BRINGO Blog

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.

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.

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.

Latest numbers on online advertising from the Internet Advertising Bureau and Price Waterhouse Coopers:

http://iab.net/news/pr_2007_11_12c.asp

Online advertising hit $5.2 billion in Q3 2007, up 25% from a year ago. The dollars are following the potential customers — which makes a lot of sense. People are increasingly looking for businesses online (see my last post), and online advertising offers a great way to reach them — it’s much more measurable, and your spend can be scaled to results. What’s not to like?

Oh yeah — it is time consuming and complex if you don’t know what you’re doing. More on this later…

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

Some more local news coverage on BRINGO. Last week NoPhoneTrees.com was featured on KCWE-TV and KMBC-TV in Kansas City/Nebraska areas, and also on WCNC TV (NBC) in the Carolinas, and WISN-TV Milwaukee (ABC).

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.