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Should You Use Patient Testimonials in Your Medical Marketing?

Doug Williams @ 7:37 am

This blog entry was posted on December 30, 2011.

One of the purposes of a physician website is to build trust and credibility. You want to attract potential patients that are searching for a doctor. Having patient testimonials on your site help provide third party validation of your good work.

Benefits: A patient’s own words expressing gratitude and appreciation for you, your practice and results they received are very convincing for potential patients. Reading testimonials helps overcome the apprehension and resistance of prospective patients. Patients that give testimonials become more loyal.

Process: Create an easy mechanism to collect testimonials. Create forms that can be completed at your reception desk. Ask patients about their opinions and experiences. Include a release where the patient that allows you to use their testimonials in the marketing of your practice. Maintain a record of these testimonials and consents.

website testimonials

HIPAA: HIPAA in general protects patient privacy. HIPAA doesn’t restrict the use of testimonials. They should be accurate and in the patient’s own words. You should avoid sharing information that may identify any of your patients with any specific treatments.

FTC: The FTC has rules on how any business may use testimonials from their customers. An endorsement or testimonial is essentially a public claim by an advertiser. The advertiser is responsible for the accuracy and to ensure it does not mislead in any way. Avoid false, misleading, or untrue statements.

Regulations: Before using testimonials on your website, you should check with your state licensing boards. Every state has different standards. According to Etna Interactive, Illinois, Kentucky, New York State, and West Virginia entirely forbid the use of patient testimonials in healthcare marketing. You should check with your attorney to see what rules or statutes may affect your practice.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



Rules Are Meant to Be Broken

Doug Williams @ 3:38 am

This blog entry was posted on December 23, 2011.

A rule as defined by Merriam-Webster is an accepted procedure, custom, or habit.

Conformance to rules means doing things the way everyone else does. If you want to be a market leader, you need to separate your company from the pack. You need to be the innovator.

If you want to be outstanding, then you need to stand out. In a world full of people doing similar things, the person with new ideas and new ways of doing will draw the interest and attention of the market.

Are Rules Meant to Be Broken? If you want to be a market leader, then the answer is a resounding YES!

Leadership is focused on outcomes, not necessarily the process to achieve it. Rules tend to focus on the process. A leader has to be creative and willing to introduce change.

A market leader is developing new business models, new strategies and new ways of doing things. Leadership requires the pursuit of innovation, a flow of fresh ideas and a culture that does not accept the status quo.

A leader understands the rules, but is constantly challenging the status quo to come up with a new and better system. If it isn’t broken, a market leader will fix it anyway.

What does it take to be an innovator? It takes a belief that there has to be a better way. It takes constant creativity. It takes observing, networking, questioning, experimenting and challenging the current rules.

The web is one of the fastest changing environments that you can find. It doesn’t matter if you are a web business owner, a web designer or web marketer, you need to be an innovator. This means constantly challenging today’s rules.

The web allows you to measure everything. Website strategy needs to focus on outcomes and innovation. The web allows you test and measure if your new idea is working. If your idea didn’t work yesterday, it may work tomorrow.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



Checklist to Develop Your Own Web Strategy

Doug Williams @ 5:30 am

This blog entry was posted on December 20, 2011.

Marketing Purpose

  1. What is the business purpose for your website? This could include sell products, generate leads, build your brand, reduce operating costs, etc.
  2. Who are your direct and indirect competitors? Indirect competitors may not sell what you sell, but they satisfy the need. Example: If you are a plumber, then the local home improvement store can satisfy the need for the do it yourselfer.
  3. What do your competitors do well and what do they do poorly? What they don’t do well creates opportunities for you.
  4. website strategistHow are you positioning your business? High price, high quality, high service or? This will affect the look and feel of your website.

Audience

  1. What is the demographic of the person you are trying to reach? There could be several groups.
  2. What is there role in the purchase decision? This could be the decision maker, influencer, etc.
  3. Are they B2B (slow, rational and a longer buying cycle) or B2C (fast. emotional and prone to an impulse buy).
  4. What problem or need are they seeking a solution to?
  5. What typically appeals to your target audience?

