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Electronic Marketing
By Morgan Stanfield Marketing in the digital age is a whole new ballgame, according
to Elizabeth Mansfield, Outsource Marketing Solutions, though it's
not necessarily one that everyone wants to play. In the past,
practices generally relied on word-of-mouth referrals, yellow page
ads, and mailings to lists of likely contacts. Now, Mansfield says,
you need, "a piece of Internet real estate.... You can find almost
anyone on the web if you type them [into the search engine], but
people like to see a site that belongs to you, and then you can use
that in so many different ways to amplify your word of mouth."
Those ways vary from purchasing advertising from web browsers to
"Web 2.0" functions--Internet features that allow patients to
interact with websites, even adding to them, and allow
practitioners to address existing and potential patients and
referral sources in novel ways.
Dennis Clark, CPO, President, Pointe Health Centers of America,
Waterloo, Iowa, and President, Clark & Associates Prosthetics
& Orthotics, Waterloo, says that Clark & Associates
recently added new interactive features to its site, including
condition-specific patient-health information, links to support
groups, practitioner bios, and space for patients to add
testimonials. "I run into practitioners and business owners at
conferences all over the country, and they say, 'Well, my patients
aren't Internet savvy,'" he says. "First off, they're selling their
patients short, but they're also selling short the influence of
those patients' neighbors, church members, sons and daughters,
siblings. A huge percentage of patients and patients'
families and caregivers who look for information... are doing
research on the Internet to help them make quality decisions. And
so the number of hits on a monthly basis on our website because of
the upgrades that we've done and the resource base that we've put
on there are absolutely remarkable, and the amount of business that
we're getting locally and regionally because of the information
that people get from our website and the follow ups that we do when
they ask us questions, is remarkable."
Practices can also purchase advertising on websites that potential
patients might visit, such as Disaboom, a social networking site
for people with disabilities. Such ads can be tailored to appear
only to people in a target geographic location. Web browsers, such
as Google, also offer advertising. These type of ads appear only to
people who seem to be searching for something related to the
practitioner's ad.
Mansfield's current favorite tool is the e-mail newsletter, which
she says maximize her clients' outreach without their having to
invest in postage or printing. She calls them, "really, really
effective for any company if you do it right... especially for
small patient care offices." They're also trackable from some
e-mail systems. Microsoft Outlook's read-receipt function tells the
sender which addressees opened each e-mail. If the sender
subscribes to a service such as Constant Contact, the user can also
tell which links in the message were clicked and which led to
requests for more information. 
Table Of Contents - September 2008
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