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Jurassic to Fantastic Webinar
Jurassic to Fantastic Webinar
Jurassic to Fantastic Webinar
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So hello, I'm Taylor. If you've ever gotten an email from Taylor from Raider 8, that's me, in case you were wondering. I'm the marketing manager here at Raider 8. And before we get started, I want to cover a couple of logistical things real quick. If you have any questions, feel free to ask them at any time using the Q&A function available in your Zoom controls. Evan will take time at the end of the presentation to answer as many questions as he can. And let me give you a short bio about Evan to introduce him. Evan's career in healthcare technology spans 25 years. He was a medical practice administrator for nine years before becoming the founder and CEO of SRS Health, an electronic health records company focused on specialty physician practices. His focus on software ergonomics and his passion for customer service enabled high-volume specialty physicians and practices to operate at peak efficiency. Evan brings that same dedication to Raider 8, the leader in healthcare reputation management. And with that, please take it away, Evan. All right. Thank you very much, Taylor. Thanks for joining. I hope everyone's doing well. I'm looking at the attendee list here. Those are on the call. And I see a nice mix of both Raider 8ers and Raider 8 clients and also others in the healthcare field who are not Raider 8 clients. So thanks for attending. I hope you're enjoying your spring up here in the Northeast, in the New York metro area. The weather's just been beautiful. It's been one of the best springs in recent memory. And I hope you are having the same. So today we're going to talk about patient acquisition evolution from Jurassic to Fantastic, kind of balancing the old way of marketing and some new elements, new ways of approaching patients and acquiring patients. And we'll go over that today. Oh, get a little dinosaur there. Fly by. We're going to want to understand the value of digital marketing when it comes to acquiring patients. And there's, you know, three kind of platforms. There's healthcare reputation management. Actually, let's go reverse order. It started out years ago in the 90s with a website. And then we've added social media. And then more so over the last seven, eight, nine years, we have the healthcare reputation management has been a part of a lot of practices, marketing efforts in healthcare. I always like this expression, patient acquisition starts at the search bar. We all are used to finding everything from the weather to stock prices to restaurants. And of course, you know, doctors right on the search bar, right through Google. And first impressions obviously always matter, right? I think just us as humans, if anyone ever read the book by Malcolm Gladwell called Blink, it's a whole book about just snap decisions, first impressions. So first impressions are very important. And obviously it's very important from a marketing perspective as well. We look at the prehistoric or pre-internet or prehistoric marketing. Of all these, I think primary care providers and word of mouth are still very important, right? Nothing beats a happy patient telling their friends and family to go see a doctor, right? So word of mouth marketing is powerful. But these other avenues of marketing have taken a kind of a backseat, like print ads. I can't remember the last time I read or even touched a newspaper, billboards. You know, billboards are on the side of the road, but I could be a 25-year-old healthy person going on the, driving down the side of the road. I'm not looking for orthopedic care at that moment or even the next 10 years. So maybe it's not as effective. Same thing with radio and TV. Community events, sports teams are nice things to do. I think they could be even more effective than some of these. And then direct mail. Again, you're sending pieces of mail to people that may or may not even be interested in your services. And then there's the yellow pages. And I put that here, we all kind of laugh at, oh, the yellow pages, that's so old fashioned. But if you think about it, it's exactly what we have today with Google search, right? Like people looking in the yellow pages for an orthopedic surgeon or a dermatologist or a primary care doctor, or an emergency room, people are actually interested in that type of service. And they go to the yellow page and look up that type of service and then see your ad. Well, it's the same thing online, right? In fact, Yelp was started, it was like an abbreviation of yellow pages from what I understand. So when someone Googles, it's really a yellow page search. I'm looking for a ENT doctor. I'm looking for a ENT doctor near me. So they do that yellow pages search and find some recommendations or find some ads. I think there's been a dramatic shift in the way patients are acquired these days. First is patients are tech savvy. My mother is 89 years old. She walks around with one of these, never more than a foot away from her, always has this. And if the battery gets below 98%, she starts freaking out that she's almost ready to run out of batteries. So they're tech savvy at all ages. There's a mobile workforce. So people are all over the country now. I know that, like my daughter, she's now working from, and she lives in Europe, right? She lives in different cities in Europe. She could be anywhere. So that mobile workforce is now moving to different areas, different cities. We all see these large shifts accelerated with the onset