Action

  1. What is primary action for your visitor? What do you want people to do when they come to your website? Buy, request a quote, signup for your mailing list?
  2. What is your central message? Are you trying to educate? This will affect your content, your tone and your writing style.
  3. What is your selling sequence on your site? This is from when you first grab their attention to the point that you convince them to purchase or request a quote.
  4. Will you collect email addresses? Are you going to offer an incentive such as a free sample or free report?
  5. How will you build their confidence so they trust you?
  6. How will you make it visible and clear so they see your offer?

Traffic

  1. How will you attract people to your site? This could be organic SEO, pay-per-click advertising, social media or even offline methods such as radio or TV.
  2. Decide on your keyword phrases early and build them into your site.
  3. How is your competition reaching out to your target audience?
  4. Are you willing to blog regularly? Blogging reaches out with its RSS feed and attracts visitors. Each blog posting adds one more page of keyword rich content that helps with SEO.

For more on website strategy development.

Measurement

  1. How will you measure success? How will you measure the return on your investment? Some types of websites are easier to quantify than others.
  2. What will you measure? Sales? Bounce rate? Time on site?
  3. What are your specific goals you want to reach? By when?

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



How to Get Customer Reviews and Testimonials

Doug Williams @ 4:10 am

This blog entry was posted on December 9, 2011.

I encourage clients to continually add real testimonials to their website to give the social validation that they provide a quality service or product.

The willingness to post customer reviews on a website is a clear signal to buyers that this company is customer focused and will work to create a positive buying experience. The problem that most small business owners have is they don’t have the time, systems or resources to regularly add testimonials to their website.

Ways to get customer reviews

Ask for it: Encourage reviews on your website, at your retail location (if you have one), or with a follow-up email or phone call. For email and phone calls make it timely. Follow-up should be within 3 days of a transaction.

Make it easy: The more steps or answers that you require, the fewer reviews you will receive. A simple star rating (1-5) with optional comments is effective. The downside is that your website visitors want to see the comments.

Keep it real: Resist the urge to offer incentives in return for testimonials. Your best advocates will do it for free. You want your testimonials to be real and not have the appearance of being “purchased”.

Third party service: One solution is to use a third party service to contact recent customers and interview them by phone or an email a survey. Some of these firms will have you add a widget to your website and then they can add testimonials and reviews to your site.

Customer Review Services

  1. Customer Lobby
  2. Customer Rating
  3. Proven Credible
  4. Verified Credible

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



How to Deploy a Core Story on Your Website

Doug Williams @ 4:50 am

This blog entry was posted on December 6, 2011.

The core story uses market data to engage prospects and show that your company is the logical one to do business with. Core Story is a product of Empire Research Group. This is a great example of education based marketing.

The idea is to educate buyers about their own niche using market research data and market trends. The product is delivered as a polished PowerPoint presentation that is ready to use as a webinar. Once you have a core story built, how should you deploy it on your website?

  1. Messaging: Use the core story to position and differentiate your company. Educate web visitors on hidden trends and problems in making purchases in your market. Show how you are part of the solution. Weave market data into your marketing message.
  2. Animated Header: Put together an animation sequence based on the core story and place it in an animated header on the home page.
  3. Tagline: Use the core story to create a new tagline. This is the short text under your logo. This should be a slogan or a positioning statement.
  4. Video: Create 2-4 minute videos that inform and educate. When presented by your CEO it puts a friendly face on the company.
  5. Webinar: Put on live webinars and allow sign-ups on your website. As an alternative, have a recorded version of your webinar that visitors can sign-up for and then watch at their convenience.
  6. Report: Create a free report that can be used as a sign-up incentive for building your email list. Make the title of your report compelling so that buyers of your products / services are intrigued.
  7. Drip Marketing Campaign: This is an email campaign where pre-written emails are delivered at regular intervals. Use the core story content to write educational emails to people that sign-up to your email list.
  8. Articles: Write and publish articles that will position you as a leader in your market. Always include a link back to your website in your byline at the end of the article.
  9. Whitepapers: Include downloadable white papers on your website that are created based on core story data.
  10. Blog: Add a blog to your website and use the core story content as the basis for many posts.
  11. YouTube: Host your videos on YouTube and create your own YouTube channel. Use keyword driven tags on each video and show your website URL in the video. You will drive traffic from YouTube to your website.
  12. Social Media: Spice up your Facebook page and create compelling tweets using core story content.

