BRINGO Blog

Most analysts say that more than 80% of internet searchers click on the “organic” search results as opposed to the paid advertisements on Google or the other search engines.  We agree.  So while we do manage some paid advertising campaigns for our clients, we have focused on developing our in-house expertise on Search Engine Optimization.  We have gotten good enough with healthcare SEO that we are signing up local provider clients to our product (BRINGO Top Rank) you can click here to learn more about it:  http://www.bringodentist.com/top-rank.html

This is a service where we can get YOUR website to the top of google so that prospective clients see your site the moment they are looking for a “dentist in (your area).”  Sometimes clients want to appear at the top of cosmetic dentist in their area, or chiropractor, etc….you get the idea.  Our clients tell us what services/products they want to sell more of…and we tell them how we can help them use Google to get there.

But of course, the proof is in the pudding…so allow me to show off a bit…without revealing the secrets of our clients, I will focus on some of our own properties and a few partners.

Go to google.  Type in “dental marketing” and you will see www.bringodentist.com in the top 5.  Try dental websites, and you’ll see the same thing.  Not convinced?  Try chiropractor marketing.  Or chiropractor websites.

If you want to see what we do for clients, try typing in “electronic claims” and you will see www.ansdirect.com at the top of the search results.  Every day, our client ANS is getting phone calls from prospective new clients because of our optimization.

Of course, search engine optimization takes a little time.  We just began a project to optimize a site focused on offering dentists the best online continuing education courses with access to over 150 CERP accredited courses.  The project is www.bringopro.com and over the coming weeks and months…we will also make this visible in the search results for “dental ce or dental continuing education.”  (now we are in the third page of google….the process has just begun).

Thanks,

Mark Grazman

I attended a great conference last week (not only great because it was in Orlando while I am in cold Chicago)….but also because of the quality of speakers. I was giving the talk on Healthcare and Technology, particularly how payers and providers can embrace the internet and leverage the power of new technology to grow their businesses and their practices. For those of you interested in the conference….it already happened but here’s the link: http://www.iirusa.com/dentalbenefits/eventhome/35951.xml

Okay, onto some fascinating data points shared by presenters that got my attention and should get yours:

1) According to a study by IOM (Institute of Medicine), it takes an average of 17 years from the time when a new discovery/treatment that is proven effective (e.g. treating ulcers with medication) for that treatment to become widely practiced.

2) According to a study by NCQA, 57,000 people die every year in America because physicians are not following clear trends from ”evidence-based medicine.” Said another way, this is the staggering cost of the 17 year delay game because it’s hard to spread information throughout our fragmented health care system.

3) We all know about the challenge of rising Medicaid and Medicare costs. We also know that we sometimes get better data from the government sponsored programs than we get from the fragmented insurance industry, so from both perspectives….think about this….The Institute of Medicine did a study in 2006 that found 50 cents of EVERY $1 dollar spent by Medicare was spent in the last 8 weeks of a patients life.

4) Some other engaging Medicaid/Medicare facts: these programs cover 65% of all nursing home residents in the United States (44% of all nursing home costs). In 2005, Medicaid passed up Medicare in terms of the # of lives covered. In an average month, there are 49 million Americans covered under Medicaid.

Fascinating stuff. Data can help us understand our costs better, help patients and providers make better choices, and even start a discussion about how we as a society spend our valuable healthcare dollars.

Stay warm everyone….the winter is almost over….

Thanks,

mark

Lots of chatter these days about how the Yellow Pages are dead — stocks are down 80-90% from a year ago for most of the major YP companies:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120399101723692463.html

UPDATE 3-6:  This MSNBC video also harps on the death of the yellow pages theme

http://www.cnbc.com/id/15840232?video=676088789

I think that it’s still a bit premature to say that traditional yellow pages advertising is completely dead — I think they are still relevant in some markets. Overall YP references are down about 2-3% year upon year, but clearly the movement to online is accelerating, according to the Kelsey Group:

http://www.kelseygroup.com/press/pr080110.asp

http://publications.mediapost.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=Articles.showArticleHomePage&art_aid=74131

While the YP companies are finally starting to move aggressively online, they’re just one of many effective media that patients use to find new dentists or healthcare providers (and fairly far back in terms of importance, after the search engines, local directories, and vertical directories).

