The first place a potential patient searches for information is not the yellow pages but the Internet. Savvy doctors have recognized that this is the best place to market their practice. There are five fundamental concepts that you must understand and you can use to market your practice. These are: Organic Search, Direct Online Advertising, Local marketing, Social Media and Direct Email Marketing. I will briefly discuss the five fundamental pillars of online marketing.

Organic Search

Organic Search is the first thing that you must be interested and perhaps the easiest to understand and verify for yourself. It is something that you can do yourself at little to no cost yet it is perhaps the most time consuming and complex of the advertising strategies. Organic Search is the position or ranking of your website as it appears to those individuals who are searching for you or your service. It is easy to understand but it is very complicated to get that first top spot on a search query.

Investing time in Organic Search placement will work as a great substitute if you do not want to spend money in the internet advertising arena and have the discipline and patience to see results over time.

Search engines work under a very simple concept. When people search online, the text being searched gets matched with the best online content. Organic Search work by matching the text being searched for, with an online website that delivers the content as the best possible match. Ranking of websites is done by an algorithm that uses the text, images, and content that is incorporated into your website. All this data is then weighted and ranked and the result is what makes your office website noticed by search engines and thus ultimately patients.

The simplest way to get to know if your website is crawled or “looked at” by search engines is to go to the master search engine. I suggest you visit www.google.com/addurl and ensure that your website is listed on Google search. Many search engines rely on Google rankings and algorithms to perform their search.

Direct Online Advertising

Direct Online Advertising is another good way in which you can increase your online presence. This is the electronic version and fundamentally works very similar to printed media. It is simple, you pay a company to advertise online by banners or text that is exhibited in content relevant websites or content search. The idea here is that you are paying to be found by potential patients as they are actively searching for products or services like the ones you provide.

This form of advertising works better than printed media simply because fact that a potential patient is looking at your website means they are ready to make an appointment. In this case you are targeting a person who is actively looking. In other words, your ad or website will show up when patients are actively looking for your service or your optical. In this strategy also allows you to have far more control over when and where your office advertising is displayed.

There are two main ways to advertise. The first is pay per click where basiacally you pay the advertising rate everytime the ad or banner gets clicked. The other basic format is pay for impressions, here you pay a pre determined amount of money for a pre determined number of impressions. Adwords is an example of this type of advertising strategy.Visit google.com/adwords to learn more and create an even create AdWords account.

Local Online Marketing

This is another way to selectively and by geography reach customers in your region, city or community. Local business listings online marketing strategy works best if you want to drive online information seekers and potential patients into your physical location. It usually works combined with a traditional retail based offer.

It is unquestionable that most of people use the Internet to research a products or services, especially in their local geographical area. Local business listings get your business in front of those potential customers, most times these service listings are free of charge. There are some services that do require paid subscriptions. An example of a free service would be Yelp.com while a paid subscription would be zocdoc.com

It is unquestionable that Google is the leader in many of these local business listings and it is also free. I suggest you also visit google.com/placesforbusiness.

Social media

Simply put, this is the most diverse and time consuming but perhaps the most rewarding of any of the online marketing strategies. Social media lets you get closer to your audience, interact, start conversations, offer deals and enjoy the benefits that social human relationships have.

It is important to realize the power of just one relationship can be exponential as you not only tap into the person whom you are interacting with but also you become exposed to family, friends and many times co workers.

This medium is a two way street in the sense that the message can be delivered from you to your patients as well as from the patients back to you or others inside their social circle. The many options can be summarized into big three social media services can be classified into four categories. AudioVisual presentations have been part of social media for a number of years and YouTube.com is the primary medium. Here you are able to deliver voice, video and provide a business message in a controlled environment.

There is also Editorial content of which blogs are the representative medium. Blogger.com is the primary blog medium.

Social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin are the three best examples of social media that provide interaction between the delivery and the receiver of information. This is called a two way communication. I would like to mention Google +1 as the new kid in the block which is a new reputation based social media but with limited interactive ability.

Getting started in this area is really easy. For a quick way to start a blog go to blogger.com and create your own office or personal blog to share ideas, information and interact with your patients. You can also go to youtube.com where you can upload, create and share videos on your office. A common video is a tour of facilities or a brief introduction of your practice philosophy. Registtartion with Facebook, Twitter and Linkendin is free and you should secure your name even if you have no plans of using these services at this time.

For Google +1 you can visit Google.com/webmasters/+1/button/index.html to learn how to include the Google’s +1 button on your website. This is quickly becoming a way of recommend people and places and I suspect will be factored into the Search algorithm.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing is perhaps the easiest and most cost effective way to keep a direct presence in your patient’s desktop. Emails make it easy to promote offers and provide updates to existing customers through direct email marketing.

While it is limited to those people you have developed a relationship with, it is effective as offers and promotions can be drafted and repeated in future dates. We have used it to promote new product lines, new medications as well as information (together with Facebook and twitter) on weather related closings.

This medium works best if you want existing customers to come back for more or remind them why they have chosen your practice to serve their eye care needs. It is easy to share promotions, product and even interact with other business news to engage existing customers and earn repeat business.

There are many popular email service providers with diverse offerings to create and manage your email campaigns. Constantcontact.com is one of the most commonly used.

