BRINGO Blog

Hello everyone, we are baking in the sun, working hard and hoping you are enjoying the summer.  We have been spending plenty of time with some exciting insurance carriers as we continue to develop our Bringo Direct Connect and Bringo I-Find products.  As all of you are, we are watching the national debate on healthcare and healthcare reform and we remain passionate that fundamentally…healthcare consumers need more information and more tools to make better healthcare decisions.  Reforming our system is important (and it is clearly broken), but any kind of restructuring needs to result in more informed consumer decisions, less defensive medicine, and a healthy dose of pragmatism. 

If you want to see one of our latest projects, take a look at our directories: www.findachiropractorpages.com and www.findadentistpages.com.  While we launched these in the past few months, already thousands of people each day are coming, rating/reviewing their providers, contacting their providers, and laying the groundwork for another valuable source of information for consumers out there.  We have remained pretty darn quiet about the directories but it’s not our noise that will bring consumers…it’s our optimization.  In the fall, we will be rolling out some VERY exciting features that will allow providers (e.g. dentists, chiropractors, and others)…to see a one-stop-shop dashboard that will give them a better sense of what’s happening on the internet in their geographic area than anything out there….as well as helping them understand their own internet profile/visibility and attractiveness. 

We have continued to sharpen our search engine optimization skills and are helping some important partners for BRINGO achieve high placements on keywords that help expand their business.  Want a good example….type in “electronic claims” into google and you’ll see our client www.ansdirect.com placing very highly.  This SEO prowess is winning us and our clients new clients, new patients, and new strategies for using the internet to grow, grow, grow.

That’s all from BRINGO-land for the moment.  Enjoy the summer!

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

The USA Today recently published a good article summarizing the phenomenon of online reviews. As we’ve highlighted before, traffic to local business maps and reviews sites is growing at an incredible rate, and most local search properties now offer the ability for users to rate and review local businesses, including dental, chiropractic, podiatric and other medical practices. The number of reviews online is also growing fast, with some sites claiming hundreds of thousands of reviews.

Thus, managing and soliciting reviews is a critical part of the online marketing mix that also includes creating an effective practice website, driving traffic to your website, measuring and tracking results, and managing online listings. Studies have shown that a majority of searchers for local businesses will read reviews about a business before making a decision, and many consumers’ decisions on providers are affected by reviews. We’ve also seen evidence that having many reviews from a large variety of sources can also help a practice website or practice directory listing rank highly in search engines’ local category searches, which increases visibility of the practice and helps to drive traffic and ultimately patients.

Actively managing your review profile should include actively soliciting good customers to write reviews of your practice online, paying attention to reviews that are written about your practice on the various directories, and responding to both positive and negative reviews that are out there. Doing this properly can take some time, but in the end it can have big payoffs in terms of a positive online reputation for your practice, greater visibility on the web, and ultimately more traffic to your website and patients in your office. If you don’t have time to do it yourself, this is a service that we offer to our dental, chiropractic, and other medical practice customers

Via the “Medical Quack” blog:

A recent article in the SF Business Times finds that the proliferation of ratings and reviews is having little effect on consumer behavior because it is confusing them.

Based on our experience, I’m not sure whether the conclusion is totally correct — we have seen a positive effect in generating new business for dentists and other healthcare providers based on positive reviews that we have helped them generate through their patient bases.  My guess is that the effect of the reviews probably depends on the sector and the source of the reviews - and the effect may not be as measurable in the aggregate, but for individual healthcare practices that manage their online reviews well, it can make a big difference in generating new patients.

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.

Just a quick note to wish all of our readers and customers Happy Holidays — thanks for all your support over the year.  We’re looking forward to making 2008 a good year.

Here’s an good article in Search Engine Land that summarizes the evolution of search and how it is changing how people look for products and services online:

http://searchengineland.com/071127-091128.php

Danny Sullivan has put “universal search” or “blended” search in the “Search 3.0″ category, which basically means that the search engines can now break down and show search results from more specific “vertical” search engines (such as news or shopping) that may give a closer approximation to what the user is looking for. According to Sullivan, the next generation of search includes personalization and social networking (a vague notion of social networking).

Of course this is all very search-engine-centric. As we’ve seen with our clients — much vertical search and social networking (predominantly in the form of reviews) is already happening today on directories, local sites, and social sites.

The key for local healthcare providers is being visible not only in search engines (which are an important part of any search marketing strategy), but also across a wide variety of sites where qualified searches for healthcare providers are happening in their area.

We were on TV again — this time on ABC-News affiliate KOCO in Oklahoma City on their “What Matters to You” segment.  Here’s a link to the video.

Also, the St. Paul Pioneer Press did an article on us a while back and reposted a link to us in their web links section.