How effective is your website in bringing you prospective patients?  Do you know?

According to a survey in 2006 by Advanstar, dentists are getting on board with building websites (over 65% had websites or were planning on building one within the next year).   Given what we’ve seen with prospective patient behavior (the Internet is the #1 resource patients use to search for dentists and other healthcare providers, surpassing yellow pages and other offline resources), this is a good sign.

However, it is clearly the early stages for many providers, as the same survey found that 35% of dentists with websites either did not know whether their website had brought them new patients, or said their site had brought them no patients.

This is consistent with what we’ve seen among our client base — which is why all our patient generation programs have measurement of the effectiveness of our campaigns built into the package.  We track everything from the visitors that comes to the website, where they are coming from (down to the campaign and even keyword advertising level), what they do while on the website, and, importantly, how many of those visitors actually pick up a phone (or fill out out a schedule form on the site) and attempt to schedule an appointment.  We also offer the option to record all phone calls generated by our campaigns, so that offices can tell how many of those calls resulted in new appointments, and how many were just kicking the tires.  Our most diligent clients will also take that to the next level and track whether those patients come in for their appointments.

By providing this data, our clients are able to see instantaneously how well the patient generation campaign is working, and get a full end-to-end view of the patient generation process so they know exactly how many patients are generated for their practices each month, and what that means to the bottom line.

Gathering this data is also important in that it allows us to optimize the campaigns that we run.  Much of online advertising is about experimentation and testing — the Internet world is changing constantly, offering both new opportunities to find new patients, but also making older tactics obsolete fairly quickly.  The only way to make sure you stay ahead of the game is to constantly test new things, and measure, measure, measure results.  We are able to instantly tell when a campaign isn’t generating as much patient traffic as before, and make adjustments accordingly.  In this way we constantly optimize the campaigns we run, in order to make sure our clients are seeing a great ROI for their online advertising dollar.

A recent article in Forbes highlighted the growing demand for cosmetic dentistry in the US, citing a survey of members of the American Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry showing year over year growth of cosmetic dentistry patients of 12.8%.

Similarly, a recent Dental Ecomonics/Levin Group dental practice survey showed average gross dental practice production went up 7% in the past year (lots of great stuff in this survey — more on this later). This is all great news for the health of the industry — patient demand is up, as well as production — especially in such highly profitable areas as cosmetic dentistry.   The results we’ve gotten for our clients certainly do nothing to disprove the notion that patients are out there, looking for dentists.

So things are great — what’s a smart dentist to do? Sit back and enjoy the good times while they last?

I’d argue that now is exactly the time to be doubling and tripling your efforts to bring in new patients. There are more new patients in play than ever before, and each patient is worth that much more once you bring them through the door. It is much easier to keep a patient coming in once they have a relationship with your office, than to constantly generate new patients — especially when the times turn and things are not as good. Now is a great time to be out there establishing long-term relationships with new patients while they are in play — it’s the best way to ensure that your practice will be healthy during the bad times as well as the good.

I had meant to blog about this earlier, but it somehow got lost in the holiday rush.

TechCrunch published a great chart that shows the traffic for the various Google properties. Google Maps ranks 4th, behind general search, image search, and GMail, and also posted one of the top growth rates of all the properties (52% growth from a pretty large base of traffic).

Coupled with the recent research that shows that online resources such as maps and local search has surpassed offline media as the main place people look for local businesses, it’s obvious that paying attention to making sure your practice is visible across the most important and fastest growing online properties such as Google maps.

