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Urgent Care Centers and Protecting Your Practice’s Bottom Line

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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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What You Need to Know About Facebook Advertising

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Since 2010, Advertising on Facebook has grown more than 680%. More than a million advertisers have spent more than $8 billion.

Every day, more businesses are pouring advertising dollars into the social network. Currently, it’s one of the most powerful avenues for paid marketing.

If you’ve ever used Google’s AdWords, you know that program shows ads to users based on their searches. If they search “Chinese food Omaha,” anyone who bought that term will show up first. Those types of ads are effective because the searcher is already looking for that solution.

Interruption ads, like billboards and TV commercials, are usually just noise. They get in your way and often provide no value.

Interruption Marketing

Facebook ads are interruptive (because the user didn’t request them), but they are powerful because they’re powered by Facebook’s tremendous data sourcing machine. Facebook keeps data on everything you or I do on the social network. It builds profiles for each user that catalogs everything they can.

Facebook knows your religion, political party, favorite soft drink, preferred book genre, and where you live. From basic pieces of data, they can extrapolate bigger things, like how much money you make, where you work and in what field, and your opinions on Donald Trump.

With all that data available, marketers buy ads that carefully target their ideal customers. You can have your ad shown to people based on their location, hobbies, interests, behaviors, and several other factors.
So even though I’m not requesting anything through Facebook, the ads that are shown to me are highly relevant. Since I’m interested in that content, I’m likely to click.

Growing Your Brand

The benefit over AdWords, is that you aren’t bound to a certain demand. Through Google, ads can only be shown when a similar phrase is searched. If customers aren’t searching it, the ads won’t display.

On Facebook, however, you can put your ads in front of people who may not know a solution or product like yours exists. This ad format is a great way to expand your brand.

It’s also good for promotion products or services that people ordinarily wouldn’t buy off the Internet. You may sell an extraordinary line of premium jam and jellies, but most people get those at the grocery store. You have to interrupt a user to market to them.

Buying Facebook Ads

Since 2014, Facebook has been using an ad buying structure that’s suited for serious testing and experimentation. Their goal is to give users all the tools they need to create powerful ads with solid ROI.

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If you use this structure properly, you can adjust audience segments and run different ads against one another to determine the most effective.

When you buy ads, you’ll first establish a budget. This prevents Facebook from charging you more than you expect (which would be very easy if you didn’t understand how to use the interface properly).
When an ad is to be shown, Facebook holds an auction. The auction considers three factors before displaying an ad:

  1. The advertiser bid – You can let Facebook choose this (recommended) or set the bids manually (for advanced users only).
  2. Ad quality and relevance – How much Facebook thinks people will like your ad.
  3. Estimated auction rates – How likely a person is to take your ad’s action.

Evaluating Your Campaigns

Once you set your ads, don’t forget about them! Even though they can be set to finish at any time, you’ll want to check back into the Ads Manager to see their performance. Facebook is great about showing you the data you need at a glance.

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Evaluate the results of your ad, the cost, and the reach. Does anything seem out of place? Can you do anything better? How can you tweak your ads to get better results?

The answers to those questions are an entire industry of advertisers, but that doesn’t mean Facebook’s ad program is beyond you. With some careful study and data-minded thinking, you can use Facebook to sell products, build subscriber lists, and grow your business.

Have you seen some really cool Facebooks ads recently? We\’d love to hear about them.

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The Department of Justice is looking at your website – are you ADA compliant?

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Compliance. It’s a word that finance managers are all too familiar with. We know it might cause a slight sinking feeling, but compliance guidelines exist to protect everyone — You and your customers.

That’s why it’s vital to understand the impact and implications of the new Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) guidelines issued by the Department of Justice. In short, it’s about making sure your banking website and online presence is easy to access and use for visual and hearing impaired customers (and that’s good for everyone).

It matters for two pretty big reasons:

  1. It shows your commitment to all your customers and making their banking experience as easy as possible.
  2. It protects you from legal action — Businesses with websites that fail to meet ADA / DOJ requirements have been fined or sued (ouch).

The problems visual or hearing impaired people have with using websites.

For most people, using a bank website is easy (especially if they don’t forget their password!) They visit the site, enter their login details, get into the online banking app and pay their bills, check their statement, and manage their finances. If you’re blind or visually impaired, that gets a lot more difficult.

They may need specialist tools like braille or tactile interfaces, screen readers, voice activated navigation, and specialist software. When they arrive at a banking website they may run into more frustrations because the site isn’t coded properly to work with their hardware and software.

If your customers are hearing impaired, they will run into problems with audio content, or if they needed to call a service center to get issues sorted out.

It’s these problems the DOJ\’s guidelines are trying to solve, and they’re serious about it.

How do you know if your website is ADA compliant?

