Practice Marketing Revolution

How FarmVille Teaches You To Be A Better Marketer

If you have a Facebook page, you’ve probably had a friend’s FarmVille update streamed across your newsfeed or maybe you play FarmVille yourself. This popular online game boasts 85 million active accounts and has been advertising in real life (IRL) through a partnership with 7-11.

Today, I just "hid” a friend on my Facebook newsfeed. I like the guy and all but he was sending FarmVille updates 20 times a day - super annoying. I really don’t care how many virtual lettuce patches you just harvested or how many pigs you have.

However, it did make me think about how many social media posts/tweets are enough to reach our target patients ... or when does it feel like too much? You certainly don’t want your practice to be “that annoying Farmville guy.”

You have to know where your audience is, and where you need to reach them in the locations they like to be reached. If you are able to engage regularly with patients on Facebook, that is a great place to be. If you feel all alone in the Twitterverse, you may want to ask your patients what social networks they like, and meet them (and others like them) there.

As to how often you should reach your patients, that’s totally dependent on them – If I start to see people unfollowing, or not replying, I know to back off. The thing that makes social media different from all types of media before is the INTERACTION. Social media is not a platform for broadcast but of genuine interaction with others. Treat your social networks like you would a cocktail party. If you only talk about yourself, eventually, you will be talking TO yourself. If people stop conversing with you or "hide" your posts and updates, they will miss all the good stuff you have to say. I believe that in social media, you always want to UNDER-push than OVER-push.

How often do you interact with your patients? Let me know in the comments!

- Sarah

5 Easy Ways to Use the i-pad for Health Care Marketing

The i-pad has been on my mind a lot lately. Not just because I was just in the store playing with one, or in the first month they sold over 1 million units, but because I think they could be an excellent tool in health care marketing.

Let’s take a look at five ways you can spark interaction with your patient that increases engagement by using an i-pad.

1. Load it with before and after pictures, articles, and testimonials.
2. Make your social media pages available so patients can "check in" at your practice on social location sites (Gowalla, Foursquare, etc).
3. Create a referral program so patients can email an invitation from your practice to their friends while they are still in your office.
4. Show educational videos to your patients when explaining treatment or while they wait.
5. Present treatment using the i-pad to show mock ups, design, or function.

What am I missing? How would you use an i-pad in your practice?

Does your practice's online reputation matter?

Absolutely! It’s one of the first steps to earning trust and building a relationship with new patients. For most new patients, a google search of your practice is their first impression. In fact, a recent Pew Research Center Project study showed that 44% of online adults say they have searched online for information about someone whose care or services they seek in a professional provider, like a doctor, dentist, or chiropractor.

If you haven’t recently done a search for your practice, yourself, or the names of your key staff or care givers, now might be a good time to do it.

Here's what to do:

* Start your search with Google, Bing, and Yahoo, yelp.com, and Angie's List.

* Document sentiment, practice brand mentions, and patient concerns

* Share feed back with your team

* Decide follow up strategy as needed

You can also use some of these free tools to search for your practice and find real time results in social networks, blogs, and forums.

Remember, its often the patients who never give you feedback that can be the most vocal online. Take some to see what your current reputation is and identify areas for improvement.

- Sarah

Defining Your Practice Brand Through Social Media Profiles

I sat down with an awesome dentist last week for a coffee and a chat about marketing. He’s getting started with a social media strategy and like most of us, has a lot of questions on how to balance his personal life and practice brand. We talked about the importance of great, friendly looking headshots and the ongoing WOW experience that we try to create for patients within the practice.

We also talked about creating our social media profiles and I want to share a few of those ideas with you here today.

Like a first impression at your front desk, your username and profile can speak volumes about your practice. Many people, (myself included at one time), view creating an online profile as something to check off the “to do” list without stopping to think of the impact it will have on their business and brand.

Your profile or bios provide windows that let people know how you want to be viewed and insight to your core values and the values of your practice. Your profile should let people get to know you before they step foot in your office or call to book an appointment. Your profile helps you build rapport with existing patients, and can attract people to you who are looking for the services and care you offer.

Before you get started with social media, take some time to think about your personal brand and the brand of your practice. Be yourself, be helpful, and if need be, make multiple accounts for your practice and yourself.

Need some help choosing the best profile photo for you? Let the world choose your photo!

Twenty-somethings Prefer Texting to Calling

“I’m not trying to cause a big sensation, I’m just talkin’ bout my generation.” – The Who

Cell-phone texting has become the preferred channel of basic communication between twenty-somethings and their friends. A recent Npress survey of 300 Americans in their twenties showed that 94% say they sent and received text messages daily in April 2010.

Among those texters today:

17% send 100+ text messages a day, or more than 3,000 messages a month.
14% send 50+ text messages a day, or more than 1,500 a month.

Most people in their 20s send 11-20 text messages per day.

Among twenty somethings, texting is used for multitude reasons, including communicating with friends and family (88%), managing work projects (59%), and coordinating meetings and plans (85%).

Calling is still a central function of the cell phone for people in their twenties, but they typically make and receive five- seven calls a day—far fewer than text messages.

Beyond text messaging and voice calling, twenty somethings who have multipurpose phones say they use many of the extra features. Among the most popular are email use (83%) and taking pictures (54%).

Bottom Line: Generation Y is 76 million strong and flooding the workforce. If you want to fill your practice with these young professionals and earn their trust and loyalty, you have to reach them where they are.

Have ideas on how to connect with your Gen Y patients? Share them here!

-Sarah

Looking for a great digital marketing strategy? The Practice Marketing Revolution can help! Email sarah@npressnewsletter.com today!

11 Tools to Discover What Your Patients Really Want

Listening to your patients and learning to meet their needs are keys to growing your practice and creating an effective marketing plan. In fact, not doing so handicaps the overall reach and effectiveness of your marketing, communications, and service strategies.

Luckily, there are a variety of interactive media tools that provide platforms for listening to an ever growing sample of patients. These monitoring tools offer doctors opportunities to identify critical conversations and for strategic engagement.

Here are some of my favorite and FREE social media "listening"tools:

Google Alerts - Email updates of relevant search results
Monitter - Search for keywords in real time on Twitter
Social Mention - Real time keyword search across the web
Twitrratr - Sentiment ratings for Twitter
Backtype - Monitor blogs, blog comments, and conversations
Blogsearch - Find key words in the blogosphere
Evri - Aggregates user generated content
CoTweet - Conversation threading and trend monitoring for Twitter
Collecta - Monitor update streams of news sites, blogs, and social media sites
Klout - Find influencers based on topic
TweetDeck - Organize Twitter seaches by hashtag, brand, etc.

Since these tools are free, I advise searching for your practice or specialty on multiple sites so you don't miss potentially valuable information or feeds. Your practice's needs will be unique so select the tools and services that best fit your processes.

Do you have favorite tools for monitoring your practice or brand? Share them here in the comments :)