New Patient Marketing Resource Site For Health Care Professionals

As practice owners ponder about what is the most effective way of increasing new patients, they often miss a very important point.

If there is not enough business into your door, then there are simply not enough people knowing about your business — no matter how little or much marketing you claim to have done.

‘Bringing the business to the people’ does not apply just to location. It means to do everything you can to get your goodwill and expert messages to many many people who will eventually seek you for your services.

But to do that, you have to use any and all marketing tools to reach the new patients you want to reach consistently by being in front of them through marketing all the time (stay in their sight) and thus staying in their mind.
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Dear Dr Charles,

I have received your question about attracting new patients without diminishing your professional image. You are concerned about the ‘proper’ dental marketing image presented of your dental office.

You are one of the many doctors who are concerned about this issue and so I thought I give you a full reply on the issue of maintenance of a professional image in marketing.

Most dentist and also many other professions from all walks of life (plastic surgeons top this list) believe that a beautiful, elegant, high tech, high class, professional marketing piece, - be it a flyer, a postcard, a letter and definitely a web site, translates into high class patients and into branding themselves as a high class or professional dentist.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

First of all what is pretty is pretty ONLY in the eye of the beholder. This applies to elegant, smooth, beautiful and even high tech.

It specifically applies to the overused term “professional”.

Let’s look at what that means.
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We have disabled our Facebook and Twitter accounts due to recent revelation that Facebook has been sharing and selling users’ information with other entities, without informing the public.

Though we have existing followers in our social media accounts, we have decided to close the door on further exploitation of privacy issues.

Social media is a great marketing tool.

However social media has never been and will never be restricted to Facebook or Twitter.

As we use other available methods and tools to communicate with our audience, we hope to share more new business and marketing strategies and ideas with you better and faster.

You can get our latest posts by giving us your name and your email in the comments section, or subscribing to our RSS feeds, we can deliver the latest post right to your email box or computer.

We look forward to an open and yet more trusted experience with you.

Helmut Flasch

P.S: There are many automated medical and dental marketing online tools available for a health care professional. I am not talking about having a nice medical or dental web design or having the most fancy state-of-the-art medical and dentist website design with all the bells and whistles.

It is not about just focusing on a medical or dental website marketing campaign, it is using the necessary tools to engage in an all-out effective dental internet marketing strategy where by your messages can go viral with the help of other web sites.

Once in a while, we come across stories that are appropriate to not just business success but also appropriate to life. Here is a story which was told to me by a friend:

“Two men were stranded in the open sea when their boat was overturned by a huge wave. Both were hanging on to their life vests, there was no help and there was no sign of land nearby.

The first man was frantic and said, “I am going to die! I am going to die!”

The second man said, “Let’s start swimming and maybe we will meet land by accident”

The first man continued his ranting, “But there is no guarantee that we will find land!!”

The second man said, “Even though there is no guarantee of success, at least we have a chance at survival.”

The first man was too scared to move. Hopelessness has consumed him so much that he has already resigned that he could do nothing.

The second man started swimming away. Many grueling hours later, he spotted land and got to safety.

The first man waited for someone to help him and by the time the rescue team went out to find him, he had disappeared.”

What is the moral of the story?
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A number of medical and dental practice management consultants have missed a very vital part of growing a practice. If a dentist only knows how to rely on internal marketing  for new patients, or only uses traditional dental advertising tools, he will find that his outlay of efforts will not bring in the beans that he is expecting.

Look at it this way for a moment:

• You do not build your own road but use the roads which are already built.

 

• Even if you are a car mechanic, and some real good engineer, you do not build your own car, but you have it built.

 

• When traveling you only put yourself on a bus/train/airplane/ship etc. that has pre-existing routes to your destination, you do not build a new vehicle and create a new route.

So why the dickens would you want to build your own marketing avenues?

Why not put your message on channels and media that are already in existence and which will carry your message for free or at the very least with very, very little money?

Here are a few examples on how to have other people and companies and organizations distribute your message for free or for little.
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Dental internet marketing and dental social media marketing have become more important for dentists who want to attract new patients without using traditonal advertising. How does a dentist capture his audience on the net without expensive search engine optimization or pay-per-click?

The boy in this video within a short period of time has become an internet sensation with his after-seeing-the-dentist reactions and has since been interviewed on CNN and the video has appeared on the list of top 50 internet videos on Times magazine.

This is the phenomenon of the vast acceptance of a message that is not trying to sell something, not trying to show that someone is an ‘expert’ etc.

This is just pure family fun.

So, as good students of marketing, what can we learn from this?

What kind of messages are you putting out in your marketing?

Are your current messages saying things like “Dr XYZ has 10 years of experience” or “We have state-of-the-art equipment” etc?
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As I have consulted business owners and dentists on effective dental web marketing strategies to help one’s presence on the internet, I have found that there are too much misguided focus on having to have a nice medical or dental website design. Doctors then spend lots more money on medical and dental internet marketing hoping to be picked up by Google or Yahoo under different keywords.

Those hopes of being found easily on Google under all kinds of keywords will never come true because your single web site is just NOT enough for Google, Yahoo and Bing to only feature your keywords and to display your one web site, and not considering your competitors’.

Plus Google will never ‘favor’ a site versus another. They have a strict criteria to decide which web sites get featured in the 10 spots of the 1st page and these 10 positions can change from day to day, as one web site might meet their criteria more than other sites and thus climb to the 1st page whereas another site might lose its position from the first 10 spots.

In conclusion, your single stand alone web site will never get you all the traffic you could get.

Even Microsoft’s main site does not come up under all software related keywords. If you Google “Office Software”, Microsoft’s web site does come up on the 1st page (among plenty of other competitors as well).

But type in “word processing software” and Microsoft’s site disappears from the 1st page.

It is already quite an accomplishment to many web site owners to appear on the 1st page of Google under their profession, such as a dentist in XYZ city showing up on the 1st page when someone types in “XYZ City Dentist”.

But how about if you could also appear when someone types in “XYZ City Teeth Whitening” or “XYZ City Dental Implants” ?
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Medical and dental internet marketing have been considered “not so important” by health care professionals until recent years where those who have spent time and energy constantly on learning about the high tech marketing tools have literally left their competitors in the dust. Unfortunately, medical and dental website marketing strategies are still a mystery to most.  

One of the common questions my staff and I got asked frequently regarding appearing on top rankings in Google is this:  ”How do I make my website visible through Google?” or “Why is my competitor’s site on the 1st page and mine is not?”

If you do not know the rules of the search engine game, you will always wonder why your site is not coming up on the 1st page of Google under ALL keywords and at the end, after spending lots of money and time on it with little returns, you might simply just tell yourself that there are NO patients/customers that you could get from the internet.

I just spoke with one of my newer clients, a dentist in Los Angeles, who has played the dental SEO marketing (dental search engine marketing) game for about 10 years now ( even before he became our client).

He is getting 20 new patients from the internet every month! He is getting those results because he knows about the good and bad practices of dental website marketing strategies and have gone through them in the last 10 years.

He signed up with our service because he would still like to get even more!

For doctors and business men out there who want to see more patients coming in from the internet, don’t ignore the rules.

Roll up your sleeve and learn about the rules of the game — you will have a higher chance of winning!

Thankfully, many technologies exist to cut down the amount of work you need to do.

Here is a video from Matt Cutts, an engineer from Google on a few criteria which would help Google to position you well:

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