I wish I could say that this new research provides us with all of the answers we've sought, but I think we're left with new questions. That's fine by me, I find it encouraging. We've talked about reproductive endocrinologist (RE) and fertility center reviews, and the psychology behind them. This new data helps us understand how success of treatment impacts the rating of a fertility clinic or fertility doctor review.
Top 7 Ways to Market Your Fertility Practice in 2016
2015 was an interesting year for fertility centers. We saw big mergers in both the United States and Canada to watch large practices become extremely large practices. Meanwhile, other practices sold equity to team up with larger management firms while some reproductive endocrinologists (RE) opened their own clinics. That's no surprise; infertility treatment remains a high-growth category. The Society for Advanced Reproductive Technology (SART) numbers show an increase in ART cycles every year from 2003 to 2013 and we expect the 2014 and 2015 reports to follow the trend.
The Sacred Scroll of Infertility: 8 reasons fertility clinics can't afford to ignore Instagram in 2016
This is worth saying again. Instagram is an insanely powerful social media channel for fertility marketing. I don't say this because data proves that Instagram is the second largest social network in the world. Twitter and Linkedin are large social networks too, but I typically don't recommend that fertility clinics spend too much time with them. They just aren't places where people usually talk about children or the journey of infertility. Instagram is different.
12 Blogs and Podcasts that Fertility Clinics Should Share with Their Patients
I believe that the fertility centers who provide their patients with the most opportunities for information, connection, and community are those that stand to gain. One of the most common pain-points described by people coping with infertility is not having people in their social circles that can relate to their journey.
For this reason, so many people have bravely decided to share their experiences online, and their content has become invaluable to couples and individuals struggling with infertility. Fertility centers can empower their patients by linking to some of this media on their websites, and even sending new patients home with a printed resource.
The Future of Content Marketing for Fertility Centers
I've mentioned before that every fertility center is, in fact, a media company. This thesis should inform your fertility clinic's entire content marketing strategy. First, let's define content marketing as the process of creating and curating relevant and valuable content. So how do we know what's relevant and valuable? We have to reverse-engineer the attention of couples and individuals struggling with infertility.
10 Highlights From What You Missed at RESOLVE's 2015 Night of Hope
November 17, 2015 marked RESOLVE's 18th annual, Night of Hope, in Manhattan. As the cardinal event of the national infertility association, the gala promotes RESOLVE's mission to support men and women experiencing infertility.
The 25 Best Words to Describe REs in Fertility Clinic Reviews
Now, on to the good news.
In an earlier post, I had written about the 28 harshest words that people use to describe reproductive endocrinologists. Paying attention to the words that people use to desrcribe their REs and their fertility clinics begins to offer insight on how we can improve their experience. This time, I made a word cloud of the most common positive adjectives that people use in RE reviews.
The 7 Most Powerful Ways for Fertility Centers to Use Instagram
What is the most frustrating thing about managing social media for your fertility center? If I ask this question to enough people, sure enough, this answer will be fairly common: there are too many platforms. How do we participate in all of them?
Ready for the good news? You don't. I'll make this much simpler for you. All we need to do is reverse-engineer the attention of the patient. What media do IVF patients spend the most time with, and how does it relate to their struggle with infertility?
A Self-Education in Social Media for REs, with Dr. Brian Levine
Brian Levine, MD, is a reproductive endocrinologist (RE) with CCRM New York. Dr. Levine sits on the American Society for Reproductive Medicine's (ASRM) tech committee and speaks on social media to the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG). I thought he would be a great resource to keep us abreast of the rapidly changing landscape in communication technology.
There are other REs who participate in and talk about social media as it relates to reproductive health, like Dr. Serena Chen and Dr. Kenan Omurtag, but there aren't many. I asked Dr. Levine why that is.
Why on Earth Would an RE Review Google and Yahoo?
Did I miswrite the title of this blog post? Aren't reproductive endocrinologists reviewed on Google and other search engines, not the other way around?
If you believe in content marketing, it's because you've seen results from it. If you've seen results from content marketing, then you likely agree with Gary Vaynerchuk when he says that every company is a media company.
INVOcell and Educational Content for Fertility Center Websties
We can expect this type of headline in fertility news to be the new norm: Simpler, less expensive infertility treatment gets FDA green signal. For a patient researching infertility online, this is attention-grabbing. The first thing most patients search for on a fertility center's website is IVF cost. On page 18 of the free e-book, Digital Marketing for Fertility Centers, we look at the dominance of IVF cost in search behavior.
Infertility and Ovarian Cancer Risk As a Blog Post for Your Fertility Clinic
As I mentioned in my post about how to come up with topics for your fertility center's blog, one of the best habits you can develop is to write about the latest news in the field of infertility. I am not suggesting that you re-post a link to a news article on your site. You can do that if you absolutely don't have ten minutes to write your own post, but I'm concerned with increasing your fertility center's search engine optimization (SEO), not that of cancernetwork.com.
28 Scathing Words for REs Across Fertility Center Reviews
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.
What Every IVF Patient is Looking For On Your Fertility Clinic's Website
4 Simple Fertility Blog Topics to End Your Practice's Writer's Block
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?
4 Reliable Guidelines for Responding to Positive Fertility Clinic Reviews
6 Critical Rules for Responding to Negative RE Reviews
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.
4 Powerful Facts About Fertility Center Reviews to Improve Your Practice
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.
The Top 10 Tweets from ASRM 2015
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.
Forget Twitter: The 2 Most Important Social Networks for Fertility Centers
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.