This week on the DrMarketingTips podcast, you’re in for a real treat. We’ve compiled the best conversation nuggets from our new Facebook live show (that airs every Wednesday at 2:00 PM).

Listen in as Jennifer, Corey, and Danielle, discuss how you can compete with a hospital who lands in your neighborhood, the implications of the new Facebook algorithm for healthcare, and ways to use Facebook live videos to boost your marketing efforts.

Plus, you’ll get the goods on why organic content continues to be the number one traffic driver to practice websites, and the right way to evaluate social media and website metrics.

Tune in to discover:

  • How to develop a short and long-term strategy to compete with a hospital that moves onto your doorstep
  • What Facebook’s new algorithm means for medical practices
  • How your practice can use Facebook live videos to boost engagement across the board
  • Tips for using organic, personal content to drive traffic to your website

Free Healthcare Awareness 2024 Calendar

Nearly every month of the year has a health holiday or observance, and there are also a number of awareness months that your patients and staff would love to know about. You also don’t want to miss chances to celebrate with your practice’s followers.

Free Healthcare Awareness 2023 Calendar

Nearly every month of the year has a health holiday or observance, and there are also a number of awareness months that your patients and staff would love to know about. You also don’t want to miss chances to celebrate with your practice’s followers.

Transcript Notes

Speaker: Doctor Marketing Tips. Paging Doctor Marketing Tips. Doctor Marketing Tips you’re needed in the marketing department.

Speaker: Welcome to the Dr. Marketing Tips podcast. Your prescription to the answers you seek to grow your medical practice easier, better, and faster. This show is all about connecting practice administrators and medical marketing professionals with peers working in practices, learning from experiences, making mistakes and sharing successes. Let’s get started.

Jennifer: Hey there. Welcome to the Dr. Marketing Tips podcast. This is Jennifer and I want to say thank you for joining us this week. We’re doing something a little bit different and that’s because we’re taking some of the snippets from our new live show on Facebook live that airs every Wednesday around 2:00 PM and we’re taking the, kind of the best of the best of those conversations over the last couple of weeks and compiling them into thi s week’s episode. I think you’re in for a real treat. Let’s go ahead and get started.

Jennifer: Corey and I started our day extra early because we had a conference call with a pretty large practice who happens to be another Ortho practice and their practice administrator and their COO? I think-

Corey: Yes

Jennifer: She’s the Chief Operating Officer.

Corey: Correct

Jennifer: Well they have recently received notification that one of the large nationally known hospital chains is moving into their community, and they had been told previously that the hospital wasn’t coming or if they came, it was more in name only, but they weren’t hiring orthopedic surgeons.

Corey: Right.

Jennifer: Well now there’s a group of independent practices where we were on the email chain, that this large hospital group is actually gotten multiple ads out looking for orthopedic surgeons to move down to this area, and so we had a big strategy meeting on what we’re going to do to counter the hospitals. And the one thing we were talking, Corey and I had a pre-meeting before the meeting and we were saying, strategically speaking, there’s not much, you’re never going to compete with a hospital this size.

Corey: [inaudible]

Jennifer: No, and this is a, this group has a huge name ID and they’re known for having a quality experience. But what we can do is lean very heavily into the strategy that we already have out there. Really leaning into the online reviews, specifically. And then you know, right now you might have 30 reviews per doctor.

Danielle: Yeah

Jennifer: But the goal would be, let’s have a couple of hundred by the time this hospital chain moves into the area, because by the time we do that, they can’t catch up.

Danielle: Right.

Corey: Well I also, I mean that practice has been there for decades. So they’ve been the orthopedic leader for decades-

Jennifer: Decades.

Corey: In that area and the hospital can never say that?

Jennifer: No, absolutely. I mean, bu the hospital can say that they’ve been around for decades.

Corey: Sure, but not in that community.

Jennifer: That’s it. So we had a big come to Jesus this morning, talking about the difference between, what do you do from a strategic standpoint of a large hospital group moves in and then that’s on one, and then separately, how do we really amplify the fact that they’re independent and how do we lean into those patient stories? Because at the end of the day, the only thing that’s going to make your practice different from anybody else is the stories of the patients themselves. And so that’s what we do.

Corey: So we’ve got a client, they’re an independent practice and there’s a hospital that’s moving in basically to their doorstep, and so what we found out about this last week, and we’ve been, I think we’ve had what, three meetings so far.

