Advertising for Doctors: Is it Really that Important?

In my last post I made men­tion of a pro­gram we have been cre­at­ing to assist in adver­tis­ing for doc­tors. I received a few inquiries regard­ing why physi­cians should con­sider an online mar­ket­ing pro­gram to com­pli­ment their tra­di­tional mar­ket­ing efforts, so wanted to respond.

One of the most con­tro­ver­sial posts that I have writ­ten was regard­ing online adver­tis­ing and den­tists. In that posts I sug­gest that den­tist begin con­sid­er­ing plac­ing some of their mar­ket­ing bud­get into adver­tis­ing online. The rea­sons are sim­ple. When was the last time you opened the yel­low pages to find a ser­vice pro­fes­sional, be it med­ical or not? My assump­tion would be it’s been awhile.

The Inter­net is at our fin­ger­tips daily, it’s easy to look online to find ser­vices providers that we need includ­ing physi­cians. Online not only will we find their tele­phone num­ber, but we are able to read about the doc­tor and make a deci­sion on whether or not they are the type of provider we are look­ing for. A physi­cians web­site can draw us in or turn us off. It can con­firm that we want to make an appoint­ment or drive us to keep look­ing for a bet­ter fit. This is the rea­son we cre­ated the med­ical mar­ket­ing and con­sult­ing agency — The Prac­tice Pros. We wanted to be able to give the infor­ma­tion to the poten­tial patient in a way that they can under­stand. This assists the physi­cian in grow­ing their prac­tice draw­ing in peo­ple who are attracted and feel com­fort­able with them and their practice.

We are not new to med­ical mar­ket­ing. We have worked with sev­eral doc­tors and hos­pi­tals in the past. In this process we began to real­ize how impor­tant med­ical mar­ket­ing ser­vices was to them, even if they didn’t quite under­stand the poten­tial in the begin­ning they saw the value shortly after we began our work.

There are sev­eral med­ical adver­tis­ing agen­cies avail­able to physi­cians, but we felt with our expe­ri­ence in the med­ical indus­try and our mar­ket­ing exper­tise could help physi­cians gain the patients they were look­ing for with­out hav­ing to spend a lot of time try­ing to find the right places to adver­tise — we do that for them.

Why should physi­cians mar­ket online?

• We are an instan­ta­neous soci­ety — give us infor­ma­tion now. We don’t just want your tele­phone num­ber and a sta­tic yel­low page ad — we want to know who you are and why we should chose you.

• Med­ical infor­ma­tion is one of the top searched for top­ics online. We not only look for infor­ma­tion regard­ing our symp­toms but we look for doc­tors who can relate and help us. We want to know you before I walk into your practice.

• Mar­ket­ing your prac­tice online enables you to stay in front of poten­tial patients with­out spend­ing a lot of your time doings so — because we know it’s dif­fi­cult to find the free time dur­ing the day to mar­ket your practice.

• Mar­ket­ing your prac­tice is no longer an option — it’s a neces­sity — I guar­an­tee if you are not doing it there are other physi­cians in your area that are and they are attract­ing patients that could be com­ing to you. Can you risk that?

• Physi­cian mar­ket­ing no longer car­ries the stigma of unpro­fes­sion­al­ism that it once did. Mar­ket­ing is sim­ply edu­cat­ing poten­tial patients on why you are the physi­cian for them. You still leave the deci­sion in their hands, but you inform them of why you should be their choice.

If you are are a physi­cian and you ready to explore a turn-key med­ical mar­ket­ing solu­tion, that is as effec­tive as word-of-mouth and refer­ral mar­ket­ing con­tact me directly. I will let you know if we can help you by imple­ment­ing our med­ical mar­ket­ing exper­tise and ser­vices. I will also let you know if our pro­gram won’t work for you — I promise.