Healthcare

Marketing – it\’s a TEAM effort!

As the saying goes – there is no “I” in TEAM. I wish the word Marketing didn’t have an “I” in it so I could carry the saying over – but I think you know where I’m going here.  You can spell team using the letters in Marketing though! Marketing is a TEAM effort – that is, if you want to have the biggest ROI (Return on Investment).

About the TEAM in MARKETING.  I get some pushback on this, especially if I have a client paying me to handle marketing for them, or if they have an in-house marketing person or group.  Why do the rest of the employees need to be involved – what gives?

In fact – a lot gives. Here’s why.

  1. When you build a culture of inclusion making everyone part of the process and therefore the story, magical things happen.  It creates a powerful place of employment, more importantly, the team not only drinks the proverbial Kook-Ade – but they also share it.  WORD of MOUTH Marketing is powerful.  When employees brag about your brand – what does that say about you?  Ps – A Lot.
  2. You get the REAL STORY. Back to #1.  When you have team members posting work selfies on Instagram, Facebook & Twitter – or FB or Insta Live videos they tend to get far more engagement and will tend to become viral over a standard – hey here’s what we do post.  More importantly, you are getting a behind the scenes look at what makes the company tick aka “The Real Scoop”.
  3. Your buyers don’t want to be sold to. When you get that real behind the scenes story, buyers can see what’s real and then make a decision based on that reality.  Far more powerful than an advertisement telling someone why they should buy from you.
  4. The team includes your customers! We all strive to have brand evangelists, so why not encourage your employees to find those evangelists and engage with them on social.  Salespeople are your ideal target for this since they are often client facing – or perhaps even a service team.  Having an employee and a happy customer in an Instagram Story or in a picture on Twitter is PRICELESS!  You can’t beat that kind of advertising.
  5. Consistency, Authenticity, and Transparency. The holy grail of marketing.  When you have your team involved this becomes far easier.  You will have more engagement, you will see the real behind the scenes story from real people – not actors, not stock photos and not a stagnant social feed or website.

So….that’s why I encourage CEO’s to have a flexible yet monitored social media policy.  Yes, you have to have training and controls especially in compliance driven fields such as healthcare, financial services, and insurance – but trust me, it can be done and done well.

That’s my story, I’m sticking to it.  Go Team is the answer to this one. 100% hands down a winner!

Marketing – it\’s a TEAM effort! Read More »

Marketing – it\’s a TEAM effort!

As the saying goes – there is no “I” in TEAM. I wish the word Marketing didn’t have an “I” in it so I could carry the saying over – but I think you know where I’m going here.  You can spell team using the letters in Marketing though! Marketing is a TEAM effort – that is, if you want to have the biggest ROI (Return on Investment).

About the TEAM in MARKETING.  I get some pushback on this, especially if I have a client paying me to handle marketing for them, or if they have an in-house marketing person or group.  Why do the rest of the employees need to be involved – what gives?

In fact – a lot gives. Here’s why.

  1. When you build a culture of inclusion making everyone part of the process and therefore the story, magical things happen.  It creates a powerful place of employment, more importantly, the team not only drinks the proverbial Kook-Ade – but they also share it.  WORD of MOUTH Marketing is powerful.  When employees brag about your brand – what does that say about you?  Ps – A Lot.
  2. You get the REAL STORY. Back to #1.  When you have team members posting work selfies on Instagram, Facebook & Twitter – or FB or Insta Live videos they tend to get far more engagement and will tend to become viral over a standard – hey here’s what we do post.  More importantly, you are getting a behind the scenes look at what makes the company tick aka “The Real Scoop”.
  3. Your buyers don’t want to be sold to. When you get that real behind the scenes story, buyers can see what’s real and then make a decision based on that reality.  Far more powerful than an advertisement telling someone why they should buy from you.
  4. The team includes your customers! We all strive to have brand evangelists, so why not encourage your employees to find those evangelists and engage with them on social.  Salespeople are your ideal target for this since they are often client facing – or perhaps even a service team.  Having an employee and a happy customer in an Instagram Story or in a picture on Twitter is PRICELESS!  You can’t beat that kind of advertising.
  5. Consistency, Authenticity, and Transparency. The holy grail of marketing.  When you have your team involved this becomes far easier.  You will have more engagement, you will see the real behind the scenes story from real people – not actors, not stock photos and not a stagnant social feed or website.

So….that’s why I encourage CEO’s to have a flexible yet monitored social media policy.  Yes, you have to have training and controls especially in compliance driven fields such as healthcare, financial services, and insurance – but trust me, it can be done and done well.

That’s my story, I’m sticking to it.  Go Team is the answer to this one. 100% hands down a winner!

Marketing – it\’s a TEAM effort! Read More »

Social Media and Health Care: Improving the patient experience – digitally!