Danielle: Yeah at least three meetings

Corey: Just got off a call with them, and it’s interesting. So there’s, we’re developing a short-term and a long-term strategy. So the short term is basically like, let’s make sure we have this, we have a little window of time before we know that the hospital is gonna come and spend a lot of money. So short term, what are we going to do to sort of increase name recognition and how are we going to do that without having to take out loans and blow up the b`ank, basically? So we’re working on that now.

Corey: And then long-term, we’re talking like three to five years. We’re looking at like every element of how this practice runs and so that’s administration, it’s operations, how they hire, how they fire, how they communicate, what patients actually think of them, which I think is a really cool exercise because we always sort of assume we know and we just sort of tell the message that we think people want to hear, but we don’t really ever ask them. So it’s a really cool opportunity, not only for us to find out what patients in this particular demographic are saying, but I think it’ll help all of our clients because we’re going to be able to take this knowledge back and say, well you may think that your position to X, Y, Z, but it’s actually totally different. We heard it straight from the horse’s mouth. So.

Danielle: Yeah, I think what you said too, it’s definitely a big learning opportunity for us too. And I think the word strategies, strategy is important because it’s easy to think of little tactics like, oh we should buy this app or we should spend here, we should spend there. So it’s not tactics. It’s like a complete strategy, take a step back and look at everything. So I think that’s just a learning opportunity across the board for us and our client.

Corey: Yeah, and then there’s definitely you’re going to have to spend money, for sure. Because if you want to increase brand recognition, name awareness, there’s only so much you can do sort of without spending some money. But it’s about spending money in the right ways and the right places and then having that right message too, which is why what we were just saying, it’s kind of important to know what the perception is and what people are actually saying rather than just assuming. Because you could buy it, like you said, like print ads and radio ads and talk about your doctors, but does anybody really care? Would they rather see a patient? Which is how we always try and market it. It’s like let’s focus on the benefits and the results, but maybe they would rather see the doctors or maybe they would rather see a before and an after or whatever the case may be. So it’ll be interesting.

Danielle: Facebook is changing their algorithm again. Sure, sure. But this one is actually interesting cause it’s, they’re addressing sensational health claims. So these kind of miracle cures for overly exaggerated results. So obviously this relates to us for the medical field and kind of how you’re portraying your results or your patient’s stories on Facebook. Right now their kind of goal is to minimize health content that is sensational or misleading. Right now it says that they’re, they want to focus on posts that are trying to sell products that have all these health-related claims, buy this and you’re gonna instantly lose a hundred pounds. Things that are sensationalized.

Corey: Are you old enough to know snake oil, like a snake oil salesman? Have you ever heard that?

Danielle: No, I actually heard you say that yesterday and I was like, yeah, cool Corey.

Corey: Yeah, so it’s like when someone that tries to sell you something, but it’s sort of fake. It’s like, they used to travel around in these little get-ups, they would get out and stand up on the soapbox and say like, this potion or whatever will make you six feet tall. Just put two drops on your head in the morning. It’s not an actual thing. So, is that what they’re trying to-?

Danielle: Yeah. So for the most part pages shouldn’t have too much to worry about if, like a lot of what we do with our clients-

Corey: If you’re legitimate

Danielle: Are like legitimate patient story sharing their experience, but if you say that doctor is going to do back surgery and you’re gonna do a back flip the next day, that might be a sensationalized claim. So just something to pay attention to. Facebook’s always changing their formulas, and so just another thing to-

Corey: And I would imagine too, this probably would affect a, maybe not so much like medical practices, but some people that work in medical practices, they have like a side hustle, right?

Danielle: Yeah.

Corey: And they, they’re part of those nutrition shakes and those kinds of things. Like I wonder if those businesses are going to be really affected.

Danielle: That’s what I would imagine, and I think it’s more product sales spaced as well. So, I mean a medical office is more like a service-based, rather than order this product online and it’s gonna change your life kind of thing. So it’ll be interesting to see how that affects [crosstalk 00:08:09].

Corey: And it’s funny, as you, as they’re going through and making these changes, I wonder if they’re related to the fact that as of right now, I think two minutes ago, right?

Danielle: Yeah.

Corey: The Facebook is broken, none of the images are working, right? On Instagram too?