of COVID. So people are looking for new doctors in their new cities where they live. There's work from home, right? I remember I used to work in New York City and my dentist was in New York City because I'd go at lunchtime or two o'clock and get an appointment. Now that I'm working from home in the suburbs of New York, I need a new dentist. I need a dentist that's here near me. So these physician patterns, they've changed a great deal, right? People are looking for physicians near their homes because of work from home. And then there's trust. So remember, we trust what our friends say, what our primary care physician says. But now there's an element of trust with other patients are saying that I may or may not know. And that's the whole online reputation, the importance of online reputation. We call it trust marketing, is trusting others that you may or may not know. So let's just dig down a little deeper into that healthcare reputation management, which in general just means taking control of your online image and brand to attract and retain patients. So that includes online listings, reviews, ratings of course, not only just Google, but health grades, vitals, WebMD, Facebook. It includes your, believe it or not, your social media, medical practice website also has elements of reputation, right? Because a lot of, at least a lot of RaterAids clients, they post testimonials from patients all the time. They put the testimonials on their website. So now you're taking comments that you're generating from patients and putting them online in your social media feeds and your medical practice website. I promise this is the only slide that just has lots of stats on it. I find those very hard to read, but I thought they're kind of important. There's been various studies and you always, you know, you always got to take studies with a grain of salt because they're paid for and done by people who benefit from high numbers. But even if you cut these numbers in half, let's cut the numbers in half, 72. So 36% of prospective patient read online reviews and choosing a provider. Okay. So even if it was half of that, it's still a lot, one in three patients. 40% say they considered a provider with at least five reviews to be more trustworthy. That's a lot. 44% of patients read the doctor reviews after being referred. I'm in all these camps for sure. And especially this one, I have a wisdom tooth issue. Not to get too personal, but I went to my dentist. He referred me to two oral surgeons to go to. He gave me these two cards, wrote the teeth number on both of them. And the first thing I did when I get home is look up the reviews. Like, I don't know which practice to use. It used to be whichever practice had the most convenient appointment time. Now it's the one that had the best reviews and that's the one I chose. So this is a very powerful effect here. That so many patients read reviews after a referral. And again, usually patients are given more than one referral, right? They get a name from their primary care physician or two or three names like I got from my dentist. They'll get from their Facebook. My wife goes on the Facebook Bergen County Mothers Group and ask for a recommendation there. Or they go to the insurance guide if they're on Cigna and they go online and they see who accepts the insurance. They get a few more names there, right? So there's just a lot of names that are coming from different sources. And the only way to differentiate them is for them to search for those doctors online. Okay, so reputation management in healthcare today. This is fascinating. So we have a scraper technology. So we'll scrape thousands of reviews, thousands of Google listings. And measure what's going on. So we took 3083 practices in hospitals nationwide. And we bought a database from a company called Definitive Healthcare called DHC. And we loaded it into the scraper. And we found that 31% have at least four and a half stars. Now four and a half stars is kind of like healthcare doctors, they're rated higher than restaurants, let's say. I think an average restaurant or an average auto body shop or coffee shop has lower ratings than doctors. It's just a fact that the patients seem to like their doctors more than their coffee shops, which is a good thing. So 4.5 stars to me is a bare minimum. So of the 33,000 practices, we looked at the location listings. 31% have at least 4.5 stars. 64% have at least 30 reviews. Makes sense. Even not doing anything with reputation management, just having a big practice with a location listing. Let's say a hospital like NYU, you're going to have more than 30 reviews even without doing anything, just getting that organically. And if I look at both of these together, so who's really using something? Meaning I have more than four and a half stars and I have more than 30 reviews. It's only 24%. And then we looked at the practices in hospitals. We looked at the doctors underlying those practices. And there were 26,408 doctors. 46% have at least four and a half stars. So a little more than the hospitals. 