The simple truth is, if you need to ask whether your website is ADA compliant, it probably isn’t. For example, does your website:

  • Allow navigation completely by keyboard (not using a mouse)?
  • Have rich alternative descriptions for any pictures or visual elements on your website?
  • Explain what’s happening in customer service videos, purely through audio?
  • Provide sign language interpretation for audio content?

These are just four examples from the over 70 requirements the DOJ has. Ultimately, it comes down to the question: Is your banking website completely usable by all of your customers, regardless of their ability or disability?

Why your bank website needs to get compliant

Your bank website needs to be compliant by 2018. If it’s not, you’ll run into several big problems:

  • You could get sued or fined by the DOJ for non-compliance.
  • You could fall foul of equal rights laws.
  • You could get negative publicity and a bad brand reputation.

In short, getting compliant isn’t an option if you want to stay in the clear.

Relax, we’ve got this

We understand just what it takes to get your banking website ADA compliant. We also understand you just don’t have the time. That’s why we’re here to help — We’ve already helped banks like Litchfield Bancorp and Collinsville Savings Society, and we’re here to help you.

Get in touch today and we’ll explain exactly how we’ll make your bank website ADA compliant. Get yourself some peace-of-mind.

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Why You Should Be Using Drip Campaigns

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When someone subscribes to your email list, it’s important to capture their newfound interest by making a strong connection. The best marketers use drip campaigns to quickly interact with new fans in a short period of time.

A drip campaign is an automated series of emails sent to your subscribers. The emails are sent on a specific timeline or based on user actions. There’s no denying their effectiveness. The email marketing app Emma found that targeted emails are far more likely to earn clicks than general broadcast emails. In fact, links in drip emails are clicked 119% more often.

Drip campaigns typically begin with a welcome email that reminds the fan how they signed up and what they can expect from you. Further emails can take different shapes depending on your goals. A campaign may introduce your fans to your best content or answer common questions about your product or service. Some campaigns are almost entirely educational, designed to deliver tremendous value to subscribers.

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The most common structure of drip campaigns is called lead nurturing: an email course that solves a subscriber’s problem. The fan signs up on your website because he’s interested in the information you promise. They involve five to seven emails with a two-day delay between each. Marketing automation experts at Drip report that lead nurturing creates 50% more customers ready to buy.

Throughout the emails, the campaign offers information that soothes the reader’s pain points. Each email should end with a call to action, usually a link to additional content or offers on your website.

Toward the end of the course, position your product or service as a logical solution to the problem with calls to action that encourage the visitor to sign up. By this point, you should have offered enough value that the reader considers you an expert.

As you begin to craft your email series, use these guidelines.

DO understand your reader. You have to create your copy to solve their problems. First, you have to know what their problems are.

DON’T be sales-y right away. If you hit your fan too hard with sales copy, you’ll turn them off from the experience. You must provide value first.

DO end every email with a call to action. Just because they’re done reading doesn’t mean they’re done engaging. This can be a link to a blog post, a social action (like, share, follow, etc.), or a link to a landing page.

DON’T rush the reader down the buyer’s journey. For instance, content that compares your service to competitors should come after you convince the user they need a service like yours in the first place.

DO move the user into your broadcast list once the drip campaign has completed. Most email marketing applications offer procedures like this.

We\’d love to hear your feedback on drip campaigns – on successes, failures, or even programs that you like or dislike.

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Banks and the social media compliance debate

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We work with several financial institutions, and we know that one of their main concerns is compliance – How do you make sure that what you’re saying in your Facebook or Twitter feeds meets all of the rules, regulations, and guidelines of the financial industry? Compliance can be a headache, but that shouldn’t stop you having a good social media presence.

We’ve got a solution we think you’ll love. Here’s why you should consider adding social media and social selling to your marketing.

The way to make sure your posts are compliant is to be proactive – You need to create and manage a proper editorial calendar and have a solid review process for your content. Run your content calendar, posts, blogs, and social media strategy by your compliance department.

They’ll likely provide some advice on how to phrase your posts, what to add, and what to remove. Make sure the person responsible for your social media profiles has regular conversations and check-ins with your compliance team. That way you can ensure everything your publishing has a seal of approval.

As a local bank or credit union, you’ve built up a great reputation in your area. Targeted marketing is a good way to get noticed and to encourage personal and business customers to come to you, but that’s only half the story. If you want more chances to sell your financial products and services, you need to seek out and act on opportunities — We’ll explore exactly how you can do that.

If you’re a commercial lender, your main purpose is lending money to expanding businesses. In addition to income from loans, you can upsell other products like financial protection, insurance, retirement planning, and more. The question is, how do you find those expanding businesses in the first place?

Fortunately, there’s some good technology, which, combined with some tips and tricks, can help you create some powerful leads for your banking services. In this article we’ll cover three main areas – LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Twitter, and other social media.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

As the largest social network for professionals, LinkedIn is already a strong resource for businesses. Hopefully you’re already making the most of your bank’s LinkedIn presence, but today we’re going to focus on one specific part of the platform, LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator lets you collect together prospects from across all of LinkedIn, whether you’re connected to them yet or not. It has built in algorithms to help you identify potential clients and businesses who might be in need of your bank’s financial products. It helps you understand where people are changing roles, when organizations are launching new initiatives, and how a business posts about any changes.