Danielle: Facebook and Instagram, so it’s like, there’s broken image things, where it’s like the little green background of a broken image. So that’s happening on Facebook and then Instagram because it’s connected to Facebook. So you’re probably experienced that, experiencing that as well.

Corey: We went ahead and went live with the big Facebook live Q & A that we were setting up with a orthopedic surgeon that we work with. I think it went as well as it could it have.

Jennifer: I thought it was great. I thought it was great.

Corey: Yeah. On and off we had, I think 80 or 90 people watching and had a bunch of comments, a bunch of feedback. And what was nice too was a lot of his team and people at the practice tuned in. So created kind of, created a buzz within the practice and it’s nice because Facebook makes it really easy to save those videos and then embed them. So what we can now do is jump on the website, we can put the video right there and it’s just, we can use this over and over again, and it was, it’s cool cause nobody else is doing that at least not [crosstalk]

Jennifer: Yeah, and I think you can take those questions and we can use them as FAQ’s on the website after we can transcribe it.

Corey: Yeah, so the whole thing took about 20 minutes or so and I don’t remember how many questions he answered, but they were all really good succinct answers. So like you said, I think we can turn those into FAQ posts, social posts, all that kind of stuff. Wasn’t a ton of the set up and-

Jennifer: What was the setup that you used?

Corey: So we actually signed up with a software called the E-CAM and it’s like a subscription base, but it essentially turns the computer into a production studio. So we had a couple of cameras there, which may, you can switch through the camera angles really easily. We can see the comments live, we can share them, we can respond to those comments.

Jennifer: I’m going to say this, I was there-

Corey: It was cool.

Jennifer: And it was very legit.

Danielle: I saw the setup.

Jennifer: Talk about people having some pride with the fact that they had this big computer and everything-

Danielle: Check her Instagram story for the behind-the-scenes.

Jennifer: Yeah. That was great, it was great.

Corey: We knew what we were doing.

Jennifer: Yeah we did. Did you have any oh shit moments?

Corey: At the beginning I was, well, okay, so we scheduled it and yes, we-

Jennifer: Always.

Corey: Yeah, we scheduled it for noon and then it was, cause there’s a little countdown on there and it was a minute and a half to go and the doctor was still seeing patients and I was like, what are we going to do? We can’t prep him, I can’t stop it.

Danielle: I remember I was watching the countdown. I’m like, I bet Corey’s freaking out now.

Corey: Yeah, and then [inaudible] came back and then we had time to say, “Hey, how’s it going?” and then he went “What am I doing again?” And we told him and he sat down and then…

Jennifer: [crosstalk] So talk about that because you mentioned Andy.

Corey: Yeah.

Jennifer: Did you, so in the past when we do live videos, we sometimes just do a straight with the doctor and I thought this one, the physician was a lot more comfortable because of this, the way that you guys-

Danielle: The interview style.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Corey: Yeah. We tried to do an interview style almost like a moderator. So we had someone from the practice basically be a host for the live video. We actually wrote out a little script for him so he knew where to pause, what to say, how to wrap it up, and then we had a signal for when we were coming to a close cause it was during the physician lunch hour, so we wanted to get him out of there so he could have lunch then get back to clinic. So we hit a certain point, I gave the signal and he wrapped it up, and then with a call to action, if you wanted to learn more about the doc or schedule an appointment, go here and do that.

Jennifer: So when you were doing that, I, cleaning everything up at the end I was having a conversation with the person, the rep from practice and I was saying that when they’re ready, what I want to do is, I want to do this exact same thing, but remember when you were in elementary school and they did the morning announcements on video.

Corey: Yes, I was on those.

Jennifer: Even if we do like a weekly announcement. But what a great way to disseminate information-

Corey: Absolutely.

Jennifer: To like put a name with a face and to get it out, practice-wide. You do a quick video, whether it’s a close social media group or you take that video and pop it on the internet. Super simple, doesn’t cost anything, great way to create that connection with patients or with employees. So I think that’s a win, win, win, win, win, win.

Corey: Yeah, it was cool technology and I’m excited to see what some of the other physicians think and how it takes off.

Jennifer: So what time of day did you do that?

Corey: It was at noon.

Jennifer: Alright, so it’s at noon and this is 2:11 PM that we’re having this conversation and just a few minutes ago I got the Google alert showing that the Facebook event had already indexed for the practice.

