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Physician Marketing

October 28, 2004

After spending multiple years in medical school and then in a residency, the sad fact of the medical profession is that not every doctor can always make it to the big time of Porsches and fancy homes that we see on television and the movies. In fact, full transparency of a physician’s earnings might reveal that they are working longer hours for less money than an equivalent professional in the law or business fields.

But doctors do get to save lives, and that cannot be underrated. Whether you work in a small clinic, or a big city hospital, every day you may be put in a position where your skill could mean the difference between life and death. These kinds of special circumstances often mean that physicians ignore the marketing aspects of running a practice.

From all around the United States, physicians compete to be the one that helps you feel better. With all this competition it is crucial that physicians market themselves to the best of their abilities. From New York to San Francisco, and all the little cities in between, medical doctors are fighting to save your life.

And it shows. In the United States medicine is a multi-billion dollar industry, and with every practice trying to get a piece of that pie, it can be extremely difficult to stand out from the rest. Competition is tough, but with an effective physician marketing system, you could be seeing the patients roll in, and rolling out in a cherry red 911 Turbo.

By using the Internet’s most powerful tool, the search, physicians can market themselves online with a geo-targeted approach. By pinpointing the people in your community who are most likely to be searching for a doctor, you can guarantee an influx of clients that will surpass your wildest expectations.

Due to the rapid expansion of the Internet (over 100 million Americans log on every day), it has become clear that it is an untapped reservoir for advertising. Physician marketing is no different. By taking advantage of the technologies that exist today, you can create your patients of the future.

Search-based, online advertising takes you ad and places it directly where it can be seen by anyone searching for the verticals that your practice is attached to. Setting up an online physician marketing system today could mean the difference between driving that Ford Taurus into work again, or pulling up in an $80,000 luxury automobile, complete with leather, CD player, and Blue Tooth compatibility. And after all those years of long nights studying and doing rounds, don’t you think you deserve it?

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Vertical Marketing | Comments Off

Negative & Positive Keywords

October 24, 2004

This is a very important lesson to learn about Google AdWords. Overture has a similar system, but the amount of negative keywords allowed per keyword is quite limited.
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Google AdWords Jargon

October 22, 2004

Once you say pay per click so many times, it degenerates into ppc. The same can be said for many words that are constantly used over and over. Here is a list of the most commonly used conventions.
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Chiropractor Marketing

October 11, 2004

As many people know, treatment for back pain is now a 100 billion dollar business. From direct treatment to prescription drugs, sufferers of back pain-especially chronic back pain-are fast becoming one of the top spenders in the United States in terms of medical dollars.

And while there is still no consensus as to which type of treatment works best to cure back pain, the patients keep streaming in, spending over 1% of the nation’s GDP on back pain treatment.

All these figures point to the fact that the market has never been more ready for an influx in chiropractors. The only problem from the standpoint of these doctors is: how do I make it so that my practice stands out against the competition? In an increasingly flooded market, the community might ignore one small chiropractor’s practice if they do not engage in an effective chiropractor marketing system.

Chiropractor marketing represents the only way to make sure that you get a piece of the market share in your community. And with over 100 billion dollars floating around in the US alone, that share can mean quite a large amount of money.

But advertising a medical practice is often a very difficult thing. Many doctors still believe that word of mouth is the only way to attract clients. And indeed, personal chiropractor referrals a potential patient’s friend or colleague is a great way to go, especially considering the high level of trust people typically need to feel before signing up for a doctor’s appointment.

But many people with back pain also use a number of different references to search for chiropractors in their neighborhood. This is where marketing can become a huge factor for a chiropractor.

In fact, chiropractor marketing should rely heavily on making sure that your practice is the one that people see when they begin to search for relief for their back pain.

One of the most underused fields in terms of marketing for chiropractors is the online search. Placing your advertisement online, in a search-based system, represents one of the most effective and cost efficient ways to market yourself to your community.

Using the online search means that anytime someone in your community goes online to search for a chiropractor, your advertisement will pop up immediately in front of them. All those people searching for back relief will be lead directly to your office, allowing you to expand your business and hopefully get a small piece of that 100 billion dollars.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Vertical Marketing | Comments Off

Overture’s new features

October 3, 2004

We all knew that the DTC was going to be down, and that new features were coming.
There is now a daily budget feature under accounting. It lets you specify how much to budget per day (however, I don’t see any details under their help for exactly how it’ll work - if it’ll be nonstop until the budget is hit, or space out the impressions like AdWords). The default ‘auto credit charge’ is a full month’s budget. So, you might want to make sure that you’re not being charged 10k at a time, but rather a number you’re comfortable with.

The new advanced match system is now in place where you can choose either standard or advanced match. As before, there are some words that it won’t let you switch the matching option (I’ve got both 1 word and 3-4 word phrases that it won’t let me change).

However, some of those words that aren’t changed when you change more than one at once, or change an entire category’s match level, will let you change the match options if you just select that specific word and try to change its match option. (Odds are, there is a bug at the category or keyword level that will later be changed.)

As previously noted, you can now have 45 negative keywords.

If you use Overture conversion stats, the stats previous to 10/2 aren’t showing up in the ‘Manage precision match’ area, however, you can still run reports which contain this data.

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, PPC Info, Yahoo Search Marketing | Comments Off

More on Advanced Match

October 3, 2004

Advanced match works differently than broad match.
The system analyzes the entire query.
It checks for standard matches.
It then checks the advanced matches.

Standard matches are shown first.
Advanced matches are run through filters.

An advanced match must have everyword in the query - it doesn’t broad match similar keywords like Google where ‘ring’ can be matched to ‘jewelry’. It does use stemming matches though.
See: http://www.content.overture.com/d/AUm/ac/ba/mt_int.jhtml

It then has another algo that determines if the searched for query is close enough to the advanced matches to show. In a lot of cases, ‘junk keywords’ can’t be matched to anything - so no matches are shown.

Now, the above is more sophisticated than it sounds.
A search for ‘red widget Alaska asdfe’ will usually show an ad for ‘red widget Alaska’ as 3 out of 4 words are identical.

The search for ‘widget asdfead’ most likely won’t show anything as half the words aren’t matched to anything.

Advanced match is good to use to pick up phrases like ‘buy a red widget’, ‘buying red widgets’, ‘finding pink & red widgets’ etc.

Geo based keywords stop a lot of advanced matches. Overture has worked hard on ‘Overture Local’, and many geo qualified terms stop advanced matches unless the geo term is included in the phrase. This isn’t true for many product searches (like wedding gift), but it is true for many local services, like ‘dentist’.

However, their geo terms aren’t perfect yet. A search for ‘Juneau Alaska dentist office’ brings up 0 results, where a search for ‘Alaska dentist office’, brings up a pageful (and some have the keyword phrase ‘Alaska dentist’), so the system should be showing the ad for ‘Alaska dentist’ in that search - but it’s not for some reason.

I think we’ll see advanced match showing more impressions over time. Not because of increased search volume, but because the system will start to better target geo qualified terms and understand longer product based phrases (i.e. buying a wedding gift in Chicago)

Written by Brad Geddes aka eWhisper · Filed Under Blog, PPC Info, Yahoo Search Marketing | Comments Off