Let’s face it, we live in a digital social world. Brands of all types have made their mark on Social Media – Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram – but where are the health care providers?

  1. Oh, there are a few out there, but many are adverse to jumping on the social media wagon and here’s why avoidance is a mistake.
    Your patients are there and they WANT to engage. Using platforms such as Twitter or Facebook to brand your practice is a given, but are you posting content that is ABOUT them vs. about you? 80% of your content should have nothing to do with the services you offer. How much can you really write about Breast Exams or Colonoscopies or wait times in the ER? Ask questions! Ask for Feedback! Talk about preventative care, families and lifestyle. Patients also want to see the team from the doctors to the intake folks and everyone in between. Who are they? Why would I as a patient want to engage with them? Trust them with my care – my life? It’s all part of the customer experience.
  2. Improve Patient Communication. We all know that social media is not the place to talk about personal health care issues, but it is the PERFECT place to address broad questions. The key is to have a Social Media Manager and/or Patient Advocate managing social feeds. If indeed a personal health question arises, the Manager can direct the patient to a secure portal or have a health care provider call him/her to discuss concerns. As with any business, there will be Frequently Asked Questions that appear and best practice is to create an FAQ page on your website to direct patients or prospective patients to.
  3. More Satisfied Patients. It really all goes back to communication and transparency. Patients want to feel they are involved in their health care decisions AND they want providers who are willing to help them along the way. There is also the connectivity factor – connecting patients with other patients who share the same illnesses – almost like support groups but online. It’s perfectly OK to have a private MONITORED Facebook page for a variety of topics/groups such as Cancer Survivors, Sports Injuries, Heart Attack Survivors or those currently going through some life changing issue or chronic condition. When the Health Care Provider CARES and is involved, patient satisfaction will naturally rise. You are developing a community that your patients can be a part of.
  4. Education – Teach and Learn. It’s a given that social media is a great venue to educate your patients, and video is by far the #1 channel to do it. Not only is video engaging but it shows the true personalities of the presenters – doctors, PAs, NPs and other providers. Offering educational videos on everything from pre-op to post-op procedures to stretching exercises and healthy menu planning – the sky is the limit! Every physician is an “expert” and has a point of view. Social media allows physicians to easily share that expertise with the world and further engage current patients as well as attract new ones.

In the end, it’s all about putting you and your practice/group/hospital out there and allowing your patients to learn, teach, and engage.

Your patients are begging for this – where are you on the social spectrum?

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Secrets to building your health care practice…

Word of mouth is one of the best ways to organically build your healthcare practice. People are naturally cautious about who they share their medical needs with, and getting recommendations from friends and family helps to build trust.

The problem is, word of mouth has diminishing returns. You can build up a stellar reputation as a health provider, have overwhelmingly positive people who advocate for you, and bring in new patients, but at some point that’s going to tail off. When that happens, you need some other ways to reach out and let others know how awesome you are. Fortunately, we have just the thing…

Here are some tried and tested ways of marketing your healthcare business to bring new patients through the door.

Provide exceptional healthcare advice in a public setting. Some of the medical advice you provide is crucial. It helps potential patients gauge if you’d be the right doctor or healthcare provider for them. Use this to your advantage by providing great advice in a public setting. Attend health fairs and other events, speak at gatherings, and share your knowledge.

This doesn’t just need to be limited to strict medical information — If you have a nutritionist, physical therapist, or other healthcare expert on staff, they can provide advice in related fields and expose you to a whole new audience.

Give 150% when it comes to the customer experience. With so many options today, patients are being quite critical of their patient experience. How can you stand out? Have a comforting and comfortable waiting area with refreshments – it makes a difference! Doctors running late? Ensure you have a way to contact your patients and offer them a reschedule. Busy day of appointments? Make sure your staff doesn’t rush patients through the process but spends time ensuring their questions are answered and their needs are taken care of. Every little touch point matters. Not sure how you are doing – survey your patients and find out! PS – when you have a stellar customer experience it will differentiate you from others – market it as a perk!

Partner with other local businesses. One of the most powerful forms of local marketing is partnering with similar businesses. If you have a local gym, provide a class on exercising safely. If there’s a sports team, get involved with them by giving talks on recovering from sports-related injuries. If your town has large student population, give advice on good nutrition and diet. Involve yourself with retirement communities on medical care in later life.[/cs_text]

Build up a better medical referral network. Healthcare providers thrive on referrals. Network with other medical businesses in your local area and demonstrate your authority and expertise. As your reputation grows, use this to build mutually beneficial relationships with other specialists.

Offer free or low cost physicals, preventative tests, and vaccinations. Prevention is better than cure. Get healthy patients to your practice by providing physicals, preventative tests, flu shots, and other vaccinations for free, or at a significantly discounted rate.

