Hanging Out Your E-Shingle:
How to Market Your Practice
in a Digital Age
John Maese, MACP, FACEP, FHMISS
Based on a presentation at Internal Medicine 2011
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Shingle
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Outline
• Why this is an important topic?
• Marketing Concepts
• Traditional
• Content Development
• Web site Development
• Basic Web Based Marketing
• Social Media
• Conclusions
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Why
• Just because you build it does not mean they will
come.
• Market share is important whether you are
employed by a hospital or in solo practice.
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Why
• Competition.
•
•
•
•
•
Other Physicians
Hospital Networks
Nurse Practioners
Pharmacists
PAs
• Comparisons.
• Consumerism.
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Original Chat Room
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Factors that Have Changed the Game
• The rise of the internet.
• The move towards digital age.
• The consumer movement in health care.
• The need to protect your image.
• Deceptive Medical Advertising.
• Change in advertising dollars spent on paper vs. digital
media.
• Number of patients online.
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Internet Statistics
• Number of people using the internet in North
America 266,244,500 - or about 77% of the
population.
• Eight in ten internet users look online for health
information.
• Health information is the third most popular
online search.
• 44% of internet users look online for information
about doctors or other health professionals.
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Web Sites that Compare Physicians
• Commercial sites.
• Data and Patient reviews.
• Government sites.
• Data.
• Insurance Company sites.
• Data and Cost.
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Commercial Sites
• http://www.healthgrades.com
• http://www.vitals.com
• http://www.ucomparehealthcare.com
• http://www.lifescript.com
• http://www.qualityhealth.com
• http://www.angieslist.com
• http://www.healthline.com
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HealthGrades
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HealthGrades
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Government
• The “Physician Compare” Web site, fashioned after CMS’s
existing “Hospital Compare” site that enables consumers to
shop for hospitals against several price and quality factors.
• Initially, information about physicians enrolled in the
Medicare program and those participating in the Physician
Quality Reporting System (PQRS), through which CMS pays
incentives for providers who meet various quality marks.
• CMS will add in January 2013 physician performance
information based on 2012 quality reporting it receives.
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CMS Site
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State Site
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Consumer Movement
• The new word of mouth “peer-influence” marketing.
• On Feb 25, 2010 in the Wall Street Journal an article
titled “Trusting Other Patients' Drug Advice PeerInfluence Advertising Takes Off, as Companies Seek
Effective Marketing Tools” was published.
• “Market research shows that the sick are relying more
on the recommendations of fellow patients, and less on
the reputations of companies and endorsers, in deciding
whether to seek treatment and what drugs to ask for,”
say pharmaceutical companies and their consultants.
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Traditional Marketing
• Word of mouth
• Paper
• Telephone book
• Radio
• TV
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Marketing Basics
• A brand is the identity of a specific product, service, or
business - it affects the personality of a product, company
or service. A legally protected brand name is called a
trademark.
• The Brand is the image and personality you want to
project.
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Marketing Basics
• You stand for something!
• You are a brand!
• You want to brand yourself
positively!
• You and your practice have a unique
look and feel!
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Brand
• The emotional expression of the brand is
the brand personality.
• Who you are?
• How do you want patients to feel about
you?
• How you want your practice to look on
the web?
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Brand Personality
• Brand Personality is the guide for the taste,
tone, and style of ALL brand communications.
• A Brand is formed by the Branding elements.
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Branding Elements
• Name
who you are
• Logo
your signature
• Color
how you’re seen from
a distance
• Symbol
what you stand for
• Typography
how you speak
• Illustrative style
how you dress
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Branding
McDonald’s
• Red is associated with
energy, passion, desire,
love
•
Yellow is associated with
Joy
Happiness
Intellect
Energy.
Yellow is often associated
with food. Bright, pure
yellow is an attention getter
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,
Getting Started
• You need to spend time with staff and decide
what you and your practice represent.
• An Internist’s Practice will have a different look
and feel from a OB/GYN or a pediatric office.
• What is the goal of the web site?
• What services do you provide?
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Getting Started
• Collect the correct information:
• Practice demographics:
• Physician(s) Full Name
• Practice Name
• Practice Full Address
• Practice Phone Number
• Hours of operation
• Description of Services.
• Description of Practice.
• Biographies of MDs and key personnel.
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Bios
• Must be accurate and relevant to the practice.
• Who you are in a narrative.
• Highlights about the physician or the practice.
• Touch on Experience and Education.
• Comment on special interests of the physician if
relevant to medicine.
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Biography
• Donna Seminara, MD co-founded Island Internists in
August of 1991, and is proud to have served thousands
of families in Staten Island, sometimes over multiple
generations, as their Primary Care Physician. Although
involved in many academic and advocacy positions, she
identifies herself first and foremost as a Practicing
Clinician. She is Board Certified in Internal Medicine
and Geriatrics, and has re-certified each of these
credentials.
