Last week, we learned about a partnership between Yahoo and Yelp, where Yelp will now provide listings for local businesses on Yahoo. Sounds good, right? Isn’t integration between platforms a good thing?

Not necessarily. The downside to the Yahoo/Yelp partnership is that when searching for a local business on Yahoo, years of old Yahoo reviews are now gone and replaced by Yelp reviews: Dan Tringale, a business owner from Massachusetts, saw 50 Yahoo reviews- reviews that had been built up over six years of hard work- disappear.

So what does this mean for your medical practice?

We’re big fans of social media, but at the end of the day email is what will drive sales.

Just a few weeks ago, we wrote a blog post saying that local businesses, like doctors, should make growing their email list their marketing focus not growing their Facebook fans. Email marketing is effective. There’s an over $40 ROI (return on investment) for every dollar spent, on average, in email marketing. But sending an email from your normal email client (like Outlook) if not effective.

If you want to get the most out of using email as a marketing tool, you’ll need to use an ESP, or Email Service Provider. An ESP like MailChimp, Constant Contact, or StreamSend is a company that allows you to easily send out mass emails.

Here are a few reasons why you should use an ESP:

Search engines are the new “Yellow Pages” for local businesses, like medical practices. Some facts:

• 97% of consumers turn to search engines like Google and Bing to find local services, including medical practices (according to research from BIA/Kelsey and ConStat).
• According to research by Chitika Insights (featured on the Marketingprofs.com website) companies that appear as the 1st search result in Google for a given keyword, receive 33 percent of search traffic, compared to 18 percent for those that come up as the 2nd result.
• The drop in traffic is even more significant between pages of search results. The first page of Google search results generates 91.5 percent of all traffic, while the second page only generates 4.8 percent of traffic.

Earlier this week we interviewed our SEO team and distilled what they told us into 6 steps your practice can take to increase its search rankings.

“This specialist was recommended but their online reviews are not very good. I don’t feel comfortable using them.”

This comment was made by a friend of mine just a couple of weeks ago. It drove home the fact that online reviews really are becoming important for medical practice marketing.

You can do a great job of your marketing to get prospective patients to notice you and research you but if your online reputation is weak those prospective patients may never show up at your practice.

Okay, you’ve got a blog for your medical practice and a website … now what? These pages won’t do you any good if nobody finds them.

But how do you help people find you? That’s easy- SEO. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the process of creating and optimizing a website to appear high in search engine results.

While paid ads that place you at the top of the page are an option, free actually perform better: according to internet marketing agency Imforza, 70% of the links that search users click on are organic, or non-paid, search results. And considering most people don’t bother scrolling past page one of results, you really want to make sure you appear towards the top.

Here are some tips on using SEO to help grow your medical practice.

“You drive for show, but putt for dough.”

Spring is here (today) and the Masters golf tournament starts in 3 weeks. If you’ve every played more than one round of golf, one of your playing partners has probably uttered this classic Bobby Locke expression.

So what does this have to do with marketing a medical practice? Today’s post is about email addresses. If I we were talking marketing rather than golf I’d change this phrase to:

“You get Facebook fans for show, but gather email addresses for dough”.

I started out my research for this post with a different post in mind.

My concept was to show you several examples of good ebooks medical practices have on their websites and how those help them in their marketing. And I hope that may be one of my next posts. To find these ebooks to show you I reviewed dozens of medical practice websites in New Jersey (where we are based.)

But none of those medical practice websites have an ebook. None. Maybe medical practices don’t need ebooks in their marketing.

This post is about why I’m not convinced of that.

If you’ve been reading our recent posts on medical practice marketing, chances are you already know that social media can be a great tool to help grow your medical practice.

But how do you make your presence on Facebook, the biggest social network of them all, work for your business? With 1.11 billion users as of last November– 665 million of whom log on every day- you know that the audience is there, so now it’s time to create a page.

Here are five tips for effectively using Facebook to best market your medical practice.

1. Post regularly. It’s important to post on a regular basis to keep patients engaged with your page. According to Social Bakers, five to ten posts per week is ideal.

Social media is a lot of work. Should your medical practice bother with it?

The answer to this question in the end is a personal one but since we’re social media believers, we’d like to lay out a couple of reasons that make it worth doing.

1. Shows you are a true expert in your field

Showing is better than claiming.

A lot of doctors have their academic certificates hanging on their office walls. These certificates show patients you’re credible. They help us know that you’ve been trained at some of the best institutions and are an expert in your specialty.

In today’s world social media marketing is a must for every business, including medical practices. If you are a medical practice considering expanding your social media efforts, consider these 5 basic areas:

1. Educate patients

According to a recent Pew Internet study, 72% of Internet users reported searching for healthcare information online within the past year. Clearly consumers are looking for reputable medical information online.