BRINGO Blog

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.

Looks like we’ve been on TV– Here’s a video clip that was shown on NBC Action News in Kansas City. From what we can tell, we were also on in Sacramento, Seattle, Memphis, Portland, Paducah, and Fargo!  Probably a bunch we’re missing based on our traffic today, but we love the attention!  Hope you enjoy the site.

Thanks to some complementary coverage from TechCrunch and from ABC-7 news in Los Angeles, we’re getting a (more than slight) bump in traffic the past day or so on our customer service phone site: nophonetrees.com.

We’re getting some great feedback from users, both through the feedback forms on our site, the contact us, form, as well as in the comments on this blog (I think my personal favorite is the Poem someone wrote about BRINGO in the comments on Techcrunch:

Just when I’ve become
Madder than a dingo
Along comes relief
In the form of Bringo

No more hold tape
Of elevator retreads
Why wait 30 mins
Before discussing my meds

No, I do not work there
Not pimpin my VC dime
I sing the song of Bringo
Because it gives me back my time.

Thanks, DotPoet — I don’t think I could have ever hope to say it better than that.

We’re doing our best to respond to everyone and also incorporate the tons of constructive comments we’ve gotten to improve the site.

Keep it coming — we read everything you post to us, and are already working on incorporating some of the specific comments we’ve received!