How do you make sure your practice is visible? While conventional wisdom says that you need a website to get started on the web, the business listing is also becoming increasingly important. In fact, for many of our clients, business listings in local directories and those focused in dental, chiropractic and other healthcare-related spaces provides a significant percentage of new patients we drive to their practices, and are often more ready to set up an appointment (begin further down the decision-making cycle).

Business listings appear on Maps whenever a user searches for a dentist, chiropractor, or healthcare provider in their area from the Maps or Local interface. In addition, it appears on the main search page (if it is optimized correctly) when someone searches on a geographic- and category-related term (such as Dentist San Diego, or Chiropractor Chicago). A basic business profile may already exist in many of the properties for your practice — most of the big players buy their data from big data clearinghouses and pre-populate basic information to fill out their directories. However, I’d advise taking a closer look at what’s contained in those listings, as most potential patients will want to know more about your practice than simply name, address, and phone number. Most directories will allow you to add additional information such as a practice description, office hours, specialties, languages spoken, parking availability, and other information that is important to potential patients. Providing and updating this information is important, as the more complete the information is, the more likely a patient will pick up the phone and call you to set up an appointment.

One other thing to notice is that many of these directories collect and/or aggregate consumer reviews. This is also becoming increasingly important to marketing your practice, as managing reviews can make or break the image your practice has online. I will write more about this topic in upcoming posts.

Chris Smith at Search Engine Land posts a useful article about the many things to think about when creating and optimizing your business listing to become visible potential patients who may search for you on the Internet:

http://searchengineland.com/071217-081815.php

Based on our experience with our clients, the local listing is a basic building block for driving online patients to your practice. Many of the topics that Smith touches on are accurate — we work with our clients to make sure the important ones for their practices are covered, including making sure the address is correct and represented correctly on the various mapping services, office hours, languages, areas served, payments, and services provided.

Once the basic listing is created, it is then important to distribute the listings across the myriad of places where patients are searching, including Google Local, Yahoo Local, Microsoft Live, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Local.com, Citysearch, Yelp, and dozens of others. We’ve found that a well-managed and optimized listing can provide dozens of patient phone calls a month, and be a key part of a successful online marketing strategy for our clients’ practices.

Most people have a sense that the Internet is becoming a more and more important medium for people to find things in general, but how does that tie back to healthcare providers who are looking to find new patients?

According to WebVisible/Neilsen, the Internet has surpassed traditional print media as the # 1 place where consumers look for information when making a purchase from a local business (courtesy of Greg Sterling):

(click to enlarge)

Search engines have surpassed the print Yellow Pages as the top place people look, with several other online venues also prominent (Online Yellow Pages, Consumer Review websites).

Based on our experience with our clients, the healthcare space follows this larger trend where users increasingly look online. The mix is slightly different and more fragmented than the above chart shows (search engines tend to occur early in a consumer’s search process, whereas some of the other more specialized media specific to this space tends to be important to the decision process as well). The mix also will differ often based on geographic area as well (some sites are more important on the West Coast, or in certain cities).

While for many healthcare providers, it is natural to spend thousands of dollars a year on yellow pages ads, many of them are not following their potential patients online, and thus missing out on a huge opportunity. Potential patients are out there looking on the internet for information about providers and also talking about specific providers and comparing them to the competition.

Finding these patients online and getting involved in the online conversationcan be a daunting task for those who are not familiar with where to look and how to manage them, but as patients move more and more online, those who don’t make themselves visible there risk being left behind.

We have been working hard over the past few months to enhance the BRINGO product offering to provide local healthcare providers (think dentists, chiropractors, cosmetic surgeons, doctors….) an easy way to leverage the potential of the internet to get new patients walking through their doors. There are many complicated and expensive marketing schemes out there, both on-line and off, that make it hard to get for a healthcare provider to get started, let alone have a cost-effective marketing campaign on the internet. At BRINGO, we worked hard to make it easy.

