How Are Healthcare Providers Using Video For Training & Communications? Written by Jeff Tormey on November 24, 2022. Posted in Convert. Video is quickly becoming a vital part of the healthcare landscape. From patient care to training and communications, video is being used innovatively to improve patient outcomes and provider efficiency. For example, animated explainer videos educate patients on healthcare treatments, operations, and other procedures. This type of content can easily explain complex topics in a visual format that engages patients and helps them understand their options. Read more: Animated Explainer Videos for Healthcare Businesses: How They Benefit and Examples. There are many benefits and methods to using video for healthcare communications. Here are just a few: 1. Patient Education Patients must understand their diagnosis and treatment options before making an informed decision. Healthcare providers are using video to explain complex medical topics better than traditional methods like pamphlets or verbal explanations. For example, healthcare centers for chronic illnesses like epilepsy, diabetes, and cancer use videos to explain their conditions and treatment options. Patients often feel more comfortable expressing their concerns when a video is used instead of a traditional verbal explanation. 2. Broadcast Public Events, Training, and Meetings Healthcare providers can use video to broadcast public events and training to their staff or the general public. This is especially useful for healthcare organizations that need access to a large physical space or venue for such events. For example, patient awareness campaigns can be hosted on video streaming platforms so more people can participate. Similarly, hospital conferences and meetings can be broadcasted to a broader audience. Not only does this help to spread awareness about the events, but it also helps healthcare providers reach out to more people for their training and public events. This can increase engagement with staff members and those interested in learning more about medical topics or receiving healthcare-related advice. Additionally, video streaming allows for remote attendance at events and meetings, so individuals from other areas or countries can participate without having to travel to the physical location of the event. 3. Onboard and Train New Team Members Another great use for video in healthcare is to onboard new team members. For example, hospitals and doctors’ offices can use video to create an interactive onboarding program for new hires. Videos can be used to introduce the company culture, share best practices and policies, and walk through onboarding paperwork. This helps to ensure that all new team members understand their roles and get off on the right foot before they join the team. Additionally, video can be used for training current employees. Video is an engaging and effective way to share information about complex topics like medical coding and HIPAA compliance. Re-watching videos anytime also allow healthcare providers to review content quickly when needed. Read more: How Video Marketing Can Influence The Future Of Healthcare 4. Tips for Appointment and Procedure Videos Creating appointment and procedure videos can be a great way to improve the patient experience. For example, many healthcare providers are creating short, instructional videos for new patients unfamiliar with medical procedures or treatments. These videos can help patients better understand what to expect from their appointments or procedures. If you want the best healthcare videos for your team and patient engagement, contact Sequence Health. Our expert team of healthcare lead generation understands the importance of professional video production for healthcare providers, giving you the most compelling content to increase patient engagement and staff training.
How to Choose a Healthcare Advertising Agency Written by Jeff Tormey on April 24, 2021. Posted in Convert. It is an inevitable stage in the growth of every practice, the crossroads that propels you to build key partnerships. The choice is to offer substandard service or to get professionals to do it. Customer relationship management is usually one of the first areas that require outsourcing to skilled partners. One such vital partnership is the medical call center service under the umbrella of solutions healthcare advertising companies offer. Tips for Selecting a Healthcare Advertising Company Align Your Goals With Their Strategies Healthcare advertising is more than designing paid ads. The marketing agency you choose should understand the unique requirements of your business. Communicate your marketing goals and how they feed into the overall vision of the business. Ask the prospective advertising agency how they would go about meeting these goals. Industry Experience The healthcare industry is highly regulated and held to a different set of standards than other businesses since it deals with human life. Your agency of choice should these regulations and how they affect marketing strategies and the patient engagement solutions they offer. Strong Measure of Success Advertising agencies will likely have extremely attractive portfolios and websites. This is not enough. You need to ask tough questions about the success of these beautiful portfolio components. What were their goals vis a vis the results they achieved for each client or project? Budget, Billing, and Payments The serious money talk goes beyond how the agency’s work plan will execute the vision without exceeding budget. The right advertising partner will also plan for a high return on your investment. Before you even schedule a meeting to discuss figures, you should have a clear picture of the budget available in your practice, your cash flow situation, and whether your business can afford this new investment. Financial surprises can spell doom for your new business partnership. Make sure you’re all on the same page about billing cycles, fees, retainers, extra charges, and expense approvals. Read more: The Importance Of EMR In Medical Billing Diverse Marketing Specializations Medical online marketing today is different and dynamic. It involves an intuitive mix of paid advertising, content marketing, and organic reach tools such as medical websites and medical patient portals. The advertising agency you choose needs to bring a variety of marketing specialties to the table so that your marketing strategy is well-rounded. If your practice needs to partner with a healthcare advertising agency offering medical call center services, contact us today.