You can bring all of this information together in one place so you can start having informed, relevant conversations with the people that matter — The decision makers in your target businesses. It helps you put context around these conversations too, building trust with your potential clients. Combine this with insights into your professional network, other’s profiles, and lead recommendations, and it becomes a very powerful tool for finding commercial banking prospects.

Twitter

You might not think of Twitter as a way to find business banking opportunities, but used correctly it can be a great way to connect with potential customers. Here’s a quick step-by-step guide:

  1. Follow the Twitter profiles of any businesses and professionals in your target geographical area.
  2. Review your Twitter feed to see what people are sharing — Are they discussing new opportunities, products, services or research?
  3. If they are, engage with them — But here’s the trick — Don’t try to sell them anything. Provide useful financial advice, professional banking support, and insight. The idea is to build up trust.
  4. Once you’ve built up that trust, you can suggest products and services to help them achieve their business goals.

It’s vital that you don’t just promote your banking products and services — That can turn people off very quickly. Instead, you want to spend time building up a good reputation and strengthening your expertise and authority.

Other social media

Finding leads isn’t just limited to Twitter either. Facebook, Instagram, even Pinterest can be good places to find new banking customers, if you know how to look. As with Twitter, start by identifying the people and businesses in your local area and connect with them.

Then, spend some time cultivating relationships — Share genuinely useful financial information and links to your Facebook page or Pinterest board. You’re looking to build a brand focused on financial trust. As you add to that content, you’ll get more visibility and potential customers will start to see you as the “go to people” for advice on their money.

As you can see, these tools can help you rapidly expand your banking market. When you start out actively seeking leads, and engaging with them in the right way, you’ll be able to build trust which will lead to more sales of your financial products and services.

Still feeling a little hesitant on tackling social media? Give us a call – we can set up a training session with you and your banking team.

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Creating New Banking Customers – The Art of the Email Drip

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If you oversee the marketing or sales for a bank or credit union, you’ve probably placed your fair share of ads in local newspapers, had some promotions on the local radio show, and launched a fabulous Facebook page. Hopefully, you’ve gotten some feedback, adjusted your strategy, and carried on. One marketing avenue you might have overlooked is the quiet, simple, inexpensive, humble email.

It’s true that email marketing sometimes gets a bad rap – Many are afraid of clogging their client’s inbox, being lost in a sea of spam, or getting an “opt out” notification. Fortunately, there’s a solution – Send emails that aren’t all about selling. Instead, focus on building trust, showing expertise, enhancing reputation, sharing great information, and being useful to your customers. Sneak in a subtle call to action here and there by all means, and you’ll find it effective. That’s why “Email Drip Campaigns” work really well for banks, credit unions, and financial institutions.

Why email drip campaigns work

Email drip campaigns are more successful than standard email campaigns because they’re not directly selling something. People are put off by overly “salesy” messages, so drip campaigns avoid them. An email drip campaign will:

  • Share genuinely useful information with your customers and potential customers.
  • Reinforce the name and brand of your bank or credit union with your customers.
  • Show that you understand the needs of people who may require your services.
  • Alert people to news, information and other content that could be useful to them.
  1. A customer or potential customer provides you with their email address, and agrees to get emails from you.
  2. You create a strategy for sharing useful banking and financial information with email recipients and create a series of emails.
  3. You send out emails on a periodic basis according to your strategy and timetable.
  4. Customers and potential customers read these emails and choose to act on them.

We call these “drip campaigns” because they’re designed to work over time — A slow reinforcement of your bank’s brand, expertise, and authority showing how you can help out your personal and business customers.

The type of information your bank could share

Here are some examples of the type of content that does well in email drip campaigns:

  • Simple advice on household budgeting and how to make money go further.
  • Financial planning for vacations and special events, especially at seasonal times of the year.
  • Clear information on investments and how customers can start making their money work for them.
  • Information on the housing market in your local area and whether it’s a good time to buy or sell.
  • Explanations of good money management, including credit and debt.
  • Business centric articles on succession planning, the economy, company culture, and more.
  • Advising people on savings, insurance, and other key areas.

Of course, you can mention your products and services in these emails, but that’s not the point of sending them out. Instead, you’re providing genuinely useful, actionable information to help your customers make better decisions. As a result, they’ll trust you more, and people simply prefer doing business with organizations they trust.

The information you provide doesn’t need to be limited to your emails either. You could have a blog on your website that the email links through too, and where you expand on key information. That also has the benefit of “search engine optimization,” meaning the content could show when people search online.

If you want to learn how to create an affordable lead generating magnet for your bank or credit union – why not give us a call? It’s what we do – We’re lead generating machines here at the Red Barn.

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