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Bios
• She is Director of the Geriatrics Department and the
Fellowship Program at SIUH. She has been elected to
represent fellow Physicians on the Hospital’s Medical
Executive Committee, and starting in the summer of
2011, will begin a two year term as the first female
President of the Medical and Dental Staff at Staten
Island University Hospital. Three to five times weekly
Dr. Seminara can be found rounding on her patients
admitted to Staten University Hospital’s North
Campus.
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The Brand Dr. Seminara
Professional
Caring
Qualified
Compassionate
Patient Advocate
THE
Doctor
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Other information
• Pictures (physicians, nurses, facilities)
• We are in a YouTube world- pictures and video are
helpful.
• Testimonials ( Optional )
• Patient testimonials are the single most powerful
endorsement you can have!
• You must get permission to attribute it to an
individual.
• Awards & Achievements (Optional)
• If you have done good things impress your patients.
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Other information
• Logo
• Most practices do not have one. You can go without
it.
• Can be developed for about $400.
• Desired colors
• Color has meaning and should be considered
carefully.
• Any material that you may already have (optional)
• For example: Patient Education.
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Website
• A website is a collection of related web pages containing
digital documents/photographs.
• A web page is written in plan text interspersed with
formatting instructions of Hyper Text Markup Language
(HTML, XHTML).
• A website is hosted on web server, accessible via a
network such as the Internet.
• World Wide Web is made up of Web pages.
• The Internet is the connection between the web pages
• It is relatively static compared to Twitter and Facebook.
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Website
• Website Address or Domain name or URL.
• Are easy to obtain.
• Costs about $10 -$39 a year for registration
• Different Extension have different costs.
• .com – Commercial Web site
• .net- Network Internet infrastructure activities, such as
Internet Service Providers
• .edu- Education
• .ws - Web site
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Website
• The Domain name may come as a package with
web hosting.
• Who hosts the web site is the Internet Service
Provider (ISP) address or physical address on
the web.
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Domain Names
• Services
• www.godaddy.com
• www.networksolutions.com
• www.max.md
• Others
• Domain Name
• Should be easy for patients to remember and spell.
• Should reflect the practice name.
• You might purchase more than one name.
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Domain Names
• The practice name and spelling variations.
• Islandinternists.com
• Islandinternist.com
• The individual Physician names
• Johnmaese.com
• Johnmaesemd.com
• Johnmaese.md
• If the name is already taken then be creative
• Islandinternistsonline.com
• IslandinternistSI.com
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How To Get a Domain Name?
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How To get a Domain Name?
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How To get a Domain Name?
• Do you want a private registration?
• This is like an unlisted phone number.
• Do you want it certified?
• Do you want an email package?
• Cost is about $3 to $7 a month not secure.
• Secure encrypted email is about $7 a month
purchased by another company.
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Hosting Services
• Hosting services
• Internet Service Provider (ISP)
• Can be bought as a separate service
• Deluxe vs. basic Service
• Basic is about 10 GB or about five pages of content for $ 4 / month
• Deluxe is about 150 GB or about twenty pages of content $7 / month.
• Security
• $ 49 a year for encryption
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• $ 39 year
• Total cost simple five page website with SEO about $119/
year
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Building a Web Site
• The Web site should be simple easy to navigate for
your target audience
• Consistent with your Brand.
• Content optimized for Search Engines.
• Keep eye candy to a minimum unless you do
cosmetic procedures. This helps keep expenses to a
minimum.
• The more content, the more memory, the more cost.
• Clear! Readable! Understandable!
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Building a Web Site
• You are going to build it to optimize its
detection by search engines. This is called
Search Engine Optimization(SEO)
• Consider a Blog with your web site.
• Track traffic - called ‘hits’ or ‘eyeballs’
• i.e. Web Site Analytics
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Prefabricated Website
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Prefabricated Website
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Prefabricated Website
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Website
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Web Shingle
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Search Engines
Market Share as of January 2011
Google
Yahoo
Bing
Ask
Aol
• Search engines use an algorithm or formula that ranks
web pages based on a variety of criteria. For example, the
quality and number of web sites your site is linked to.
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Web Marketing
• An overall strategy to use all elements of the
Web to increase the ability to be found on the
Web.
• Use the idiosyncrasies of Search Engine
algorithms.
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Web Marketing Strategies
• Search Engine Optimization
• Pay Per Click
• Local Search Visibility
• Email
• Facebook
• Twitter
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Search Engine Optimization
• Enhancing your website rankings in search
engines is important because most people do not
go beyond page 2.
• SEO tries to get your website ranked high in a
natural or "organic“ way.
• Search Engine rankings are earned and not paid.