21%, only 21% have at least 30 reviews, which makes sense, right? A practice has a location and several doctors. So you're diluting the reviews among all the doctors, but the location gets a lot of listings. So a lot less doctors meet that 30 review threshold that I think is important, right? When I'm looking for, like when I'm looking at the dentist, if a doctor only had 6, 8, 10, 15 reviews, I'm not going to put as much weight in that as if the doctor had 30, 40 or 50 reviews. And then we looked at who has a combination of four and a half at least and 30 reviews. And that's only 13%, which is kind of sad. So only one in eight doctors around the country have an online reputation that's reasonably solid where a patient would say, yeah, I'm going to see this doctor. So in my opinion, there's a lot of work to be done, especially on the doctor side and also, on the practice side as well, but especially on the doctor side to burnish those online reputations. So this is my favorite part of the presentation. The section's called Google is your online billboard. It really is. We have a client that's 21 doctors and 12 APs, advanced practitioners in Ohio, right? And we looked at, like a mini case study, we looked at the Google insights, the Google business data, how many times were their listings viewed on Google search or Google maps? So that's when I search for the doctor by name or let's say John Smith, MD, or the name of the practice, or if I said best ophthalmologist or best urgent care center near me, and then Google recommends a few practices. How many times a year did this practice have their listings pop up like a billboard in front of patients' faces? And we found out it was 1.5 million times a year. That's an astounding number. You could expect 20, 30, 40, 50,000 views per doctor per year. So if you have a 10 doctor practice, figure 300, 400, 500,000 views on those listings for the doctors and the location listings per year. And that's just Google, not including health grades, vitals, or WebMD. And that should be a... By the way, you have this data. If you own the listing, you could easily get this. If you wanna have, just send me an email or I'll give you contact information at the end. If you wanna know how to do it to get this data, so you could show your doctors, I'm happy to share it with you. It's just a few clicks in your Google business console. But that's a lot of views, right? Akin to a billboard on the side of a very busy interstate. So speaking of billboards, I found this group OA Duluth billboard, right? So you type it in Google images and you see they have a billboard online. This is the Google image search result. So here's their billboard. So I'm on the side of the road, I'm driving down. I might not be interested in orthopedic care. I might have an orthopedic surgeon already, but I see OA Duluth, Orthopedic Associates of Duluth. I pass it by every day on the way to work. So now when I'm ready for, I strain my shoulder playing pickleball, which I seem to do once a week these days. When I strain my shoulder playing pickleball, I need to call somebody. And now I see this branding and I'm sure OA Duluth spent a lot of money on this billboard. I don't know, I hear anywhere from three to $15,000 a month on billboards. So they spent a lot of money. Now I'm ready to go. So I'm gonna go to Orthopedic Associates of Duluth and I search for them in Google. And this is what comes up. So where does my eye go? It immediately goes here, a little bit of an industrial warehouse looking photo, 3.4 stars, 24 reviews. Thankfully they have orthopedic in their name because they've miscategorized their business as a medical clinic. But this is their online billboard. These are the things that are being looked at by patients 1.5 million times a year. Imagine if we took this and put it up, this listing and put it up on the billboard. I think if you did this and one of your doctors drove by the billboard, somebody would be in deep trouble in hot water because this 3.4 stars and 24 reviews, it's almost ridiculous. How could you even advertise yourself like that? Yet this is what this practice is doing every day. They're spending money on the billboard and probably print ads and sporting events and mailings and everything else. And then only getting the brand burned in the head of their patients or prospective patients only to be searched. And this is what the patients see. So I think that's a kind of like a travesty. I think that that's something that should be rectified. It's just very inefficient and ineffective. Same thing with the doctor. This is just one of the doctors at the practice, Michael Momont. He is categories collect correctly here, which is nice. But I searched for Dr. Momont and I see kind of a shadowy building. His picture's not on here. Four stars, four reviews. Maybe there's a doctor with more reviews, right? Somebody better. That's what I'm thinking as a patient. Maybe let me go to that next patient on my list that my primary care physician gave me or my friends gave me or my Cigna insurance guide gave me. Same thing. You wouldn't put this on a billboard. You know how they say, the number one doctor in Duluth, you wouldn't do that with this. Yet it shows up again, 1.5 million. These listings show up 1.5 million times a year. And I think it should look like this. This is actually a rate rate client. Raleigh Orthopedics, 4.9 stars, 3,700 reviews, 3,037 reviews. Nice picture of the building. This listing looks good. And likewise, this doctor from the practice looks good. I think he looks good in more than one way. It's a very great picture. Got the white teeth. But five stars, 223 reviews. I mean, compare that. Who am I gonna use? I searched for two doctors. I searched for this doctor and searched for this doctor. I'm gonna use the doctor that has 223 reviews and five stars. So that's a little bit about the online billboard. And I think it's something very important way to think of the browser and patients and how they're interacting. Think of the Google listings as a billboard advertisement. It's just a digital form instead of a poll with a background. Healthcare reputation