Enhance your online, local SEO marketing. Local search, especially on mobile devices, is one of the main ways people discover your medical practice. Create a great website with useful, practical content. Make sure all of your local search profiles and listings are consolidated and accurate.

Stay on top of your customer reviews. Reviews should be another key part of your marketing strategy. Encourage your patients to review and rate your services, as higher reviewed businesses are better placed in search results.

Use the power of social media Monitor the social media around your brand and business. Interact with people through social media and share genuinely useful information and content. Answer questions to demonstrate your expertise and build trust in your advice and approach.

It’s time to look beyond word of mouth marketing, and here at RBC we’re ideally placed to help you do just that. We understand what healthcare providers need, and we provide awesome marketing and strategy services to help your business thrive.

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Urgent Care Centers and Protecting Your Practice’s Bottom Line

When a new urgent care facility opens up around the corner, should you begin to worry about patient retention and reduced profits? Perhaps. Anything that impacts your medical practice’s bottom line could ultimately compromise your patient satisfaction due to reduced staffing, fewer services, reduced hours and more. I’m sure none of this is shocking news – but you do have options.

The appeal of urgent care – If you want to compete effectively, you need to know what makes urgent care centers appealing. Specifically, it’s:

  • Open long hours, so people can go at weekends or after work.
  • No appointment necessary so people can go when they need to.
  • Specialized services – Some urgent care facilities provide highly specialized services like orthopedics.
  • It’s less expensive. Many people view health care services as a commodity – price is the point.

So how do you compete?

Proactively marketing your medical practice differently. We know more than a little about marketing, and when it comes to healthcare, it’s all about standing out, providing a personal touch, being there for your patients, and building trust. In short, it’s all about creating a connection, a compelling reason for them to come to you instead of going to your competition, where they’ll just be treated as a number.

This is about creating an excellent customer journey for your patients. Training your staff to be flexible and accommodating, providing a complete, holistic suite of healthcare services, and being accessible and convenient.

It’s about becoming a bigger part of your patients’ lives, when they’re well in addition to when they’re sick. Marketing can help you do just that – Email, interactive websites, patient portals, referral networks, and more all help to promote your services and encourage patients to trust you.

Will this help retain patients? Not all – but many will see the value in the connection and forgo the convenience and the dollars. If your patient goes to an urgent care facility, ensure you follow up.

You know your patients well, much better than an urgent care facility or similar provider. Use that to your advantage, to build a connection. Ensure your patients know to list you as their PCP or preferred specialists so medical records get routed back to you or your patients know to send you record of those visits.

There will be times patients will go to Urgent Care facilities out of pure convenience when you are closed. Acknowledge the fact and support your patients in their decision but make sure you stay in the loop of their care!

Focus on the positive things your practice does. You do much more than treat the sick. You almost certainly have wellness programs, specialized clinics, great advice on diet, exercise, and lifestyle, counselling services, guidance, and other services you can tailor to every one of your patients. Spend some time thinking about how you can promote those services, and become more than just a place people go when they need help.

Be more accessible and convenient. If a patient is ill, they need help there and then. One big advantage urgent care facilities have is that they can easily deal with walk-ins and are open long hours. Well, two can play at that game! Consider opening for longer and creating “walk in” slots and specialized clinics for your patients. You might also want to make signing up and onboarding patients quicker and easier, so that’s not a barrier to them coming to you.

Taken together, these three things can help you build more trust with your patients, let them know about your full range of services, and be there when they need you. If you get this in place, you’ll be in a much better position to give them the care they need. It’s not such a delicate balancing act now, is it.

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Healthy Options — Do Your Patients Know Everything Your Medical Practice Does?

To the average patient, medical information and healthcare can be a strange place. It seems locked behind an arcane door of unpronounceable medications, conditions with Latin or Greek names, and baffling procedures. It doesn’t help that the only time most people interact with their doctor is when they’re sick.

We know that’s a problem — Marketing your practice isn’t easy. However, we’ve never shied away from a challenge (except for that pumpkin pie eating competition that one time), so we’ve got some pretty good ideas. It all comes down to a few things:

  • Making your patients aware of everything you do.
  • Keeping them healthy in addition to curing illnesses.
  • Giving them more options in their healthcare and medical choices.

How does that look in (medical) practice? Sharing your full range of services[/x_custom_headline][cs_text]It’s important to move people’s perceptions away from your practice just being somewhere they can go when they’re sick, and instead focus on how it can help them stay well. That starts by giving your patients an easy-to-understand list of services and how they can benefit their health. For example:

  • Nutrition advice — Tips on eating well to live a healthier life and feel better.
  • Exercise and fitness — Advice on recommended classes, programs, and routines for people of all abilities and age groups.
  • Smoking cessation — Services you provide to help people quit smoking.
  • Pre- and post-natal services — Helping mothers-to-be through pregnancy and after
  • Screenings and prevention — Details of the various diagnostic and screenings tests you can do to reassure patients or detect early signs of a problem.
  • Any other services — Referrals to alternative holistic options such as life coaching to focus on mindfulness, therapy, acupuncture and more.

