BRINGO Blog

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