management. Everybody tries to build reviews. Everyone you talk to. Of course we want more reviews. Some people use paper forms, QR codes. Those are prehistoric. We feel automation is key. Let your patients just talk about your practice. I think you have a whole day's worth of patients of a doctor sees 40, 50 patients in a day. I would bet you most all of them are happy patients. They're happy. They got service. The one thing that probably bothers them the most at least from our data that we see is waiting room time. It's the lowest rated score, but that manifests from the success of a practice. You're so busy, you're squeezing in patients. Patients just have to wait. We do have a blog on, we had a practice that we saw has the best waiting room time scores of all our clients. And they do some really, really interesting processes and methods and things that they implement to try to make patients more comfortable with a long wait. You could go to our website and just search the blog site and search for waiting room time. It's an interesting read, but most patients are happy. So just give them the megaphone, let them speak, let them speak their mind. So send them something automated, real time, patient leaves, they get a little survey or a review request and they're gonna give you a high score. It's the upset patients that if you don't give them an easy way to post a review, they're gonna go home and post a review anyway because they're so peeved, right? But if you're an average five-star happy patient, a great doctor, you're not thinking of putting an online review, but if you get something that's easy and it's automated, it's electronic, sure, I'll post a review. So you wanna give a megaphone to the patients and let them post reviews online in large numbers. Also, when you have an online reputation, you also obtain feedback from the patient, which you could use to improve your practice, right? You hear the complaints and you can improve your practice that way. And that goes toward the word of mouth. Remember I was talking about how word of mouth marketing is still really, really powerful and really important. You wanna attract strong doctors and employees. So just think about it, especially if you're in an area where it might not be the best location, it might be a little rural or away from a big city, how are you gonna attract a doctor? If a doctor says, oh, there's a job opening in Duluth Orthopedics, and every new doctor is gonna Google the practice and they'll see 3.4 stars, 50 reviews, and maybe I don't wanna work here, right? But that Raleigh Ortho, if they see 3,000 reviews, 4.9 stars, wow, this sounds like a great practice, I wanna interview there, right? So I think that a great online reputation has other benefits. So we're gonna attract doctors. Same thing, employees looking for a job, they're gonna search online, they see happy patients, they wanna work at a place that has happy patients. Referring physicians that just wanna call you, they don't have your number, they Google your practice, you want your referring physicians to feel good about the practice they're referring patients to. And if they see 380 reviews and 4.9 stars, they're gonna feel better about referring patients to your practice. And then there's multiple marketing applications. And we could get that, we'll get into that a little bit more later with the social media. I think we have a question. Patients, Pia, patients upload pictures. What's your recommendation on filtering and removing those? How frequently should I monitor those? Oh boy, somebody let me know if you could remove them, but I know what we should do is to get, remember that doctor had a picture of the building, to get the doctor picture there, Google recommends you upload a very high resolution, a very high resolution photo of the doctor. So the real headshot, the 14 megabyte JPEG file that you got from the photographer, upload that and they're gonna give priority to that. And it's more likely that that picture will appear on the profile. Same thing with your building, a high quality picture of your building. So you don't get the side of the building from Google maps that might have a dumpster in it or something like that. So we highly recommend those high resolution photos. And maybe toward the end, if one of our experts, Parker says, you have control of the headline photo if you own, I'm sorry, now I gotta read this. He says, you have control of the headline photo if you own the listing, but other people can upload pictures they want. Okay, so that's a good point. You do have control over that headline photo, right? So I would upload those high resolution pictures, which will, what share? Right, so between 10 gigabytes and 5 megabytes. You want to try to go for that 5 megabyte size. OK, let's move on. OK, so I like this chess checkers analogy. SEO, up to now, has been checkers, right? And I'm not minimizing SEO, standard SEO. But basically, it's tagging. You'll tag photos with keywords. You put keywords on your website. You try to get back links from other websites to your website. You post content in the form of blogs and whatnot on the website. And that's SEO. Then there's reputation SEO. So you've done a good job of getting Google to have your practice come up and search. But what happens when a patient says, who's the best allergy doctor near me? Who's the best shoulder surgeon near me? How do we get Google to give you preference in their algorithms? So that's called, we call that reputation SEO. It's a different kind of SEO, OK? And most importantly, we want you to appear in the three pack. So this is the