Once you’ve collected together all of the great things you do, you need to do two things:

  1. Centralize all the information in one place — We’d recommend your website, and in various leaflets you can hand out at the practice.
  2. Tell your patients about the services — This could be through posters in your practice, via email, through a letter to their home address, or other personal channels.

The main purpose of this is to wow your patients and create trust with them — And that’s vital when it comes to healthcare. What specialized treatments do you provide? Another area to think about is any specialties your practice has, Review the skills, background, and experience of your staff and check you’re representing the various treatments you offer. Examples include:

  • Addiction treatment — Helping people get over alcohol, drug, or other types of addictions.
  • Counselling — Recommendations on good psychotherapists and counselors for helping people deal with mental and emotional issues.
  • Options for medium- and long-term treatments — Providing choices and options for longer-term care of persistent conditions.

With these types of services, it’s best to take a case-by-case approach.

Ultimately, it’s about putting choice and information in the hands of your patients. Once they’re properly informed, they can make better choices about their health and discuss them with you. This all helps to build better relationships with your patients that you can use to enhance their lives and the services you provide.

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Healthy Technology — How It Helps Healthcare Providers and Customers Thrive

The pace of technological change can leave you breathless, and not because you need to go to the doctor. In fact, as technology makes our lives easier, it’s expanding into every industry — One where it’s having a profound impact is in healthcare.

It’s easy to see why. Faster, better access to medical information, apps that make it easier for a physician to do their job, and giving the patient complete insight into their health is good for everyone. In fact, it’s vital for health providers to start adopting this new technology so they don’t get left behind.

The thing is, it’s all about how technology makes your patients’ lives easier. If you understand and support their healthcare journey through technology, it builds trust with your patients and gives you an edge against your competition.

Getting the skinny on your patients.

It’s vital to have all the latest info on your patients — Medications, lifestyle changes, symptoms, medical history — You name it. Unfortunately, something most of us hate is form filling. That’s why being able to get and record information from your clients electronically makes things much easier.

How the technology helps your patients

  • It’s less frustrating for the customer to provide the information, so they’re happier
  • It’s easy to transfer information between health providers, meaning a complete picture of care.
  • Software can automatically prompt for follow-up questions, so you build a complete picture.
  • You can tend to all your patient’s medical needs, with a holistic approach.

Having healthcare information at your fingertips. Diagnostic tools and information are getting even more portable and user-friendly.

From patient charts and details on a tablet, to wearable diagnostic devices providing real-time data, doctors and patients have access to a wealth of information.

How the technology helps your patients

  • Real time diagnostics means doctors have access to the latest information and can tailor treatment accordingly.
  • Easy access to test results, charts, and treatment plans ensures a complete understanding of patient needs and conditions.
  • This provides a more flexible, reactive, and caring approach to meeting your individual patient’s medical needs.

Sharing all the medical details that matter. It used to be that if you referred someone for an x-ray or other diagnostic test, you’d need to wait for the results to be posted or couriered back to you. With high-speed internet access and software designed to handle the huge amounts of data that medical imaging produces, those waits are becoming a thing of the past.

How the technology helps your patients

  • Find out what’s wrong with your patient much more quickly, resulting in faster, more focused treatments.
  • Easier to share results with other experts so you can get a specialist consult to ensure you’re recommending the right course of action.
  • More confidence from your patient that you have all the details you need to make the right choice for their treatment.

Medical convenience through smartphone apps

It’s not just in person doctor and patient interactions where big changes are happening. There’s a whole host of smartphone apps designed to do everything from reminding a patient to take their meds, to allowing people to remotely consult with a doctor or specialist (telemedicine). These apps are an incredible way to help patients make better decisions and take charge of their health.

How the technology helps your patients

  • They can get an update or text message if a doctor is running late.
  • The convenience of reminders and updates to help them take care of their health needs.
  • Greater access to a wider range of health and medical services.

Stepping into the health portal

Finally, the idea of the patient portal is becoming ever more popular. It’s an online, one stop “body shop” where patients can ask their doctors questions, review test results, book appointments, and get other vital information. It’s the way all practices seem to be going nowadays, and it’s the type of convenience patients love.

How the technology helps your patients

  • They can log in and get updates on their diagnostic tests, treatment and medications.
  • They can easily look up doctor availability and schedule appointments.
  • They can easily ask questions of a doctor.

Of course, with all these technological changes, it’s vital to maintain the human touch. A good bedside manner, a deep understanding of a patient’s needs, and helping them make the best health decisions are vital. A website that shares all your services, gives details on each doctor, and puts your patient’s needs front and center is a great way to show that you care.

Fortunately, with the right technology, that gets even easier.

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