How To Come Up With A Bariatric Marketing Strategy & Grow Your Practice Written by Jeff Tormey on February 17, 2021. Posted in Convert. If you run a bariatric surgery clinic, you may be wondering how you can grow your marketing efforts to reach more potential surgery prospects. Although bariatric surgery is becoming more popular as more people learn about its benefits, getting yourself in front of those people requires an understanding of how to market your practice online. In this article, you will learn about different ways you can grow your bariatric clinic using these tips for bariatric marketing strategy. Tips for Bariatric Marketing Strategy Be where your prospects are. Many people are searching for information about bariatric surgery on Google and other search engines. If you can’t easily be found on Google or Bing, then you are missing out on a lot of potential patients! Not only that, but your prospects also spend a lot of time on social media, often looking at potential weight loss methods. Using SEO for bariatric clinics can help your practice become more visible on the search engines. PPC for bariatric clinics is a great way to show your offer directly to those who are ready to schedule a consultation. Social media marketing can help you grow your brand. By being where your prospects are, you are more likely to be seen by the people who would benefit from bariatric surgery. Educate your prospects. Bariatric surgery is the most effective way for obese patients to lose weight and keep it off. Despite this, only about 1% of eligible prospects actually go through with surgery. There are plenty of reasons for this, but it’s often due to what they don’t know. For example, many people aren’t aware that bariatric surgery is covered by most insurance plans. You can educate them on how insurance can help pay for their surgery. Learn more about insurance verification services companies! So how do you educate your prospects? You need the content. Creating articles and videos on important bariatric surgery topics is a great way for you to grow your content base, position your practice as an authority in the space, and educate prospects to get them more comfortable with the commitment of bariatric surgery. Ask for reviews from patients. Most bariatric surgery clinics live and die by their before and after photos. While these are powerful tools to convince people to schedule a consultation, they’re not going to be sufficient because nearly every bariatric clinic has these! In addition to getting before and afters, you want to ask your patients to leave reviews on sites such as Yelp, Google, and Facebook. These reviews are highly trusted and bariatric surgery is a big commitment. People don’t just wanna see how much weight they can lose, they want to know how compassionate the surgeons are and how much support they get during their journey. By asking for reviews from your patients, you can show the world what sets your practice apart from the others. Sequence Health offers patient engagement solutions and medical online marketing services for medical practices, hospitals, and healthcare businesses of all types.