three pack. This is best orthopedic surgeon near Princeton, New Jersey, OK? And this happens to be a client of ours. And we can see Stuart Levine, Princeton Orthopedics, and Jeffrey Abrams. All three of these doctors have the same address. They all work for the same practice. This is the Google recommendation. So this is Google's algorithm is recommending these three listings. And we call this, it's rare and it's hard to do, but we call this Google three pack domination. This one practice where they're listing in the two doctors dominating this three pack. There's a more, you can click more to look for other doctors. But if a patient's looking for the best near me and I see these three with these star ratings and these number of views, I'm not going to that more listings page. I'm going to choose one of these three doctors because they all look great to me. One of these three listings, they all look great to me. And Google, there's so many factors that go into Google's algorithms. And it's a little, it's not a little bit, it's a black box. But Google does publish articles. And we just know as fact that some of the key variables are the number of reviews, 121, 2,200, the rating, 4.8, 4.9, and the recency. So if a listing had a review posted three days ago versus one that had one three months ago, Google likes the fresh listing. And they're more likely to promote that more. There's one more R that I didn't put on here, which is also important. It's responses. So when you respond to your Google reviews, Google is going to give that listing more priority in their algorithms because you're interacting with patients, with customers. And Google likes when you interact with patients. Plus, the other benefit of responding is as soon as you respond, the patient gets an email with a response. And that's just great for patient communications, patient engagement. Also, if a patient's unhappy and you respond, they get a response right away too to try to diffuse the bad experience and do kind of a service recovery. So these are important factors. And they help you dominate your three-pack. Let's just look at this listing. This is another practice that's completely dominating. That's Jordan Young Institute. But what Google also does, as patients post reviews and they type in comments, Google takes the comments, scans through them, and looks for keywords. So if someone says, best knee surgeon near me, or best otolaryngologist, or best allergy doctor, if you did a knee surgery and you write in the comment, oh, Dr. Siegel did a great job operating on my knee, Google knows that. And the more comments there are, the more chance there's going to be a keyword match, and the more chance Google is going to promote that listing. Here, this was a best search. So we get highly recommend, never choose any other one, best orthopedic surgeon. So you can see how Google knows from the comments that patients are saying that this doctor or this practice is the best. And that also helps in their algorithms. So lots of things, the ratings, reviews, recency, responses, and also the sheer number of reviews to do keyword matching. OK, so the last thing on the Google Business Profile is just these are also important, not as important as the reviews and the recent three R's. But you want to own your listing. So there's just, you kind of click on own this business here and you could own the listing and claim it. You want to list a consistent name, address, and phone number. So Mark A. Miller, MD, that's exactly what you want on the bio page on your doctor, exactly. Don't worry about punctuation. But you don't want Dr. Mark Miller without the A on your website and Mark A. Miller, MD, on your Google listing. Google is going to make a connection and strengthen your Google listing if the NAP, name, address, phone number, match exactly. Same with address. If you have a W 72nd Street here, you want a W on your location page on your website, not West. Or if you have suite, S-U-I-T-E 150 on your website, you don't want to have a pound sign, number, pound, and then the suite number on your Google listing. You want to make sure the Google Maps address is matched perfectly with the location addressing your website. And again, that's going to create neural links between the listing and your website and make that listing stronger and more likely to be recommended by Google. We just talked about professional headshots and photos. This is one of the practices that uploaded those. You can see it's professionally done high res photos, which shows up right here. You want to make sure the business description is instead of medical clinic or doctor, you want orthopedic surgeon or whatever it is. You want to add office hours. And you want to consider overall reputation. So look what Google does. They go out. Reiterate has review pages. But here's WebMD. There's Health Grades and Vitals. Google's actually scraping. And they know what's going on in WebMD and Vitals and Health Grades. And they pull it right into your listing. So to the extent that the secondary review sites have good reviews, Google sees that. And it's also part of their algorithms to recommend your Google listing. So don't forget about the other review sites. You might think, I don't need Health Grades, Vitals, WebMD. But it's a signal to Google that says this practice is good or the doctor is good. And we're going to recommend this doctor in our algorithms. So make sure you consider your overall reputation, not just your Google reputation. But Google is the most important. This is obviously more important than the secondary review sites. And then