Disclosure: I am the president of the website division for Business Breakthroughs International and my team regularly is asked to deploy core stories onto websites. These are the techniques that we use.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



How to Connect With Your Web Audience

Doug Williams @ 4:50 am

This blog entry was posted on November 15, 2011.

The perception of your business is formed the moment a visitor arrives to your website. To connect with your visitor, you need to completely understand your customer (or potential customer). What is their motivation to seek you out? What problem are they trying to solve? What are they worried about? What interests and inspires your best buyers?

You are building rapport and they become your allies. They need a reason to trust you so you need to make your website trustworthy.

A great connection comes from good communication. Good communication isn’t talking; it comes from a deep understanding. It comes from using a shared language, a shared vocabulary, imagery, symbols and behavior. Content on your site needs to be both useful and aligned with the needs of your visitors.

Connection is more than website text. Make it visual.  Use video so they can get to know you. Invest in educating and mentoring your visitors through blogging, ebooks and webinars. Use education based marketing. People respect and trust those that educate and teach them.

Go where your audience is. If you own a restaurant, then your audience will be mobile. Social reviews will be important. Will you offer mobile coupons? Can you automatically provide turn by turn directions from their current physical location? Is your website designed to connect with your customers the way they want to connect?

Your target audience knows what they want and what they are searching for. Optimize your website for the phrases that will bring in the people most interested in what you provide. You will want to think like your customer, not an industry expert. Did you know most realtors instinctively want to be found for “real estate for sale” yet most people actually search for “homes for sale”?

A true connection to your audience comes from a deep understanding of your target market, Then giving tangible value to them in your message.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



5 Pricing Strategies That You Can Use To Improve Your Bottom Line

Doug Williams @ 5:42 am

This blog entry was posted on November 8, 2011.

Pricing strategies are used to influence buying decisions. Pricing presentation is used to psychologically guide consumers and position products.

Left Digit Effect: Shoppers pay much more attention to the left most digits when comparing and purchasing products. Most people make a choice based on the first digit they see. They tend to not see a difference between $5.99 and $5.00 when making a selection. This is according to a study done by Manning and Sprott.

Decoy Pricing: Clients rarely choose the highest price option and often choose a middle priced option. Increase the sales of your higher priced product by adding an absurdly highly priced similar item to your product lineup. You won’t expect to sell many of these premium priced products, but it will increase the sales of your other products which are a deal by comparison.

Price Format: According to a Cornell University study on menu pricing in restaurants, guests given the numeral-only menu spent significantly more than those who received a menu with prices showing a dollar sign or those whose menus had prices written out in words.

Product Bundling: Buyers will purchase a packaged group of products or services and spend more per transaction than if they had to make individual purchase decisions. Customers assume that bundling goods and services will add value and create economies of scale even if no actual discount exists. Use bundling especially for high margin products such as software or digital products where there is little delivery cost.

Anchor Pricing: The anchor price is the fair price for an item in the mind of the consumer. They then compare prices in making their purchase decision. A store that is pricing a coat at $60 that is marked down from $120 is attempting to set the anchor price at $120. Similarly, a sales person presenting three options to a client will present the most expensive option first to create the higher price as the anchor to compare other products against.

Use pricing as part of your online marketing strategies to increase conversions and increase sales.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



Lead Generation is the Most Important Objective in B2B Web Marketing

Doug Williams @ 5:11 am

This blog entry was posted on November 4, 2011.

Business websites should be designed with a specific purpose. This could be to generate leads, generate sales, build brand awareness or to build an online community through social interaction. Some are only an online brochure and have no designed in actions. It’s always interesting to look at surveys of businesses as to what they are expecting to get from their website.