How can we use data like number of email contacts or Twitter followers or Facebook Likes?

In other words, how do we measure the return on investment on any of our social media effort?

I have often been asked the above questions, the answer is easy! First you must realize the wide breath of strategies that you can measure as part of your return on investment on social media. These strategies can then linked to a number of metrics like engagement and participation, customer response to a direct sale or loyalty discounts that can all be created by social networks.

Optometry offices are adopting the use of social media with sites like Facebook and Twitter providing an inexpensive and controlled way to advertise, promote and brand build their offices. Unlike traditional ways of advertising, measuring the return on investment and effort placed social media is requiring us to think in a less traditional way of advertising.

Tracking the ROI of social media requires you to rethink and see the effect of social media as more of how it integrates both with your audience and your marketing plan. Defining what is your intent and how social media works as well as knowing what expectations you have of your social media efforts is the first step.

There are a few things that need to be defined as part of your social media marketing plan and can be implemented as part of your networking initiative.

It is important to first realize the different platforms and the marketing strategies that social media provides, these can be defined into three categories: higher sales, attracting new customers and growing your social reputation or branding.

Once you have defined what your social media campaign intent is, you can easily use the data to analyze the goals you set out to achieve. All that is required is looking for trends and tracing their origin. By tracking the data on your website, the fans on your Facebook page or the response to your tweets, it makes it easy to see if your goals were met.

It is easy to see your ROI by tracking the number of comments or replies to a wall posts that you place or receive. You might place a piece of news relevant to your target audience and see the amount of replies that piece elicits. You can track that data as a percentage of the total number of followers you have on Facebook or Twitter.

You can also directly measure over time periods the number of email subscribers that subscribe to your email database over time and that are obtained via your social media efforts.

You can evaluate whether or not your followers are visiting your website by tracking website visits and origin.

In cases of optical sales you can easily track your sales as a percentage of responders to total audience, or the number of people that linked or clicked to a sale as part of an email campaign.

Optometrist will often give a discount in the eyeglasses as a result of a person interacting via Facebook and in turn exchange a set amount or percentage discount for a “like” in their office on Facebook page.

As you see, all this data can be easily used to help you calculate the ROI from your social media campaigns. It is easy to measure ROI by tracking data but the data and strategy needs to be defined first. Furthermore there are some online solutions that can help you in your online marketing campaign. Google Analytics and applications like Hootsuite and PostRank both of which can track Facebook and Twitter and can also be useful in this endeavor.

There are many statistics that you can evaluate and therefore measure the impact of social media on your business. It is easy and with time you can mix and match your strategies and help you increase both business sales as well as brand awareness.

As much as social media has created a buzz in recent years, we cannot deny the effective power of face to face positive endorsements otherwise known as “Word of Mouth” or WOM advertising.

Professional marketers and doctors alike recognize that word of mouth recommendations are perhaps the most effective at attracting new patients as well as retaining them. We all recognize that social media as well as online advertising are very effective tools at engaging and to promote continued communication with your patients, but to make the best use of social media we must be cognizant of all the varied tools that we have to get our patients’ endorsements. Undeniably, face to face endorsement otherwise known as “word of mouth” or WOM starts in a direct doctor and staff to patient manner.  So as marketers, we must look at the end goal in using Social Media as to capture that WOM endorsement.

In such, marketing and advertising your office online works best when we view WOM as part of our combined effort with social media and online positive reviews. 

So, simply put, nothing beats the power of word of mouth!  

A few suggestions to improve face to face self-promotion and word of mouth referrals:

1.     Start with a measurable plan. Have an idea of what results you want to see such as increasing patient referrals by X amount every week or increasing referrals from MD’s by X amount every week. Track your results and have a measurable goal and a baseline number.

2.     Use consistent actions and track results. Use a regular pattern of communication with your referral source, be it other OD’s, MD’s or patients.  Evaluate how effective the message works and see if different ways to ask get better results!

3.     Use social media to keep in touch! Social media such as direct emails, Facebook, Twitter and such are great avenues to remind people you are there when they need you. It is also a good venue to validate relationships and request new ones. A message in your direct emails, Facebook wall  or an occasional tweet openly thanking patients for referrals does three things: reminds your patients that you acknowledge their loyalty, thanks them for the continued trust and reminds your patients you are never too busy to see their special friends!.

4.     The referral process starts when you and your office staff to ask for and inspire referrals.Enpower your patients to tell others if they had a positive experience. When you deliver a positive patient experience and ask for a testimonial. Many patients are willing to share the negative feedback especially in social sites. Equally, many patients are willing to share the positive experience but they need to be motivated to act and do so. Ask them to go to your facebook page and post it or go to a review site like Yelp.com and post the experience.

6.     Many patients don’t appreciate what they don’t know. Make sure you explain in a simple and direct way what is it that makes your office unique and distinct. These can be simple things as how you deliver the care in a caring manner to how your office helps in the community. Let the patients know about you as much as you ask about them..

The concept of creating an atmosphere that helps in the old fashion WOM advertising has never been easier. Creating an atmosphere that directly asks for referrals can be seen as distasteful and demeaning to some doctors, yet think of who would not benefit from your unique experience and expertise. If your mission is to take care of patients’ eyes and make sure they see their best, you have to let patients know why you are the best option, otherwise someone else will do it for you!