lastly, you want to create listings for each doctor and office location. I put that in italics because it's super, super important. Let me give an example. Let's say I'm in, a good example would be, let's say I'm in something everybody knows. I'm in, right now, I'm in Bergen County. So let's say I have a Bergen County office. And then I also have an office, a saddle office in Rockland County, which is over the border in New York. It's the next county over. So if I have a Bergen listing, right, that's my main office, and I see patients once a week in my Rockland office, I need a listing in my Rockland office. Why? Because if a patient is sitting somewhere in Rockland County and says, best whatever doctor near me, if I don't have a listing in Rockland, you're never going to show up. There's no domination of the three pack. You're just never going to show up because there are a lot of other doctors in Rockland that will show up that are near the patient. So you got to have that listing. Also from a confusion standpoint, so if you have one listing in Bergen County, and I'm sitting in Rockland County, so 10 miles north, and I get a referral, you got to see Dr. Miller here. And I search for Dr. Mark Miller. I'm sitting in Rockland County. Google knows Mark Miller, and they know that Bergen County is near enough, and they'll pull up the Bergen County listing, not the Rockland County listing because there is none. So the patient's going to say, Bergen County, I don't want to drive there. Next doctor on my list. Let me see if I find one that's closer to me. So you've lost an opportunity to capture that patient by not having that satellite office listing. And then lastly, confusion, right? You could confuse a patient. A patient pulls up a list. Oh, I got to go to Dr. Miller's office, and I just type in Mark Miller. It comes up on my iPhone. I click directions, and I'm in Rockland, but it pulled up the Bergen listing, and now I have directions to Bergen. We hear this all the time. Patients end up in the wrong office because the listing closest to where the patient is, where they made the appointment, doesn't exist. So the listing that comes up is the wrong address. And strengthen numbers. You have 1,000 appointments. 5 or 10 of them are just going to go to the wrong address because you don't have that listing. So it's a pain in the you-know-what to create satellite office listings, but our strong suggestion is if your practice, if your doctor sees 10% or more of their patients at a list at a location, create a listing for them. It's very valuable. It might take you two hours of your time. Who cares, right? You'll get thousands and thousands of dollars in revenue from having that listing. So the return on that time investment is tremendous. So that's why I put that in italics. I don't know, nearing the end here. Okay, so social media. I don't need to say, I think everybody is so familiar now with social media, how important it is. But just some ideas about social media. And the biggest thing is social proof. Again, trust marketing. If you do reputation management, you have, let's say you get 10 comments, a doctor a month. So a hundred comments, a doctor a year, right? And you have 10 doctors. Now you have a thousand comments from patients. On a bell curve, some of them are going to be very long and robust and have like really testimonial grade quality. So think a thousand comments, let's say 20 of them are long and robust. And then 10 of them mentioned specifically a certain type of procedure or surgery. And 10 of them are really well-written. And if you have a software where you're asking patient permission, if they could use their name on the testimonial. Now I have five or 10 unbelievably great testimonials that I could put on, let's say 12 of them. I could put once a month on social media. I could put it on my website. The patients are doing the marketing for you. So we strongly recommend that like this practice here, Midlands Ortho, you could see they take, they didn't use the patient's name, but they take, oh no, this is Orthopedic Institute. They take a patient's testimonial and put it right on social media. This practice here, Midlands, they also do awards, right? So they look, there's a rate client. They look at the top rated doctors of advanced practitioners and therapists for the month or the quarter, actually the month. They look at the ones that are rated the top highest scores, like highest star rating. And then they promote them on their pit. What a great idea. Patients are telling us that these are the best doctors in our practice. They create this healthy competition among their doctors. Plus patients like seeing, oh yeah, highly rated. These doctors are great. I'm gonna use them, right? No downside in doing any of these. Although I suppose doctors who aren't mentioned here might get a little bit upset and say, why aren't I mentioned? Well, why don't you have a great bedside manner? So those are just some ideas. You could just look at this list. I'm sure you're doing most of these. I like the behind the scenes. Patients think medical offices are like these black boxes and they don't realize there's a human component. There are people working hard behind the scenes. So sometimes a little video or some pictures of what goes on behind the scenes could be very interesting and just good social media content. And then lastly is the website. Most everybody does this. Which insurance do we take? Do we have an online scheduling button? And you don't have to schedule an appointment per se, but at least a form that a patient could fill out and you could