How To Get More Patients To Your Practice Without Burning Money Written by Jeff Tormey on February 14, 2021. Posted in Convert. Getting patients to come to your practice is a key aspect of running one. After all, medical practices are still businesses and in order to stay afloat, they need to maintain sufficient patient volumes. As a result, medical marketing strategies are super important for any practice, regardless of specialty or general practice of medicine. Of course, healthcare advertising can be expensive and not all practices have room in their budget to grow their ad spend. In this article, you will learn about how you can get more patients to your practice without breaking the bank. Tips For Attracting More Patients On a Budget Understand Your Patient Base There are several things you need to understand about your patients before you’re able to effectively grow. The first is to understand the areas in which you’re lacking. Patient satisfaction surveys can help you uncover your practice’s weak points. Another thing you need to understand is the demography of your patient base. Answer the following questions: How old are they on average? what races and ethnicities are present what languages are spoken how far does a patient have to travel to reach your office How educated are they? What’s the average and median income? Build Relationships With Referring Practices Most practices get patients through referrals, and these referrals come from building good relationships with primary care providers and other non-specialists. Some tips on building good relationships with referring practices: Make sure referred patients have a wonderful experience. Patients see their primary care provider relatively often and have a relationship with them, and their word will be taken seriously by the physician. Create a direct line of contact between your practice and practices that refer patients to you. This makes it easier to share information. Let the referring practice know of treatment and other notes promptly after the treatment has been provided. Make Your Online Presence Strong A strong online presence is absolutely paramount in the digital age. It’s not as simple as just having a website and some social media accounts. A strong online presence means that patients are able to find you, online communities know about you, and your website is easy to use by anyone no matter what device they use. Investing in healthcare SEO is one of the best ways to build a strong web presence. Doing so usually involves working with a healthcare SEO company, but it also means creating content for people to read or watch online. You also want to make sure that your practice is actively participating on social media. By having a staff member regularly interact on social media on behalf of the practice, your practice will be seen by more people in the community. Grow Your Reach In The Community In addition to a strong social media presence, you also want to make a concerted effort to be a part of the community that you serve. Many physicians are not native to the community they work in and have not had the opportunity to become well known there. One important part of growing your reach in the community is to be a part of community-held events. A good way to do this is to sponsor and attend events held by groups such as the chamber of commerce or community service groups. All in all, growing your practice does not have to be expensive or complicated. By being there for your patients and providing an excellent experience while also making it easy for them to find you, you can see sustained patient growth over time.
How to Fine Tune Your Marketing for Healthcare Businesses in 2021 Written by Jeff Tormey on February 1, 2021. Posted in Convert. Marketing for healthcare businesses is not quite the same as marketing for other businesses. There are different considerations, such as HIPAA compliance, and marketing healthcare services requires slightly different tactics than marketing a store or a professional service. But marketing is still important for medical practices and other healthcare businesses, and there are things you’ll need to do in order to fine-tune your medical marketing strategies. 4 Steps to Optimizing Your Medical Marketing Strategies Use past data to figure out what works. If your business is brand new, you won’t have access to historical internal data. But, if your business has been operating, you can use what you’ve done to help figure out where your marketing dollars should go in the future. Answer the following questions: What marketing strategies did we invest in last year? Did we see growth in the following KPIs: Patient volumes Patient values Overall revenue Overall profit What strategies worked the best, based on the data we have? If you don’t have data, or your business is brand new, your priority should be to make sure that you are able to collect that data this year. Companies like Sequence Health can help you collect and analyze patient engagement data in a HIPAA-compliant way. Brainstorm new ideas. At this stage, what you want to do is figure out what new marketing strategies could be used to generate new patient leads. Healthcare advertising, medical SEO, social media marketing, traditional marketing strategies such as radio or news… there’s a lot that can be done! But not all of these ideas will be equally viable. Take insights from people in your company who work patient-facing roles and who are intimately familiar with the initial stages of patient onboarding. You’ll also want to use the insights from people who work with the website, the social media, and anything else related to your practice’s online presence. Assess the ideas and come up with a strategy for each viable one. Not all ideas will be right for this year. You will have likely settled on a few strategies that are viable for your practice. Not only that, but you’ll also have the original strategies that you’ve been using that have worked thus far. Now, it’s time to come up with a strategy and an action plan for these initiatives. You’ll want to come up with the following: Tasks required Team members & their responsibilities Timeframe Costs involved Ideal outcomes Set SMART goals for these strategies. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. The goals you choose should be based on KPIs that directly contribute to the bottom line. Of course, not all strategies will work in the end. You will want to assess the results at the end of your chosen timeframe and decide whether or not it’s worth pursuing in the future.
