DIGITAL MARKETING CAMPAIGNS BOOST ORTHOPEDIC SURGERY BOOKINGS
orldwide, our orthopedic surgeon clients in private W practice are experiencing increased competition. They ask us for help to develop new ways to connect with patients
and prospects and to design their strategies and tactics to support their business growth goals. Consumers spend hours looking online for health services and specialists. They don’t seem to spend as much time reviewing the brick and mortar facility because most agree to let the surgeon or specialist choose the place where they will have their surgery. Actually, in the USA this makes sense because not every doctor maintains unrestricted medical staff privileges on every hospital in town. In medical tourism at destinations outside the USA, American patients are often put off that the hospital is doing the marketing because they tend to place their trust in the man or woman who will cut them open, not the building where the surgery will take place. This differentiation between systems design confuses American patients because they are not accustomed to being “assigned” to a specialists or consulting physician’s “service.” As a result, Americans click through most medical tourism facilities’ boring websites and click off with a low engagement high drop off rate leaving medical tourism hospitals scratching their heads. A proper digital campaign strategy for orthopedics is a great way to take a more targeted approach, and drive more leads with a reduced cost per acquisition. It takes only a few months to drive leads that can be nurtured to mature into lucrative surgery bookings. The key to digital marketing campaign effectiveness is to identify the targeted micro audience where patients are likely to be located. For local and regional care, targeting a standard metropolitan statistical area together with adjacent counties is best. For medical tourism, the usual radius is about 2000
km from wherever the destination is located. The Need to Transform In the past, most of our orthopedic surgery clients used only traditional campaigns: mass mailings; TV, radio, recall cards, and out-of-home advertising; and billboards. Since they rarely knew better, they thought little about what they could do better. Many of the orthopedic surgeons actually liked driving by their pictures on the billboards. Unfortunately, these types of campaigns rarely generate the results they need, especially in the face of increased competitive marketing and advertising by hospital employed physicians and paid for by hefty advertising budgets at the hospitals. Hospitals can outspend a private practice physician on these “big brand” tactics and strategies. Solo surgeons and small groups must begin to develop an arsenal of new tactics to support their business’ growth goals by using a different approach. Direct digital marketing is the way forward for surgeons who can’t compete with the advertising approaches used by bigger brands such as hospitals and enormous multicity/multi-state health systems who often allocate 3% of net revenue to advertising and marketing budgets. Digital campaigns are the only way to drive more leads and reduce the cost per acquisition for a surgeon. How to Connect with the Market Consumers look online for health services, which means there are more ways to interact with the consumer. By developing a strategy with a more targeted approach that integrates traditional and digital marketing, we can connect with consumers in ways that are relevant to what they are searching for in the moment. We don’t have to wait for the commercial to run, or for them to open the newspaper, read the mail, or to drive by the billboard at exactly the time that the light turns red so they have time to read the billboard.
The Challenges to Change So often, physician marketing has consisted of “what we do” the doctor’s CV”, and “which health plans we contract with”. It seemed simple enough. But now, times have changed. Consumers demand relevance. So designing a digital marketing strategy for a surgeon comes with several challenges. Surgeons must be willing to re-craft their marketing messages. Messages about the doctors and their services that were once perfectly acceptable have become ineffective. The new messaging strategies we are developing for clients must focus on what the surgeon can do for the consumer or patient. This must also be balanced by the fact that a surgeon cannot ethically or legally promise specific results. One such campaign that was very effective and produced 700 calls over 4 months was “End your joint pain and return to your favorite activities.” Surgeons who lack an appreciation and understanding of digital marketing find it difficult to commit to too much, too fast. They resist change. Due to their egos, they also resist accepting guidance because they are smart people and they use their computers all the time, so they are at a loss as to why this is so complicated. They have tremendous difficulty understanding how a digital consumer clicking on a smart phone would behave and respond when it comes to choosing them in particular. They also have difficulty understanding how the sales cycle works in the digital world. The complexities of designing and placing an ad on Facebook are completely foreign. Most have never taken an opportunity to search their name online to see the number of rating sites or see their personal star rating. Sometimes, this too is excruciatingly painful for them. At Mercury Advisory Group, we have a sophisticated platform that we provide to our clients so that we can help them track their digital campaign successes from all across the Internet, campaign by campaign, channel-by-channel. This saves their staff from spending on average 30 hours per week to manage the social media marketing activities. For an physician of any specialty (even veterinarians!), each campaign should have a goal and a way to measure the data. Without data, they won’t be easily convinced. Start slowly Design and launch your first digital “pilot” campaign. Set a budget and a realistic time line to see results. It takes work to track calls, emails, and other engagement actions. Someone must be ready to receive the calls at a special, designated telephone number. We have ways to get these special telephone numbers and email addresses pretty inexpensively, but the manpower costs a little something. You really don’t need a sophisticated CRM system. You need someone willing to track the results and handle tasks associated with engagement (answering calls, emails, and providing flawless first encounter service.) After the pilot campaign, you’ll be ready to apply some tweaks and launch a few more. Don’t make one campaign for knees, hips, shoulders, hands, feet, ankles, and elbows. Target one or two for each problem or each procedure. If you don’t have the staff or expertise, that’s when you call in the troops for support and assistance. Addressing the Challenges of Consumer Behavior Tracking To be able to track consumer behavior and digital marketing results, you could subscribe to an expensive customer relationship management program, but that takes us back to too much, too soon. Don’t spend that kind of money until