get back to them at a minimum. Social proof, again, all those testimonials, just get them on the doctor's bio pages, on the homepage, wherever you can. And then this is my bugaboo, organized providers by specialty or subspecialty. There's a lot of large practices out there today. Hospitals do this very well. It says, what specialty are you looking for? And you go on a dropdown and you say, I'm looking for an ENT surgeon and they'll give you a list of those ENT doctors. But more important, if you're like a large orthopedic practice and if I hurt my shoulder and you have 20 doctors, like which doctor does... And I wanna look at the reviews of all each doctor that does shoulder surgery. I have no idea. I have to go through all 20 doctor profiles to find out which does shoulder surgery. So now I'm gonna call up. I'm gonna ask somebody who probably doesn't know the answer. Who are the shoulder surgeons? Now I'm waiting on hold. I'm talking to somebody and they're finally giving me a list of shoulder surgeons. Then I'll go on the website and research. So why not just create a section in your website? Here's my services. Here's the parts of the body that we service and click on shoulder. Here are the five doctors who are fellowship trained or trained in a hand shoulder surgery. And then that way, ah, these are the five doctors. These are the ones that are gonna research. And you just made the patient's life much, much easier. You made their lives easier by organizing providers by subspecialty as well as specialty. So that wraps it up. There was a lot of information jammed into 38 minutes. I'm gonna do a little Q and A. Someone asked, how do you add a provider page on Google? My business page won't allow me to make separate page for provider cause we have a business page. Kayla, I'm not sure what you mean by that. Separate page for provider cause we have a business page. I, you know, I'm not sure what you mean by that. I would say every one of our clients, unless it's a one doctor practice, maybe that's what you're referring to. You could just create a doctor. There's a Google has a doctor category. You could just create a doctor page. And if you have one office, even in five doctors, you could create those five listings for the doctors. Kayla, we do have your email address. You registered. So folks from rate to rate, maybe we could just get back to Jamie, could get back to Kayla, give her a little tutorial on how to do that. What do you think about Google ads for helping your location and listings? But Google ads is interesting. I know they're very expensive. A lot of times it's almost silly. I see practices go, let's say they search for ABC orthopedics and then the ad comes up top, yet they come up, you know, they come up in the first result in the search. So it's like, why are you paying for that ad? And then, you know, then they do knee surgeon near me. If you're not, if you don't have a good online reputation, yeah, you need the ad because you're not in that Google three-pack, right? But if you're in the Google three-pack as a patient, and I think most of us here would agree, I would have trust Google three-pack than a paid ad. I trust the three-pack more than a paid ad. So if you do a good job with your online reputation and you appear and look really good in the three-pack, you don't want that ad. It's just going to cost you a lot of money. The patients are going to select you based on the merits of your practice. Based on the ratings and reviews in that Google recommendation. So Google ads are cool, but they're very expensive. They're hard, you know, there's a maintenance component to it. And if you do a really good job with your online reputation and optimize your reputation SEO, I think it's not efficient use of your marketing dollars. What's your recommendation for a practice to track how patients are finding them? That's a tough one. This comes up all the time. I think right now, the only sure way is in your intake forms or just have whoever works up the patient or the front desk person, check-in person, how'd you hear about us? You know, if it's a new patient and then it just fits in one of a few categories, primary care physician, insurance directory, a friend or, you know, online search, Google search, or you could have it as part of your intake form as checkbox, that's, you know, that's really the only way to find it. You know, you just got to ask the patients, how did you learn about us? That kind of, that's a great array. You know, we get people filling out web forms all the time. We're always wondering, how did you find out about us? You just got to ask, right? How important are other review sites like HealthGrid? So as I mentioned a little earlier, you know, when I search for John Smith MD, you know, so here's HealthGrid, hematology and oncology, you know, it's not on the right side, like that big Google billboard, but it's comes right up in the first page of search. So 12 reviews, four stars, eh, it could be better. We like to get it over four, a little over four, maybe 20 or 30 reviews here, but they're important from that optics perspective. And they're also important from the Google perspective. You know, they're scraping, they understand, they see this and they take this reviews and ratings into account when they're deciding whether or not to promote those, you know, that doctor's listing. So it's a Google WebMD is important and vitals. HealthGrids is the easiest one to build reviews on. We find that literally it's the exact number. It's six times more, six times easier to build a review on HealthGrids than it is on WebMD and vitals