The results from the 2011 State of Digital Marketing Survey are in. The survey was taken in September 2011 with over 500 marketing professionals being surveyed by Webmarketing123. Respondents were 66.9% B2B and 33.1% B2C. These are a summary of the report findings.

Website Objective: Lead generation and sales were the most important objectives for a business website.

  • 46% of B2B businesses say their most important objective is to generate leads. Generating sales was selected by 22%
  • 40% of B2C companies say generating sales was the most important objective. 23% chose lead generation.

Measure of Success: Website traffic was the most common measurement of success for digital marketing programs.

  • 74% of B2B marketers and 80% of B2C marketers measure the success of their efforts through the amount of website traffic.

Social Media Lead Generation: 68% of marketers have used social media as a way to generate leads. Only 55% said they have actually converted these leads into sales.

  • 47% used Facebook for leads.
  • 35% used LinkedIn for leads.
  • 34% used Twitter for leads.

Most Effective Traffic Source: Organic SEO provided biggest impact on helping companies reach their lead generation goals. This was followed by PPC. Social Media provided the lowest amount of leads.

  • For B2B companies: SEO (57%), PPC (25%), Social Media (18%)
  • For B2C companies: SEO (41%), PPC 34% and Social Media (25%)

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



Identify Your Best Buyers to Maximize Online Sales

Doug Williams @ 7:17 am

This blog entry was posted on August 23, 2011.

What separates an average website from a top converting site? It is focusing and targeting the needs of your buyer. Not just any buyer, your best buyer. Your best buyers are the most interested and most likely to buy your product or service.

Your website appearance, messaging and your offer need to target their needs. Understand the psychology and motivation of these buyers. People come to your website to solve a problem or a need. Start by asking yourself 4 questions.

  1. What is the focus of your site? What products or services do you offer? Your website, like your business needs to have a clear purpose. What problems do you solve for your buyers? How is it unique and better than your competition? What benefits will your buyer experience by buying from you? Your home page should address and answer those questions.
  2. Who are your best buyers? What do you know about them? How old are they? How well educated? Income level? Live or work in a particular area? From a particular industry? What position do they hold?
  3. Why would they come? What are their motivations? What personal desires are they trying to satisfy? What are their pain points? Are you closely matching their needs with what you have to offer?
  4. What makes them buy? What is the trigger that will cause them to buy? By showing that you clearly understand their pain, people become much more open to buying. You want to present a website that clearly solves their issue.

Show them you offer what they are searching for and then build their interest. Drive your visitors toward a desired action. Online viewers can only focus on one thing at a time. If you present many options, then they won’t hear any of them.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



7 Secrets of Website Content Writing

Doug Williams @ 4:58 am

This blog entry was posted on July 29, 2011.

Writing for the web is different than writing for print. Writing content for your website is brief and to the point with shorter paragraphs, shorter sentences and fewer words. Here are 7 content writing tips that will help grab your visitors attention and convince them you have what they need.

  1. Solutions: People are looking for solutions and answers rather than to learn about your company. Focus on the benefits and answer your visitor’s questions “So, what’s in it for me?” “What am I doing here,” “How do I do it,” and “Where can I go next?”
  2. It’s about them: Spend less time writing about your company and answer how you will solve their problem. Remember, your primary duty is to give them what they need.
  3. Benefits: Write about the benefits. Benefits are what sell. Benefits are what features mean. Features are what products do.
  4. Get their attention: When they first arrive, they need to immediately see your sales pitch, your offering and even your order button. Don’t make them scroll down or switch pages.
  5. Three second rule: Internet users are active, not passive. If they don’t immediately see what they are looking for, they are gone within 3 seconds. First impressions are critical.
  6. Be brief: Use shorter sentences, words and paragraphs. Use one idea per paragraph and use about half the words than you would use in writing for print.
  7. Easy to scan: Your reader wants to scan down your web page and get the gist of it before reading. The main points should stand out in sub-headlines, lists, images, colors, italics and indented text.

Good content writing entertains, educates and convinces your audience. By skillfully weaving in keywords, content writing also gets the attention of the search engines.

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Filed under: Internet Marketing



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