How To Generate a Google Reviews Link For Your Medical Practice Written by Jeff Tormey on January 29, 2021. Posted in Convert. Online reviews have become extremely important for all types of businesses. It’s been shown that people trust online reviews more than they trust the copy on your website. They want to read about a real experience that someone actually had and is willing to share. Not only that, but people’s attention is driven more toward reading negative reviews than positive ones. What this means is that it’s paramount to make sure that people who have a good experience with you also talk about said experience. One easy way to do that is to create a Google Reviews link for your medical practice. How To Create a Google Reviews Link for Local Doctor Reviews This process is a very simple one and only takes a few minutes. It requires you to have your business already on Google My Business. If you don’t have a Google My Business account, simply register for one and follow the directions: How to Set Up A Google My Business Account Once you’ve confirmed that your business is visible on Google, just follow these steps: Go to Google Places API Type in your business’s name and location Get the Place ID for your medical practice Now that you have your Place ID, all you have to do is append the ID to the following link: https://search.google.com/local/writereview?placeid=your place_id You can put this link in automated emails, text messages, or on your website to make it easier for people to write a review. The Importance of Google Doctor Reviews People who are searching for medical services online are looking to see how good of an experience patients have had. Patients will often provide their own experiences by dropping a Google review. However, people who do review on their own are rare and often need to be reminded to do so. People are likely to give a review if they’ve either (1) had an amazing experience and would absolutely go again, or (2) had a bad experience and want to warn others to stay far away from that doctor. Both are ways that patients help other prospective patients make decisions about who to see for their medical issues. It stands to reason, then, that a practice that has an abundance of good reviews and a dearth of bad ones would be more likely to get new business. Of course, not all reviews are relevant. Some people may write reviews based on things that aren’t in your control, such as insurance billing issues or isolated incidents. For this reason, you may want to invest in reputation management services. These companies will not only dispute and respond to negative reviews, but they will also help you get real positive reviews from your clients by giving you the tools needed to request these reviews. Read more: Google Business Profile: What It Is and Why You Need It One bad review can outshine several good ones, but it’s important for a practice (or any business) to maintain a high ratio of good reviews to bad ones. This shows prospective patients that bad experiences are few and far between. Sequence Health provides healthcare engagement solutions. They include healthcare marketing services, healthcare call centers to take a load off of your staff, and access to a powerful healthcare CRM that syncs with your program’s EMR and website. Learn about Sequence Health’s vast array of patient engagement solutions!
How to Fine Tune Your Marketing for Healthcare Businesses in 2021 Written by Jeff Tormey on January 25, 2021. Posted in Convert. Marketing for healthcare businesses is not quite the same as marketing for other businesses. There are different considerations, such as HIPAA compliance, and marketing healthcare services requires slightly different tactics than marketing a store or a professional service. But marketing is still important for medical practices and other healthcare businesses, and there are things you’ll need to do in order to fine-tune your medical marketing strategies. 4 Steps to Optimizing Your Medical Marketing Strategies Use past data to figure out what works. If your business is brand new, you won’t have access to historical internal data. But, if your business has been operating, you can use what you’ve done to help figure out where your marketing dollars should go in the future. Answer the following questions: What marketing strategies did we invest in last year?Did we see growth in the following KPIs:Patient volumesPatient valuesOverall revenueOverall profitWhat strategies worked the best, based on the data we have? If you don’t have data, or your business is brand new, your priority should be to make sure that you are able to collect that data this year. Companies like Sequence Health can help you collect and analyze patient engagement data in a HIPAA-compliant way. Brainstorm new ideas. At this stage, what you want to do is figure out what new marketing strategies could be used to generate new patient leads. Healthcare advertising, medical SEO, social media marketing, traditional marketing strategies such as radio or news… there’s a lot that can be done! But not all of these ideas will be equally viable. Take insights from people in your company who work patient-facing roles and who are intimately familiar with the initial stages of patient onboarding. You’ll also want to use the insights from people who work with the website, the social media, and anything else related to your practice’s online presence. Assess the ideas and come up with a strategy for each viable one. Not all ideas will be right for this year. You will have likely settled on a few strategies that are viable for your practice. Not only that, but you’ll also have the original strategies that you’ve been using that have worked thus far. Now, it’s time to come up with a strategy and an action plan for these initiatives. You’ll want to come up with the following: Tasks requiredTeam members & their responsibilitiesTimeframeCosts involvedIdeal outcomes Set SMART goals for these strategies. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. The goals you choose should be based on KPIs that directly contribute to the bottom line. Of course, not all strategies will work in the end. You will want to assess the results at the end of your chosen timeframe and decide whether or not it’s worth pursuing in the future.