because HealthGrids allows you to put it, to give a patient a URL that pulls up the rating form, right? So they click, pulls up a rating form and they start rating the doctor. WebMD and vitals don't do that. So you have to kind of land on the doctor's listing and then the patient has to leave a review button. And that just gets rid of literally five of six potential reviews. So they just go away. So thankfully, HealthGrids is much easier to build reviews and HealthGrids usually appears much higher in search than vitals and WebMD. You know, right here, it's right up near the top, right below this three packets, right here. So anyway, I do recommend building on secondary review sites, especially HealthGrids. Question, do you need to dominate the entire Google three path to see good results? Yes, you do need to dominate three pack, but it's rare that that happens. Yeah, so if I like go knee surgeon, that's knee surgeon near me. No reviews, no idea why Google did that. I might not have a lot near me, but there's no domination here. But if there was one doctor, maybe there's just no doctors right near me that have lots of reviews. But if there was one, only it is one, I would choose that doctor. I could put in any other city and state, let's say, Des Moines, Iowa, near Des Moines, Iowa. You know, so here, this is not a domination. These two here are one practice, same address near is probably a different from Iowa or the right. So these are two different practices. So now it's like these two here, which one am I gonna choose? I'll probably research all three, right? But at least I have two of this one practice has two and this has one. So good question. You know, it's nice to dominate. It's very difficult to dominate, but two out of three is really nice. And especially if in a market, we do it right now, where you're sitting at your desk, type in a procedure near me or the specialty you are near me, see what comes up. And if there's like my first search, if there's not a lot going on and you could just get one, your practice or one doctor in that three-pack with a lot of reviews, you're gonna capture a lot of the patients. Okay, great questions. Wow, awesome. Any other questions? I think we have one more. Are you familiar with the three best rated? Is that something worth pursuing? I think the three best rated is this. Oh, there is a, you could just, you could also have a, so this is also a filter Google added not too long ago, maybe a couple of years ago. Sometimes when you do the best searches, they automatically do, they automatically have ratings set to four stars and higher, which means that if you have a three something on any of your Google reviews, you have 0% chance of showing up, but they do have these filters. So I might wanna do 4.5 and then it will show all the 4.5s, all the doctors that are over 4.5 in my area, which is really nice and just means that it's important to have high reviews because a lot of patients are clicking on those filters. What's the difference between local and organic search? Okay, good question. Local and organic, they're the same, right? So best knee surgeon near me here. Let's go to Des Moines. This is local, right? It's local to Des Moines and it's organic. It's not paid. It's just coming up, you know, as kind of like these here, 25 near, you know, these listings here, these are optimized for me. Optimized organic search results from Google, but what Google's done, not all the time, but like a high, high vest, high percentage of the time, they put the three pack here on top with these are organic results, but their recommendations from Google and Google is the most, one of the most ubiquitous brands in the world. So people trust these recommendations. So these are organic in and of itself. Any other questions? Okay. Wow. A lot of questions. I really appreciate that. If you have any questions, you know, Google listings, you want some answers, just email info at reader8.com and we'll be sure to get somebody to answer your question, get back to you. Or if you have any follow-up questions, we'd be happy to answer those questions. Okay. Hope we were very informative today. I know we're going to have a recording of this and we'll end up putting it up on, you know, we'll send it to you all and we'll have it online, but I really appreciate your participation today. And thanks for your.
Video Summary
In the video transcript, Evan, the CEO of SRS Health, discusses the evolution of patient acquisition strategies in the healthcare industry, emphasizing the importance of healthcare reputation management. He highlights the shift from traditional marketing methods like print ads and billboards to digital marketing platforms such as Google search and online reviews. Evan explains the significance of online reputation, Google three-pack domination, and the impact of patient reviews on search rankings. He also delves into social media strategies, utilizing social proof and professional headshots to enhance a practice's online presence. Furthermore, he stresses the importance of organizing providers by specialty on a practice's website and navigating the complexities of local and organic search results. Lastly, Evan addresses audience questions regarding Google listings, review sites, and the value of Google ads in healthcare marketing.
Keywords
patient acquisition strategies
healthcare reputation management
digital marketing platforms
online reputation
Google three-pack domination
social media strategies
specialty providers website organization
Google ads healthcare marketing
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