How? We let our healthcare partners focus on offering great care, while we use our proprietary BRINGO Patient Generation Program to get the internet working for them. While there are many companies out there who will spend your marketing dollars for you, the BRINGO approach is different: we offer a turnkey solution focused exclusively on local healthcare providers. We build your web-site, develop an internet marketing strategy (which includes advertising campaigns, ad copy, etc…), run your campaigns in the places prospective patients are looking, track the results, and only charge our providers for actual results.

Most of the internet marketing companies out there prefer large clients that spend thousands of dollars per month. They make their money as a % of what their clients spend, so naturally they focus on getting their clients to spend the most money they can. However, we built ourselves to focus on the small to mid-sized healthcare provider who may spend between $189 (our starting price) and $1,000 per month. We don’t have any large corporate clients and we don’t want them. What we are good at is focusing on getting to prospective patients while they are searching on the web for a new provider in their area. We developed the Patient Generation program to allow us to use our healthcare expertise to develop healthcare specific internet advertising strategies that simply outperform those offered by our non-healthcare competitors.

We will be writing more tips here for our healthcare providers to understand why they DESERVE a healthcare specialist and not just an internet specialist when they are trying to build their practice. We will also debunk some of the common myths about internet marketing and help local healthcare providers make better decisions about how to think about the internet as one more key resource in building their practice.

For today, I just wanted to let everyone know about our success in developing the Patient Generation Platform and signing up happy healthcare providers to the program. We have our R&D team working hard to make sure we offer the biggest bang for the healthcare providers buck, and we will have some exciting new offers coming out later this year.

Okay, enough talking about….go check it out. Some of our key specialities include dentistry, chiropractor marketing and plastic/cosmetic surgery. We are working with focus groups of healthcare providers and will be adding more specialities soon.

As always, our partners offer us great feedback, input and advice. So let us know what you think….and watch this space….there’s some more cool stuff coming soon.

Enjoy!

-mg

By now, most people will acknowledge that the Internet is a great way to reach potential customers — for both large and small businesses. People are going online to search for everything from sports scores to potential dating partners, and yes, for healthcare providers like dentists.

The dentists we’ve talked to have varied in their sophistication from those who have no website whatsoever, to those who have a great website, and promote it heavily through Pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns on the major search engines. The majority of those have some sort of web presence, but have not taken the next step of promoting their websites. And very few dentists could actually tell you what their return on their spending was on website and web promotion.

One of the main issues is that unlike an e-commerce business, where transactions take place directly on the site, most folks looking for a dentist will need to complete their transaction (i.e. setting up an appointment) offline. Thus, unless the office is very diligent about asking all new patients how they found the office, it is really hard to figure out how clicks from a PPC translate into real patients coming in the door.

Further compounding things, is that while most search engines do allow you to do a fair amount of targeting (based on searches consumers type in, time of day, or geographic location of the user doing the search, etc.), the level of targeting does not allow an office to target to the level that is really needed to guarantee that they are paying only for real potential patients. For example, a user who finds a dentist’s website from a search on dentists in the Chicago area, may actually be located 20-30 miles away from the practice, and therefore be extremely unlikely to become a patient no matter how nice the website is. Based on our experience the search traffic is incredibly fragmented by geography (as well as other factors like specialties desired, payment/insurance type, etc.), meaning that most dentists who advertise online are paying a lot of money for consumers who will never become patients.

With the early success of our “find a dentist” service, we’ve found that converting “clicks” to our website into phone calls that leverages the phone and receptionist that the dentist already has allows the offices we work with to have a pretty clear ROI on their investment with us. They know when a call comes in that is generated by BRINGO, and their success rate in converting our calls into patients has been quite good.

As we build out the site, we hope to continually offer better and better targeting options and education for the consumer to help them make informed choices, which will ultimately allow us to provide both the patient and dentist with better and better matches. Watch this space for more as the next few months will be fun.