Marketing for Physicians That Turns Empty Appointment Slots

at the work we did, from Steven Giannotta, MD, Vaughn Starnes, MD, Inderbir Gill, MD, Jay Lieberman, MD, Stephen Gruber, MD, John C. Liu, MD, Preet Chaudhary, MD, Craig J. Baker, MD, Yuri Genyk, MD and more. Not only that, our CEO of our community hospital we bought was begging for exposure to get more patients in the door. Our healthcare marketing department was on thin ice, but I was just hired to work here. My boss, the director of digital healthcare marketing, wanted me to create the first proactive digital medical marketing strategy for the academic medical center that we would be able to build our reputation off of with the primary intent of driving patient volume. He told me to do absolutely nothing for the first 90 days, but to go to meetings with the chairs, learn the ins and outs of how the medical enterprise worked, ignore any academic request that only benefited the school completely, and then come up with a growth digital healthcare marketing strategy to dominate our service area. Coming from an automotive background with almost an entire decade in the field, this was my first time in medicine. I had a lot to learn and used every opportunity I could to completely understand the landscape, by closely studying what we were doing, what our competitors were doing, plus peeling through what was working for each specific service line and also what wasn’t working. I also took the time to deeply understand what the highest priorities were for each service line. In my discovery, one of the biggest challenges I saw for our brand was that everything was written at an academic level. That type of doctor marketing and service line marketing disconnected our patients more than it connected them to us. Our target market of patients we wanted to market to were PPO holders, which is like a director at the LADWP or SoCal Edison or some executive at Honda of North America. While deeply educated, even they would have trouble understanding the high brow academic public healthcare message we were trying to convey. One of the most influential moments of my healthcare marketing career here was when I was able to speak with each doctor one on one. We would discuss what they did by phone for 30 minutes. I would break down what they were discussing in a way that anyone could understand. It didn’t make sense to me however, how so many other writers spoke with these doctors previously, but never took the time to distill down what they were saying. Did they actually understand all of the medical linguistics behind what was being discussed in their healthcare marketing collateral? Because I had a lot of difficulty reading the content we were developing previously, and if I did, I was sure that our patients were experiencing the same problem. And that just wasn’t good medical marketing for our doctors… While making the content easy for anyone to understand was just one tactic that was initiated, we also quoted our physicians into our healthcare content for our multiple medical practices as well. As that content got syndicated across 150 media publications, our doctors became featured in TIME, Sporting News, Quartz, Inc. Magazine, Forbes, International Business Times, MEdical Daily, Huffington Post, Apple News and more. That content also picked up 2 million additional reads during my tenure there, and an additional 1 million reads to date. Out of the pages we developed on the website, 18 of the 25 top pages on the website were built under my purview, earning first page Google rankings nationally for priority service lines. These singular pieces of content were read 73,000, 77,000, 77,000, 93,000, 108,000 and even as high as 162,000 times each and every single year. We made videos that got 10s of thousands to hundreds of thousands of watchers, and even had one of Dr. Mark Humayun that hit over 1 million watches. Most of our ads that I managed with my small miniscule budget resulted in clicks well under a dollar. The website experienced 5x growth from 90,000 pageviews a month to over 450,000 a month. But how does that translate into revenue? We went from $900 million annually in 2015 when I started to $1 billion annually by the end of fiscal year 2019, experiencing 25 percent year over year growth each and every single year, totaling $250 million in revenue in the healthcare system for our academic medical center. What was more dramatic than the revenue shift, however, was how our healthcare marketing department was treated. Within six months of deploying the strategy, the chairs and professors (and the CEO of the community hospital) were no longer angry at us. They no longer despised us. They no longer demanded more out of us. Instead, they complimented the hard work we did. They were grateful for the changes we made. They wanted to actively participate in anything we were making. And they couldn’t believe that more patients were walking in the door, and citing the work that they saw we were creating online. The ripple effect of marketing affected the entire hospital. We made an impact with each and every single chair of every service line and gained their respect because of how well we planned and executed the new digital strategy for the entire enterprise. We created the halo effect, where the chairs elevated the university, the university elevated the physicians, and the physicians elevated the university, all together as one. What can be done at scale, can also be done at an individual level as well. Even if you are a single physician clinic, we can use many of the same tactics at a scaled down, hyperlocalized level, to fill up your empty appointment slots and with the right tactics that move the needle, turn your medical office into a fully booked practice through strategic doctor marketing. Whether you are operating a small medical practice or a healthcare powerhouse like an academic medical center or large medical group, we want to help you shift the dynamic of your healthcare practice and dominate your local service area. These results speak for themselves and we can make the same impact for you that we did for this academic medical center, no matter the size of your medical practice. Ready to dominate your service line in your local area? Schedule a free medical practice growth review now!