationship with them, and ensure greater loyalty among existing patients. Remember, your practice is built on a good relationship.

Create high-quality content

Today, people, young and old, get the majority of their news and information from social media.

Social media provides a great platform to teach the public about important health matters. By consistently sharing quality content and relevant medical information, you can combat misinformation, educate your audience, and position yourself as an expert in your field.

While people may not run off and book an appointment with you, you’ll be on top of mind the next time they may be in need of your service. Plus, you’ll have plenty of opportunities to make an impact on the lives of potential patients.

Creating new content takes time. Make the most of your old content by turning them into videos, infographics or podcasts.

Invest in video

We’ve said this plenty of times before, but it bears repeating. Video marketing is the future. It absolutely needs to be a part of your marketing strategy.

As visual species, humans are addicted to video content at the moment. Studies suggest that 85% of internet users watch online videos. 95% of them claim that they are more likely to learn and remember the information after watching a video as compared to reading it in text format.

With the increasing demand for video content, it is worth putting your time and money into video marketing.

Monitor and improve your online reputation

Reputation management is critical to the success of your medical practice. With the sheer amount of information online, patients are no longer limited to the physicians in their area. In fact, most people turn to the internet when looking for physicians. Many of them would read reviews before booking an appointment.

Online reviews are a great way to get more patients through the door. Negative reviews, on the other hand, can tarnish your online reputation. A lot can go wrong if you don’t address the problem head-on.

Focus on activities that bring more results

Track the time you spend on different activities as well as the results. Based on these results, you will know which ones have generated high results. Spend more time on the ones that bring in more engagements and conversion.

Call on professional help

A strong online presence takes time to develop. Plus, you need a detailed and comprehensive strategy in order to drive results. A professional digital marketer will know the best methods for obtaining them.

As a professional with a vast array of responsibilities, marketing your practice online may not be high on your priority list. That’s what we’re here for. We’ll help you put together a marketing strategy and execute them on your behalf. This way, you’ll have more time to focus on your patients and your practice.

Having a team of healthcare marketing professionals by your side will do more than just guarantee better leads and engagement, it can provide long-term success for your medical practice.

We can help you take your practice to the next level. Fill out this form to schedule your free consultation.

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5 Doctors Who Are Rocking the Social Media Game

5 Doctors Who Are Rocking the Social Media Game (1)

Online marketing for doctors is essential in the digital age. It provides a way to reach new patients, create a stronger connection with the ones you have, and promote your practice. Unfortunately, many doctors are still unsure about how to make social media work for their practices.

Here are 5 doctors who are rocking the social media game. Read on to find out how they used social media to their advantage.

  1. Dr. Sandra Lee
    Website: https://slmdskincare.com/
    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrPimplePopper/
    Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/DrSandraLee/
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drpimplepopper/Dr. Sandra Lee is a board-certified dermatologist. She uses social media to showcase her expertise – popping pimples and extracting cysts. Many of you have probably watched or scrolled past her videos on your feed. Dr. Pimple Popper posted a video of herself doing a blackhead extraction 4 years ago, and it took off from there. Although not for the easily nauseated, people seem to enjoy her content. In fact, she has amassed a large following on her social media channels. Her devoted set of fans call themselves “popaholics”. Dr. Lee has over 5.8 million subscribers on Youtube and 2.4 million Facebook likes. Her Youtube videos have been viewed more than 2.6 billion times. Now, she is a guru of skincare with her own TV show and skincare line.
  2. Dr. Kevin Pho
    Website: https://www.kevinmd.com
    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/kevinmdblog/
    Twitter: https://twitter.com/kevinmd
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/kevinphomd/
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinmdDr. Kevin Pho, best known as KevinMD on social media, is one of the most prominent healthcare influencers. He is a board-certified internal medicine physician, an acclaimed keynote speaker, and author. Dr. Kevin Pho is the founder of the blog KevinMD.com, the web’s leading platform where physicians, nurses, and other medical practitioners tell their stories and share their insights. He also shares some social media tips for doctors in his blog. The site receives more than 3 million monthly page views and is regularly cited in major media. Aside from his blog and website, he also has successful social media profiles. He uses these platforms to share articles published on his blog, share the voices of other physicians, and promote events. His largest presences are on Twitter, with 160,000 followers. His Facebook page has over 123,000 likes.
  3. Dr. Mike Varshavski
    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/realdoctormike/
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doctor.mike
    Twitter: https://twitter.com/realdoctormike
    Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0QHWhjbe5fGJEPz3sVb6nwDr. Mike is a board-certified family medicine physician. With an impressive 3.4 million Instagram followers, it is clear that Dr. Mike knows a thing or two about social media. Doctor Mike uses his Instagram account to give people an opportunity to connect with him on a personal level. He regularly posts photos of his daily life – at work, at the gym, sponsored events, and even with his dog. He may be known for his dashing looks and fashion sense, but he also routinely disseminates health and fitness advice to his followers.
  4. Dr. Wendy Sue Swanson
    Website: https://seattlemamadoc.seattlechildrens.org/about-this-blog/
    Twitter: https://twitter.com/wendysueswanson
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drwendysueswanson/
    LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wendy-sue-swanson-md-mbe-353b1b22Dr. Wendy Swanson is a pediatrician and an avid blogger for Seattle’s Children Hospital. Known to her legion of fans as SeattleMamaDoc, Dr. Swanson is one of the most eloquent medical writers in the social sphere. As the first physician blogger for an American hospital, Dr. Swanson worked on bridging the gap between parents and doctors using digital media.