• Natural search ranking is a sign of credibility to
consumers.
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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• There are about 36 elements that search engines
look for when visiting a site.
• How you would search for yourself?
• Test key words in your search for practices like
yours and see what happens.
• SEO is constantly changing.
• It is an art as well as a science.
• There are no guarantees.
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SEO Key Factors
• How long your domain has been in existence.
• With respect to renewal terms of the domain
name, the longer the better.
• Number of external Links.
• Word Density
• Key words
• Meta Tags
• Key Word Volume
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Keywords
• Keywords are the words or phrases in the content
of your website that someone is most likely to use
when searching for your online business or
website.
• For Example: Web site name, company name, or
other related terms. (Keywords should be separated by
a comma. )
• You should limit keywords to 10-15 terms.
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Keyword list
• Should be unique for each Web page and
include words or phrases found throughout the
page content, title tag, headings, attributes, and
link text.
• If you have words and phrases that occur often,
rearrange the order on each page helps to keep
each tag unique.
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Keyword Test
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Pay Per Click
• Getting your website to appear in the paid ad
spots is accomplished by developing a Pay Per
Click advertising campaign
• Only important if you do cosmetic procedures.
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Local Search Visibility
• Is a quick and easy way to get your business listed in
local directories such as Google® Maps and Yahoo!®
Local.
• You submit your web to local directories like:
CitySearch.com
• Island Internists is located in Staten Island
• Have a physical address and phone number within an
<address> tag at least on your contact page and one
other page; the best option would be the homepage. By
far the best option is to have your address on all pages of
your site.
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Email
• The use of email for marketing is different than Email for
communicating results.
• A recent poll showed that 52% of patients would be
willing to communicate with their physician via e-mail
regarding their care (Healthcare IT News, 3/24).
• Interactive
• Need consent by patient for the physician to initiate
contact.
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Caveats
• Communication with individual patients about
their healthcare is different than marketing to
large groups on the internet.
• Social media is not secure and should never be
used to speak to individual patients about their
health care.
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Social Media
• Very Powerful
• As evidenced by the events in Egypt and around the
world.
• Blogging
• Facebook
• Twitter
• YouTube
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Blogging
• A blog is a blend of the word ‘web’ and ‘log’.
• Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with
regular entries of commentary. A dynamic Blog helps
SEO ranking.
• You can correct or give out good medical information.
• Interactive
• As of February 16, 2011, there were over 156 million public
blogs in existence.
• Worldpress.com
• Google blogger.com, blogspot.com
• Can be part of the web site or on its own.
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Blog
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Facebook
• 50% of active users log on to Facebook in any given day.
• The average user has 130 friends.
• People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on
Facebook.
• Average user is connected to 80 community pages, groups
and events .
• CBS new reported that 51% of all Americans are on
Facebook.
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Facebook
• “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people
in your life.”
• Dynamic.
• A “Back and Forth” conversation.
• Add stuff you like for your patients.
• Add photos.
• Do not allow people to write on your wall.
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Twitter
• Twitter is an information network made up of
140-character messages called Tweets.
• It's a way to discover the latest news (“what’s
happening”) related to subjects you care about.
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Twitter
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Twitter
• Instantaneous
• Very dynamic
• Limited to 140 characters per message - an average
sentence.
• Good to get quick notices out.
• CHANGES IN OFFICE HOURS
• THE FLU VACCINE IS IN
• Engage patients and colleagues in the malpractice debate.
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Twitter
• Twitter’s best-known ad format, called Promoted
Tweets, looks like a regular tweet.
• The ads appear in some users’ individual accounts, tailored to
what Twitter knows about their personal interests, and when
users type specific keywords into the heavily-used search box
on Twitter.com.
• Twitter advertisers pay a fee every time a user selects an
ad, including clicking on a link or “retweeting” the
message to the followers of his or her own Twitter
account.
• http://twitter.com/johnmaese
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Twitter facts
• As of Sept 14, 2010
• Twitter has 175 million registered users.
• 95 Million tweets are written per day.
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YouTube
• Founded in February 2005
• YouTube allows billions of people to discover,
watch and share originally-created videos.
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YouTube
• A picture is worth a 1000 words
• Uptake can be incredible and info can go viral.
• “Charlie Bit My Finger” is the number one
amateur video on YouTube today.
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Measuring success!
• Hits or Eyeballs
• Local
• Global
• Periodically Google yourself.
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Summary
• Brand your practice.
• Understand and respect the power of the internet.
• There is no one strategy.
• Do what you are comfortable with.
• Listen to feedback.
• Monitor the web.
• Synergies from interconnectivity.
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SEO Information
• WWW.SEOAUDITS.COM
• WWW.BESTSEOLAB.COM
• Books - Dummy Series
• Contact:
john@johnmaese.md
johnmaese@gmail.com
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