Healthcare Advertising Strategies for Doctors & Physicians in 2021 Written by Jeff Tormey on January 22, 2021. Posted in Convert. 2020 is now over, but the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage on. There is an end in sight, but despite this, many things have changed. Telehealth has become more accessible (and more expected), more people are scheduling appointments via the Internet, and patient portals have become an absolute must. Online marketing for doctors has been an important investment for decades now, but it’s more important now than ever. So how can healthcare advertising fit into hospital marketing strategies? Let’s find out. What is Online Healthcare Advertising? Online advertising is exactly what it sounds like: purchasing ad space on an Internet platform to be seen by people who are browsing that particular website or group of websites. The most popular platforms for online healthcare advertising are Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, and Bing. There are far more advertising options for doctors, but our focus will be on certain categories of online advertising platforms. What Are Some Healthcare Advertising Strategies for 2021? Search engine advertising Search engine advertising is the most powerful form of advertising there is for a healthcare business. When you’re advertising on a search engine, you’re showing your ad to people who are specifically looking for you. This is powerful because you’re already advertising to hot leads! You can buy search engine ads through Google, Bing, and Yahoo, but Google Ads are the most popular. Read more: Guide to Improve SEO & PPC For Doctors in 2021 Social media advertising Social media advertising is when you purchase ad space on a social media platform. Facebook ads are the most common, because you can use Facebook ads to buy ads on Instagram and Messenger. There are also Reddit ads, Twitter ads, LinkedIn ads, and Snapchat ads that you can use. Social media advertising is powerful because of how well you can target a specific prospect. The trouble is that you have to be careful about advertising specific services to specific people as it could constitute a HIPAA violation. Make sure you understand HIPAA’s rules on using patient data! Healthcare video advertising Video advertising, usually done on Youtube, uses video ads to get eyeballs. The benefit of video advertising is that you’re able to use the medium to not only get attention, but keep someone’s attention as well. Not only that, but Youtube (run by Google) allows you to only show your ad to people in a certain area. Video is a highly engaging medium, and Sequence Health has another article on healthcare video marketing that you can check out here. Should I Hire A Medical Advertising Agency? It’s entirely up to you whether you want to hire a medical advertising agency. The biggest benefit of hiring one is that you will not need to have your own staff working on the advertising. However, you do surrender some control. Medical advertising agencies have expertise in online marketing that can take years for a staff member to develop, and the cost of hiring a medical advertising agency is typically cheaper than it would be to have a full-time salaried digital marketer in house. Sequence Health provides patient engagement solutions as well as medical digital marketing services all across the USA.
