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The BIGGEST Marketing Challenge Facing Fertility Centers in 2016

"If you can't measure it, you can't improve it." --Peter Drucker

Recently, I've been honing in on the fundamental problem that we face in fertility marketing. People e-mail the practice for information but never schedule a consultation. Referral networks don't always deliver the number of patients that they promised. New patients way too long to schedule their first consult with a fertility specialist. How do we prioritize finding solutions to these challenges and is there a greater problem from which they arise? Usually, our greatest problem is that we don't accurately or thoroughly track how our patients come to us.

10 Infertility Support Ideas from a Conversation That Never Would Have Happened 10 Years Ago

On one hand, I absolutely hate millennial business buzzwords, and on the other, I deliberately use them often. I choose to say "silo busting" because of how important it is for different "departments" to be familiar with each other's goals and challenges. "Silos" aren't just separate departments within companies, they can be any sub-category of any group. According to social scientist, Tom Wolff, PhD, of the University of Kansas, all community stakeholders have to be engaged in order to solve common problems facing the community. In the infertility community, our many roles account for many different stakeholders. We have embryologists (scientists), reproductive endocrinologists (doctors), nurses, business managers, patients, support groups, mental health professionals, and advocates (among others).

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5 Rules for Writing a Negative Review That Will Make Your Fertility Clinic Listen

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"If you're not a size 5, this doctor does not want to help you."

"After trying to contact the Dr. several times, I realized that no-one at this facility gave a crap, or even pretended to care".

"_____ is the worst doctor one can go to...I wanted to smack him right in his office."

Yikes. These are what negative fertility clinic reviews look like sometimes. These aren't hypothetical examples. They are real reviews of fertility doctors in three different U.S. cities. The reviewers may have needed to vent their frustration. Research from Harvard University shows that the stress and anxiety caused by infertility are equal to that caused by cancer. If you are writing a review about your fertility clinic, you may want to use the opportunity to release some of the tremendous frustration and anxiety. Your doctor or practice may be the person to release that on to. Heck, he or she might even deserve it. If your goal is simply to vent your pain and project that on to someone who may be partly responsible, I understand. I do it too often, for far less serious affairs. I make Delta Airlines feel my wrath on Twitter every time I fly with them. It doesn't solve the issue, but I feel a little better. For couples spending thousands of dollars on an emotionally draining fertility journey, the yearning for vindication must be very strong when they are failed.

7 Musts for Using Online Reviews to Avoid Choosing the Wrong Fertility Clinic

Too often, I read an online review of a fertility clinic, in which the person says they wish they would have read other reviews before choosing that practice. In doing your online research, I strongly encourage you to take advantage of the reported experiences of other people, to help inform your decision. More than just a few times, I have read reviews where the person regrets choosing the fertility clinic despite reading negative reviews, sometimes because they followed the advice of a friend.

Power to the Patient: 5 tips for your unbeatable fertility marketing plan in the great information shift

In this week's premier of the final season of Downton Abbey, one of our favorite characters, Anna Bates, reveals her struggle with recurring pregnancy loss. The season takes place in 1925. How different options would have been for Anna and her husband in that period, with respect to both medicine and information technology. How would Anna have learned more about her medical condition in 1925?

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Patient or Customer? Self-identity in the business of infertility

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Here we are...wrapping up 2015, largely on pause between the major holidays. I'm taking it easy too, so I'm using this blog post to spell out how I can be more helpful to the infertility community in the New Year. That started an honest reflection about how we see self-identities (patients, practices, doctors, me), and what that means about our responsibilities to each other.

The Truth Is Undefeated: A hard look at "questionable techniques" and the current state of fertility marketing

You can tell I'm still relatively new to the fertility space. I don't appear in the top ten Google search results for "fertility marketing". I'm working on that, that's what brought me to check. I was both encouraged and discouraged by something else that did come up, however.

It's unfortunate for the field of reproductive medicine when our top search results for marketing include, "Many Fertility Clinics Use Questionable Marketing Techniques Online", a Jezebel reiteration of a Huffington Post article from three years ago. I would normally argue that we should avoid questionable marketing techniques by using only real patient testimonials and images. But authentic content does not fully address the issue of transparency in fertility marketing . The fundamental problem is that fertility clinics serve two different populations who sometimes overlap and who are sometimes at odds. Until we equally recognize both groups and the value of their experiences, I'm afraid we'll continue to have more problems.

"Democracy Is Not a Spectator Sport": The Top 5 Things I Learned at ASRM's 2015 Advocacy Academy

ASRM held its first ever Advocacy Academy in Washington, D.C. on December 9th and 10th, 2015. About 30 ASRM members met to learn more about advocacy at the state and federal levels, for better legislation on reproductive care. Special focus was paid to Congress's current ban on IVF for veterans, and the pending pieces of legislation that would provide that care to our vets. On Capitol Hill, we met with the offices of our individual members. Being new to advocacy in this way, these are the five most valuable things I learned from ASRM's advocacy workshop.

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New Research: IVF success impacts fertility clinic reviews. But how much?

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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.

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12 Blogs and Podcasts that Fertility Clinics Should Share with Their Patients

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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.

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The 25 Best Words to Describe REs in Fertility Clinic Reviews

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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.