If you are a reproductive endocrinologist (RE), you don't have an easy job. I don't mention this to state the obvious, nor flatter you, nor am I referring to surgical talent, study, or training.
It's heir-apparent that one of the most difficult aspects of the role of an RE is serving a population under enormous emotional and mental stress, who are often financially burdened, subject to unfair social pressure, all within great deal of outcome-uncertainty.
Many physicians tell me they just can't think of what to write for their fertility clinic's blog. They know they need to blog, but they're often unsure about which topics to write. This is often an indicator that we need to review why blogging is important in the first place . Bing, Yahoo, and principally, Google, have all tremendously improved their algorithms to help people find the exact information they want. In short, the search engines will help patients find you if you are the source of the answers for which they're looking.
While search optimization is necessary, the single greatest priority is making sure that your fertility center's website is a source of as many answers to patient questions as you can author. So how do you know what content to create?
Here is the most important thing for reproductive endocrinologist and infertility (REI) specialists to keep in mind when responding to reviews: the reviewer is not the only person to whom you are responding. The reviewer has an audience. That audience is comprised of the people who are using these reviews to decide if they should become your patient. This is why Google ranks these sites on the first page of a search for your fertility center or physician name.
Online reviews are your practice’s public image to everyone who has not been inside your clinic and interacted with your staff. Your most common ratings are what patients see when they type your practice name into a Google search. Your online reputation correlates to patient experience. If your patient experience is critically flawed, no amount of internet marketing will save your online reputation. Equally, many practices do an excellent job of caring for their patients, yet that remarkable care is invisible to the rest of the world.
We've just wrapped up an excellent time at the 2015 meeting of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) in Baltimore. It was my very first ASRM meeting, and the only thing I like more than meeting new friends is getting to see old ones.
With so many tracks and sessions over the five day meeting, you couldn't be everywhere at once. But thanks to #ASRM2015's live tweeters, we had people keeping us abreast of what went on. Here are 10 of the most informative tweets from the meeting.
It's annoying, isn't it? So many social networks come and go, how can a Reproductive Endocrinologist and her practice manager be expected to be fully engaged in a dozen social media platforms? The task becomes much less daunting when we reverse engineer our patients' attention. We don't have to be experts of every social network, we just need to know on which our prospective patients spend the most time.
A fertility center’s Return on Investment in social media can be traced back to the activism of its community. The value of social media is not that we have a free broadcast mechanism to reach people with any time we like. None of that is true—it’s neither free, nor a broadcast mechanism, nor will people see our message whenever we please.
The value of social media is your community. Fertility centers acquire new patients through social media when they have a passionate, connected, community of people that zealously advocates for them. This is "word of mouth". Communities will gladly rise up for their fertility centers—providing better advertising than we could ever hope to buy—but only if they are engaged. To engage your community:
• Respond to all direct messages as quickly as possible
• Reply to all comments and posts
• Thank those who leave reviews and compliments
• Crowdsource: Ask for input on various practice initiatives
Responding to comments and reviews is a critical part of community management for infertility clinics.
The most direct way to use social media to attract new IVF patients is to empower current and former patients with a "word of mouth" referral network. When you interact with your community of supporters, the number of people who are they are able to refer to your practice increases dramatically. If you look at the Facebook pages of the vast majority of fertility centers in North America you will find that patient communities are largely ignored. If you are unable to dedicate the time it takes to respond to, thank, and inspire your community, your ROI on social will be very limited.
If you’re spending money on internet marketing, you should know this axiomatic truth:
Posting something on social media does not mean that anyone sees it.
Many fertility clinics spend money on growing their Facebook fan base or their number of twitter followers. Often, the number of a practice's "followers" or "likes" are too large while their message remains unseen. Equally, an infertility clinic's message won't be seen if its community size isn't big enough.
Infertility clinics are possibly the single greatest social media anomaly in healthcare.
Why? Most disciplines within healthcare are not social. Reproductive endocrinology, because of parental aspirations and deep community need, is extremely social. Therefore, the content that generates "word of mouth" referrals for fertility clinics is radically different.
Caution. Attracting patients from another market will do one or all of three things.
1). Slowly and sustainably grow your REI practice
2). Hedge your patient flow in a recession
3). Offer you data to decide if maybe even one day it would make sense to open a clinic in that area (if you´re so ambitious)
I shot this video post back in June after the 2015 Midwest Reproductive Symposium. The way infertility patients use online reviews for their Reproductive Endocrinologists and their practices is vastly different from most other categories. Facebook is by far the most positive review source for fertility centers. Yelp is certainly the most negative. Other sites, such as RateMDs, ZocDoc, HealthGrades, and Fertility Authority tend to fall in between the two ends.
How do you grow your infertility clinic's practice if you´re from a small market? What if you´re the only fertility center that provides IVF in your area?
I have an assignment for you. First, you certainly have an anecdotal idea of how many people come to your practice from out of town, that´s a start. But there´s also a way to tell if people are considering you, researching your practice online from other cities.
If you're not familiar with one of my favorite authors, you may want to check out Seth Godin.
Godin says “A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea. A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate.”
Most healthcare categories do not have tribes. Dermatology patients are not connected by an idea. They have no shared interest and thus no leader or way to communicate. Couples and individuals struggling with infertility are connected by an idea however. They are connected by the feeling of loneliness and exclusion. They are connected by the feeling that they want to know their problems are human.
