"Find out why social media medical practice
marketing may not be for any physician when the
respondent lives over 50 miles away from your office."
Don’t doubt it for a second! We are living in a world where social interaction in one way or another affects our personal lives, our businesses, and the future of our careers.
The wildfire of social marketing has invaded the world so rapidly like nobody has anything else to do but “tweet” their private word of mouth thoughts into the universal digital news wire, that it has become a focus of attention for everyone around the world.
In a split second, an unknown replicant can type some thoughts into their computer and the world can read it a minute later. It’s another technological miracle that, from a business standpoint, can produce profits. And, for decaying medical practices, it is a tool that is riding the wave of
public sentiment.
As our Vice President, among others, has said, “let’s use this uncontrolled environmental unrest
to our advantage.”
Methods for using social networking in your medical practice...
In case you haven’t noticed, what used to be simple fun and social chatter on social networks Twitter, Facebook, My Space, LinkedIn, and many other social networks sites on the Internet, is now a significant and productive platform for building businesses of almost any type.
The process has evolved from idle communication to a business building model. The proof of the model as a recruitment strategy for attracting customers is no longer questioned.
It works because of the age old “familiarity principle.” When you get to know someone, you trust them. When you trust them, you buy into what they are saying, selling, advocating, predicting, advising, or offering in exchange for being friends.
Are people so desperate for friendship that they are willing to sacrifice their privacy for the sake of online communications? From a business point of view, these are not lifetime value customers that all profitable businesses urgently need.
Physicians and all other health care providers have an opportunity to tap into this recruitment system (successful businesses are built on business systems). For medical offices, it’s a means of attracting new patients, retaining present patients, and gathering back previously lost patients...
if done appropriately.
However, the effort requires a full time person assigned to the task of posting messages day after day to accomplish recruiting significant numbers of patients. For commercial businesses the process may become lucrative. For professional offices... it's not.
You can apply these social marketing strategies in your medical office, in the public arena, and in the Internet sphere. I do believe, and need to alert you, that this wave of social dependency is presently in its birthing stages. Creative minds will continue to open new opportunities in this communication medium that no one has thought of yet. Like taking on a strong position about censoring posts for political and racial purposes.
With the rapid technological expansion, you will probably discover many new methods for using social media for building your medical practice. You can try it and make your own evaluation whether it's worth the time, money and effort.
Practical applications of social marketing for your medical office that deserve far more of your attention...
- Patient bulletin board
One of the most boring areas patients have to tolerate is the reception area or waiting room. Patients rarely go directly from the check-in counter to the exam room, so a productive place to put up a bulletin board for patients is in the reception area. It’s the perfect place for medical educational materials as well. Patients will rarely pick up educational information on their way out of the office, but they will read and learn while waiting.
Magazines, outdated often, have been the traditional way to occupy patients' minds while they are waiting to see the medical provider. It’s difficult to provide a magazine or newspaper that is interesting enough for the majority of patients to pick up and read. Patients have medical thoughts on their minds in that environment and you need to provide them materials for that need and desire.
Patients are far more likely to pay attention to and read literature about healthcare and medical problems, especially when they know they probably won’t run into the opportunity to have access to those informational products anywhere else, at least without having to pay for them.
A four-by-six-foot cork bulletin board with a lockable glass door in the waiting room area should be easily manageable for most medical offices.
If you decide to have one, someone has to be responsible for keeping fresh materials posted there or don’t have one. An outdated bulletin board downgrades the perception of your office. I visit a medical clinic a couple of times a year and can’t help but notice that 95% of the posted materials never change on their bulletin board.
The lockable cabinet door prevents predators from scavenging the posted items that irritate them, or they are too lazy to ask the receptionist to make a copy for them to take home. Also, small children are attracted to the push pins, or clips, that hold the items on the bulletin board (a safety and liability issue), but we shouldn’t call them predators… right? Hence, the use of a glass lockable cabinet door.
The bulletin board is strictly for your patient’s benefit, but secondarily for your benefit as well. The purpose is to promote your medical practice by the placement of items there that educate patients on the services you provide that other doctors don’t provide, or that you are better at than they are.
And, items that demonstrate to patients that you care about them, you understand their medical problems, are attuned to their issues with the health care problems and are eager to ease the pain of what patients have to tolerate from the health care system. Use your creative mind to make it a focal point for patients. It is a marketing tactic of value.
I recently read about a physician who used a very effective medical practice marketing strategy using his bulletin board. He would invite his patients to tell him about what things they are doing in the community that is exemplary, their awards and accomplishments, and their secrets for success and happiness.
He would then take clips about that from the newspaper or write up a summary of what the patient has done, added a photo of the patient, and had a corner of the bulletin board marked off specifically for featuring one of his patients each week or month.
Recognition is an emotional factor that affects a person more and longer than most other accolades they receive. If you are a Nascar fan and watch every single winning driver’s actions in the winner’s circle after the race, then you know what I mean.
- Patient Health Newsletter
Because most patients now have access to and use computers, the best distribution format is by digital email. Not only is it free to send, at least at this time, but may reach more of your patients than by direct mail to their mailbox.
The first problem usually is they have to find the email and then have to read it at a time when they’re overwhelmed by dozens of other emails filling their screen yet to read and scan.
Surveys often show that printed hard copy health or medical newsletter is in more of a demand than an email newsletter for several reasons.
Literally, hundreds of real and spammed emails hit your computer weekly. Many are filtered out and the patient never sees them. Most are deleted after they are read leaving nothing in memory to think about again later, nor anything a patient is likely by word of mouth to tell someone else about later.
Printed newsletters sent to patients by direct mail (USPS), in my opinion, are much more effective for marketing your medical practice than email. It has very little competition for the mental attention of the patient so it will be read more intently.
When the newsletter is lying on the kitchen counter or your reading stand, it can be picked up and read cover to cover at a quiet convenient time or carried to work and read on the coffee break, or at lunchtime where others will latch on to it and read it as well.
Even neighbors visit their homes and pick up the local physician's newsletter they have on top of the pile of “items to read,” because they are curious, and their physician doesn’t have a newsletter for their patients. Can you see the value of the process?
The disadvantages of a print version of your health newsletter are the cost of mailing, time spent on creating content for the newsletter, and keeping the news current. Last week’s news just doesn’t cut it. You can start with sending a medical newsletter once a month, never longer than one month. Sent every two weeks has much better results.
Then, when you get comfortable with the process and patients like what you write, you have the option of sending it every one to two weeks, never oftener than once a week. As a last resort, many online websites allow you to use their medical articles and information for free.
{Part 2 will cover social marketing outside of your medical office}
----Professional Probe----
"Are you pointing at me,
my pant leg, or social media
'time wasting' for physicians?"
When Facebook opened its doors, I signed up, thinking that it was a brilliant program to interrelate with other physicians somehow. And I haven't used Facebook since then except as a marketing platform to advertise my other businesses. I knew that becoming a frequent user of the Social Media would become a habit pattern that would be incompatible with practicing medicine. It was
true for me.
I also found it a disrupter of family activities too often to put up with. Having someone else doing it for you requires an extraordinary amount of trust, especially if its someone in your own medical office doing it for you. Revealing medical information on patients is a constant risk factor.
That's why newsletters and bulletin boards are very favorable for medical doctors to use. The information that's given out or displayed is all well controlled by the physician who knows the
rules of the game.
Articles © 2013-2022/CGG INVESTMENTS LLC. All rights reserved. #15 3-15-22