Corey: Awesome.

Jennifer: Which means that there’s SEO value and organic ranking value that goes with this too. So I think that’s just, that’s huge.

Corey: Yeah. And then like we said, we can take that video, saved forever on the Facebook page, but we can archive it, embed it, put it on the website so we can use it in a bunch of different places, in a bunch of different ways.

Jennifer: That’s great. All right, that’s good stuff. Just live on Facebook or did you put it live anywhere else?

Corey: For this test, it was just on Facebook. We can actually stream on other services too, but we just didn’t

Jennifer: All right

Corey: For today.

Jennifer: Live and learn, right?

Corey: Exactly. Yeah.

Jennifer: It’s a good testing ground.

Corey: YouTube and Twitter. We’re going to simulcast next time for sure.

Jennifer: Next time we do this, are we going to simulcast too?

Corey: Yeah-

Jennifer: That’s a yes. That’s a yes. That’s great. That’s great. Awesome.

Corey: So I’m working on client recaps and what we’re finding is we’re going through, we actually just had a meeting yesterday where collectively as a team we were going through sort of the top level analytics numbers and it’s interesting. So we want to do that one, so obviously we’re all on the same page. We know kind of like what’s going on and if there’s trends developing, but what we were seeing is what’s, what’s really cool is we’ve launched a bunch of websites recently for clients and some of the ones that we did four or five months ago, the organic search content that we’ve been writing and putting up, it’s starting to hit. So you’re seeing year over year numbers for this website jump like 70% and it’s a direct result of that organic content. So that’s always reassuring to see that we’re moving in the right direction and we’re delivering what we say we’re going to deliver.

Corey: And then when you see like the red numbers pop up, it’s always interesting to see that too. It’s like what’s happening? Is this something we need to be aware of? And then when you start to talk through it and you look at the data, you say, well, depending on where we’re looking at this, do we spend a bunch more money last year? So we were just on the phone with a client earlier and we saw a 24% decrease and his-

Jennifer: How did he take that?

Corey: He was fine with it because we had an actual reason as to what, what had happened. And we just told them that, last year we did this big Mother’s Day promotion

Danielle: Spent like $2,000.

Corey: Yeah. Exactly, and so we didn’t do that this year and then there’s a direct correlation and causation that we didn’t spend that money, numbers went down. So we spent the money, they’d be where they were [crosstalk]

Jennifer: How were his sales? How were his sales?

Corey: They were down a little bit. But again, because we were driving to a specific appointment-

Jennifer: That’s interesting though, and he probably noticed it, and he’s like what’s going on? And we’re like well you didn’t spend the money.

Corey: Right, exactly. Yeah. So he wound up saving more money on the advertising, but obviously there’s less visits, less conversions. But for that same client, organic traffic, again, the stuff you don’t pay for, was still up, I think like 11%.

Jennifer: I think out of that exercise yesterday and the day before. One thing that really stood out to me is when we were looking at the metrics of the measurables and conversions. And there was one in particular where the conversion numbers were down, where they were different and then we started talking about we, because they’re using a, the-

Corey: Different software.

Jennifer: The software for scheduling appointments that we can’t get the conversion number from it. So then our measurement tactic changes [crosstalk 00:15:44], but then we were like, well we can’t measure it and we kind of threw our arms up in the air and then after we dove into it a little bit more, we said, all right, we can’t measure that but maybe the definition of a conversion changes. And I think that was a valuable exercise because it makes you look at things in a different way and it’s easy to say like, well we can’t do it or it doesn’t measure that way, or like impressions. Why are impressions through the roof? Or why are they low? a question like why do we even measure impressions and ad words? Because impressions are user driven.

Corey: Right, it’s a vanity metric. [crosstalk]

Jennifer: It’s a totally a vanity metric. So I think it’s important to once a quarter like we do, to dive in and really look at what you’re measuring. I think it’s valuable to look year over year. But I think also for some of our clients when we started looking at year-to-date that told us whether we’re on the right track or not.

Corey: Yeah, and I think it’s important to say too that we always try and provide some sort of analysis or context to these things. And that can be, just be something be aware of if you have a website company or whatnot and they just send you a report weekly or monthly, they just spit one out and you look through the numbers and you say, oh, we’re up great. Oh we’re down great.

Jennifer: But you don’t have the true context.