Why Medical SEO Is A Game Changer for Doctors Written by Jeff Tormey on January 20, 2021. Posted in Convert. If you run a medical practice, you might have found that getting people to find you is not as easy as you first thought. You might have a website, a GoogleMyBusiness profile, and some social media pages, but people who are searching for you still can’t find you! This is where medical SEO comes in. With medical SEO, your business becomes more visible to people who are looking for you on search engines like Google. So what is medical SEO, and why is it so important? What Is Medical SEO? SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it’s the process by which a website is optimized in order to be more easily found on search engines. There are many advantages of SEO for doctors, including increased website traffic, greater brand recognition, and higher patient volumes. There are several aspects to medical SEO, such as content creation, on-page code and content optimization, link building, and reputation management. Medical SEO services are offered by companies like Sequence Health, who also provides healthcare advertising and medical digital marketing solutions to help grow medical practices. What Are The Benefits of Medical SEO for Practices? Medical SEO is highly beneficial for one key reason: with SEO, you can get a much higher rank on the search engines. You may notice that when you Google a certain search term, some results are shown before others. You may also notice that you’re most likely to click on websites that are on the first page of the search engines. The goal of SEO is to have your website content hit that front page for the search term that you want. Here’s an example to illustrate the point. If you Google “chiropractic clinic near me”, you will see a variety of results (including results from advertisements and from Google Maps). People who are searching for that term are likely going to stay on the first page, and any chiropractic clinic that is on the first page is more likely to be seen by people who are searching for them. This visibility leads to a lot of other benefits. People who are searching for your desired search term are more likely to find out about your practice. As a result, people are more likely to visit your website and, ultimately, book an appointment with you. Without medical SEO, you won’t be able to take advantage of the vast number of people searching for practices in your area. Sequence Health provides medical SEO and patient engagement solutions for practices and hospitals all over the USA.
Is SEO Still Important In The Healthcare Industry? Written by Jeff Tormey on July 6, 2020. Posted in Convert. It’s no secret that a user-friendly website will help you generate new business for your practice. But how do you make a user-friendly website? Here are 5 tips to making a user-friendly website for a medical practice. SEO is seen as an old and outdated tactic, with some even claiming that SEO is “dead”. But is SEO truly dead for businesses in the healthcare industry? Let’s find out. Is SEO Still Important in The Healthcare Industry? Let’s get this straight once and for all: is SEO still important in the healthcare industry? The answer is YES. SEO is an important part of any business’s marketing efforts. Making sure that your practice’s website ranks for the keywords that prospective patients are searching for is an important part of making sure that your practice is found by those patients! If you don’t rank, you won’t be found on the search engines! The reason why some argue that SEO is dead is because it’s not nearly as easy as it used to be. Good SEO requires effort, and this effort needs to be focused on good website experiences, excellent content, quality backlinks from authoritative sites, and a website optimized for certain keywords. So why is SEO so important for healthcare businesses? Why SEO Is Important for Healthcare Businesses Visibility If you’re not doing any SEO, then chances are nobody’s finding you through the search engines. You might be spending a lot of money on paid ads, but if all your traffic is coming from ads, you’re missing out on a key segment of users who aren’t seeing your ads at all! By focusing on SEO for keywords that are relevant to your services, more people will see your practice. This increases overall visibility, and, if you’re focusing on local SEO, more people in your area will know who you are, where you are, and what you do. Authority Focusing on SEO means that you will be able to rise in rankings for important search terms. When you hit the top spot, you’ll be seen as the most important, most relevant, and possibly the best choice. If, for example, you offer bariatric surgery in Dallas, and you rank #1 for bariatric surgery in Dallas, people in Dallas who are searching you are most likely to check out your website because you appeared first. Free Traffic Even though investing in SEO efforts may not be free, the marginal cost of traffic generated from SEO is $0. That means, as you rise up the rankings for a keyword, you get more and more free traffic. The top spot gets the most traffic, and almost all of the traffic goes to people on the front page. Best of all, if a keyword gets more searches in any given month, you don’t pay to get that traffic. That traffic is yours. For this reason, SEO is still important in the healthcare industry, and without investing in it, you would miss out greatly!