    Supporting her goal of keeping your family healthy and safe, her content centers on the latest health news, general illness prevention tips, and helpful tips for parents. Her posts are personal and conversational. Hence, she was able to build a close relationship with her patients, in and out of the office. Swanson recently ended a stint as chief of digital innovation for Seattle’s Children. Over the past decade, she gained over 40,000 Twitter followers with her SeattleMamaDoc brand.

  5. Dr. Josh Axe
    Website: https://draxe.com/
    Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DrJoshAxe/
    Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drjoshaxe/
    Twitter: https://twitter.com/drjoshaxe
    Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/doctorjoshaxeDr. Josh Axe is a doctor of chiropractic, a certified doctor of natural medicine, and a clinical nutritionist. His goal is to help people eat healthily and live a healthy lifestyle. In his website, DrAxe.com, he shares content about topics like natural remedies, weight loss, nutrition, healthy recipes, and essential oils. Following Dr. Axe’s Facebook page is like following your friend online. Here, he shares a sneak peek of his personal life – enjoying time with his wife or cooking in his kitchen. He also uses his social media accounts to share health information, promote events, his book and other products.

    With over 2 million Facebook likes, 540,000 Instagram followers, and 43,000 Twitter followers, it is clear that Dr. Axe has cracked the code to building a powerful digital brand that people recognize.

Your practice needs social media One tweet won’t necessarily bring in new patients. Creating a Facebook page isn’t going to help you fill a waiting room. But with valuable content and consistent effort, you’ll be able to create trust with the community, solidify your reputation, and be a helpful resource to patients.

If you’re new at this game and you feel that achieving online success is well above your head, we are here to help. Schedule a free consultation today and we’ll bring you and your practice into the age of social media.

5 Doctors Who Are Rocking the Social Media Game

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5 Social Media Marketing Tips for Healthcare Professionals

5 Social Media Marketing Tips for Healthcare Professionals

As socially inclined creatures, humans have embraced technology that allowed us to connect with our family and friends. Today, social has become a prominent part of people’s lives.

With over half of the world’s population now active on social media, it’s not surprising that more and more businesses are using social media to reach their audience. Healthcare is no exception.

As a healthcare professional or organization, you need to step up your social media strategy in order to reach your target audience, boost patient engagement, and improve health outcomes.

Here are 5 tips to get you started.

Choose the right platform

There are lots of social media platforms out there other than Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn. While social media can help you drive new patient leads and grow your practice, you can’t be active on all of them all the time. You need to be strategic where you spend your resources.

A great way to plan and begin your social media campaign is to identify your ideal outlets. To do that, you need to focus on your core target audience. Find out where they spend most of their time online. Build your primary social media presence around your audience’s platforms of choice. It only makes sense to fish where the fishes are.

Narrowing down your choice to just a select few platforms will not only save you time, but it will also help you get the best return on your investment.

Jump into existing conversations

Take the initiative to be a part of a social media conversation. Join existing chats and groups that offer relevant discussions. See what you can add to the conversation and what you can learn about the current topics. Inspire discussions, ask questions, and air your opinion.

In addition to taking part in the discussions, it is important to track conversations relevant to your field. This raw and unfiltered conversation can provide you with insights from your audience. You may even get new ideas that you can use on your social media marketing campaign.

Don’t make it all about you

Social media is a great place to promote your practice and get more patients through the door. But if that’s the only reason why you signed up, then it won’t be beneficial.

People hate ads. They are turned off by businesses that throw ads but do not engage with their clients. If you want to build a solid social media presence, then you need to really get on there and interact with your audience.

Go back to your core audience. Learn as much as you can about them: demographics, what they are interested in, what they need, what their pain points are, etc. Getting to know your audience will help you interact with them on a more intimate level. Once you start conversing with them, you’ll know how you can help them.

Show them that you care about them and they will feel more connected with you.

Raise awareness and counter misinformation

Social media has become an important health resource. Studies suggest that more and more people are seeking health information on social media. With the amount of information we are bombarded with each day, it is not surprising to find a lot of medical misinformation out there. As a healthcare professional, you can capitalize on social media by providing your audience with accurate, science-backed facts.

Give people a reason to follow and engage with you. Pull from your unique expertise and share relevant, valuable information about your field. Don’t get stuck sharing links to blog posts. Share infographics, videos, interactive pieces, podcasts, and other types of content.

Provide your audience with content they can’t find elsewhere. Sharing fresh and unique content will not only keep your audience engaged, but they’ll also see you as a thought leader or industry expert.

Automate social media posts

You reap what you sow is a well-known idiom. While the phrase is biblical in origin, it also applies to social media marketing.
You can’t expect great results if your page is inactive. The key is to stay active on social media and consistently provide your followers with high-quality content. How can you do that when you spend the majority of your working hours seeing patients? Social media automation holds the solution to this problem.

Automating your social media posts allows you to schedule and optimize posts for maximum engagement. Scheduling several posts in advance helps you save time while achieving consistency in your marketing efforts. Plus, it gives you control over the content you share and how you share it.

Ultimately, it also helps you get more results with less effort. Keep in mind, though, that automation can only help you save time and effort, it is not meant to make social media marketing a completely hands-off process.

Automation tools such as Hootsuite, Buffer, AgoraPulse, and CoSchedule will make things easier for you. Whether you’re looking to find new patients or engage existing ones, you need to employ social media strategies that will help you sustain and grow your practice. Contact us today and let us put together a social media plan for you and your practice.

 

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