Corey: Right and you don’t really know why. So just something that kind of be on the lookout for is you, sometimes you might need to actually sit for a second, digest what you’re looking at and then figure out why things are trending either in the right direction, the wrong direction, or they’re stagnant.

Jennifer: I think another takeaway from that exercise, from a social media system standpoint-

Danielle: [crosstalk] say the same thing.

Jennifer: Is what was performing, what has performed this year and what hasn’t performed, and what performed really well.

Danielle: Yeah, I mean whenever we sorted it by just organic engagement, it was always this stuff with staff, or the doctors, or patient. The real personal in the moment post always far exceeded any of the other posts in an organically as well.

Corey: Yeah, that’s a great point. So those posts did really well from an organic reach and impression standpoint, engagement. So everyone that’s a fan of that practices social media loves that stuff. But then if you looked at the clicks, you say, oh my goodness, we’re down like 12%, well that’s because we didn’t post as much content that included a link back to the website, but that’s okay because look we’re making up this ground, [inaudible] just people just aren’t clicking on something but that’s-

Danielle: But that’s an interesting thing that we saw by kind of looking at everything. It’s like why are the clicks, referral, what is it called? Referral click links from social so low and it’s because we have been pushing this organic real content that you wouldn’t say like “Our staff’s having a great Friday, here’s a link to our website.” No, it just doesn’t make sense. So having that kind of, more fun social post that you want to have on- [crosstalk]

Jennifer: Well I think it backs up some of the strategic changes we’ve been making this last year. We were finishing the ability case study that we did with our staff. I was working on that again this morning with Lawrence and I think that’s going to be a really strong piece when it comes out to lay out that policy. When I was talking to Bevins from Array, which is our podcast that’s coming out tomorrow, when I was talking to Bevins last week about it, I told her about the ability case study. They want to run the same contest. [crosstalk]

Danielle: Wait I’ve already cut the layout.

Corey: Everybody should.

Jennifer: So like it’s that. Yeah, everybody should, and I think when you were talking with the doc today, didn’t you share with him that his engagement is down and what was kind of the conversation there?

Speaker 7: They have an internal person that’s gonna be kind of coordinating the staff to get more in the moment photos. But he has kind of two service lines and engagement was up in one of the service lines, because those staff members had been sending content and then it was down significantly in another service line because we weren’t getting content for that service line. So it was kind of like, this one’s up because you’re doing kind of what we asked you to do, but this one’s down because we’re not doing what you asked.

Jennifer: Absolutely.

Speaker 7: And it’s kind of a good way to show you’re up here because good job you’re doing that, but you’re down here because [inaudible]

Jennifer: I think it goes to, you can have an agency or a partner that you’re working with and we can only do so much. But our job is to teach you how to be successful too.

Corey: Yeah, and that was actually one thing that I wanted to mention. So what was interesting is when we said that you were down over in this area and we said, well, maybe it’s cause he was trying to incentivize his staff. Maybe it’s the incentive that you’re offering and he said, no, it’s me, I need to basically lead them better and get behind it and then if I show enthusiasm I know that they’re going to pick it up and I thought that was awesome.

Jennifer: It’s awesome. So yeah, I think that the, we know this stuff intuitively, it just makes sense to us, but when we’re looking at those numbers, it made us better add, even the doctor today, it made you better prepared to have that conversation with them.

Corey: Absolutely.

Jennifer: Absolutely.

Jennifer: Well that just about wraps it up for the week. I hope that you enjoyed this week’s episode and if you want to check out more of our weekly behind the curtain live Facebook video series, be sure to jump over to Facebook and search doctor marketing tips. Make sure you get onto that list so that you can be notified, and again, this is Jennifer with the Dr. Marketing Tips podcast. Hope you enjoyed it and we’ll see you next time.

Speaker 3: Thanks for listening to the Dr. Marketing Tips Dot Com podcast. If there’s anything from today’s show you want to learn more about, check out Dr. Marketing Tips dot com for our podcast resource center with all the notes, links, and goodies we mentioned during the show. If you’re not already a subscriber to our show, please consider pressing the subscribe button on your podcast player so you never miss one of our future episodes, and if you haven’t given us a rating or review yet on iTunes, please find a spare minute and help us reach and educate even more of our medical practice peers. Thanks again for listening and we’ll catch you next time. Doctor’s orders.

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