you prove you need it. If you were a 300+ bed hospital or enormous health system, I would encourage the purchase or lease. As a private surgical practice, and just starting out, the same recommendation would have the surgeon writing a referral to the psych unit - and rightfully so! There are many other ways to manage data and tracking, starting with a pencil and a notebook - the old fashioned way, progressing to a spreadsheet, and getting daily or weekly reports preformatted from a managed service provider. We generate these reports twice daily, but the client only gets the report if there is some action or decision to be made that falls outside our original guidance parameters. The latter is what we offer and the cost is less than paying a staff member to do it. It is a great way to get your new digital marketing strategy implemented at the lowest possible cost to see if it will work - for you. The key points to be taken into consideration are tracking campaign data from first to last touch to support nurturing, testing, and determine return on marketing investment (ROMI). Think about your goals and objectives for each campaign before you begin. If I am your consultant, be prepared to answer: • What is the objective of each campaign—responses, leads, appointments? • How many appointments, patients, etc., do you want/ need? • What orthopedic problem will you choose for your first campaign and why?” A competent consultant works with you and your practice manager and supporting staff member to answer these questions, and then works with you to set realistic expectations to discuss processes to achieve the measurement and evaluation (M&E). You should expect that there will be different quality among leads and they will vary between diseases and conditions. If your results from traditional marketing campaigns are diminishing, rather than trying to revitalize an ineffective strategy and toss money down the drain, try digital for awhile. You may never go back to traditional advertising. Campaign Goals The number one goal for your orthopedic surgery digital marketing campaign should be to drive new patient appointments that lead to incremental revenue for your practice. More specifically, appointments must ultimately convert to surgeries, but sometimes that cycle can take months - or longer. To be effective, you should target age groups that are likely to require surgery and respond to a message that appeals to patients looking for an active, pain-free lifestyle. I’ve used this same strategy against orthopedic surgery for my stem cell clients who target patients with osteoarthritis in other countries. Digital ads, such as those you see on the top of Google searches (they’ve recently removed them from the right side margin) or on Facebook can also be developed. The ad need only say the following: RELIEF FROM KNEE PAIN Get your life back. Request an appointment with Dr John Doe, Board Certified Orthopedic Surgeon Today.
The second campaign pilot is a landing page on a website. The visual is an active middle age couple in golf attire with the words “Stop your knee pain and get back on your game. On the page, the only other option is to complete for a callback and/or to download a focused brochure.
so select about 10 key performance indicators (KPIs) to track impressions, clicks, conversions by marketing channel, demographics, time of day and week, and deployment-type attributes. Those are the need-to-know items. Everything else is “nice-to-know” if you have time to pay attention to it.
Campaign Design Don’t be intimidated by campaign design. Here’s what it involves:
Campaign Phases • Launch: Month 1-2 • Refinement: Month 3 • Fine Tuning: Month 4-6
Demographic and Geographic Targeting 1. Micro Audience Persona - Primary: 45-64 years old, balance M/F, commercially-insured 2. Location: the local metropolitan area and adjacent counties Two calls to Action (CTAs) 1. Download a Guide (You’ll need an e-document prepared and ready to send) 2. Request an Appointment Communication Channels 1. Traditional: None 2. Digital: Search engine optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click, Display Ads,and Social Ads. In many client projects, we create a total of 10 different ads for Facebook, which is the primary social media channel for this demographic for the first campaign. What If • We often design a supplemental email strategy to nurture prospects if no appointments are scheduled • We test numerous images and various calls to action across multiple assets to see which ones resonate best. The Power of Real-Time Data Unlike traditional campaigns, digital marketing provides realtime data and feedback on how well your campaign is doing. This allows you to remain informed on a daily basis about what’s happening. That doesn’t happen with cable TV ads, billboards, or newspaper ads. With digital, you can react and respond more quickly. You will be able to can prove or disprove your ideas and strategies quickly. The amount of data produced by each campaign can be overwhelming
The Bottom Line When your campaigns start producing, the hospital will recognize something has changed. First, they will see your surgery bookings increase. You may exceed your block times. When that happens, you become the “golden child”. Your success will create quite a buzz across the health system. When it comes time to expand your block or pick a new facility that can give you more time, reward the one who collaborates with you the best. Best in terms of patient satisfaction to protect your brand, new equipment you need, and high HCAHPS scores, best pricing, and best service. Give digital marketing campaigns a chance to prove that it works and produces fast, tangible results. If you believe that you might benefit from a little coaching and help with strategic planning and implementation at first, we can help you. It isn’t expensive and if you make only $1 of profit over what it costs you to try it, then your marketing campaign paid for itself. Call us today to get started. Mercury Advisory Group 600 17th Street - Suite 2800 South Tower Denver, Colorado 80202 USA USA Toll Free: 800.727.4160 International: +1.303.823.4662 info@mercuryadvisorygroup.com www.mercuryadvisorygroup.com