TV Ads Driving Patient Volume Will Soon Be Highly-Targeted
DirecTV Group Inc. is planning the biggest rollout yet of “addressable ads,” allowing advertisers to reach close to 10 million homes with commercials tailored to each household. Dog owners, for instance, will see ads for dog food, not kitty litter, while families with children will watch minivan spots.
As a practical example for healthcare marketers, when ads are based on hospital CRM data, skinny people would not see your bariatric ads and morbidly obese people would not see your sports medicine orthopedic ads.
Targeting consumers is getting Big Brother scary, but it will save advertisers lots of money.
The practice of online data-gathering has been featured in The Wall Street Journal’s What They Know series, which documents the use of Internet-tracking technology and privacy implications for consumers.
The future is here. How are you going to respond?
115,000 Doctors Are Chatting on Sermo.com: What Does That Mean When Driving Patient Volume By Referral Marketing?
Sermo.com is one of the fastest growing internet chat sites, and it is only for licensed medical practitioners, MDs and DOs. Well over 100,000 doctors have actively embraced this professional online exchange of information.
This is not unusual. For instance, SpineConnect has over 15,000 spine surgeons discussing topics every single day.
Here is the pivotal lesson if you are still trying to drive referrals through printed referral guides: you are wasting your money.
Physicians and their staff don’t read printed referral guides (that are immediately out-of-date) and you look out of touch by distributing them to offices. Just as bad are long pdf documents put online with referral info. In other words, printed information that isn’t really printed, is even harder to read, and costs the physician money to print.
If you want to be relevant, you must get your referral info into an easy-to-access database with ratings and doctor comments. Scary because you can not control what doctors say in comments. But true and authentic because this is how referral decisions are actually made.
What You Should Learn From Diapers.com About Driving Patient Volume…No Kidding.
Amazon just beat out Wal-mart to buy Diapers.com for $540 million. Really?!? Do they sell that many diapers? No. But they have an amazing database of new parents with money. And so do you.
Here is the point: You have a huge database of high-contribution clinical intake now. You can use a CRM to sort it. Or if you don’t have a CRM system, just send out direct mail to existing patients to drive screening events.
For example, did you know that normative databases (“normative” meaning what is “normal”) show that if someone is at risk for cardiovascular issues they also have a 30% chance of needing an orthopedic procedure? Or a 10% chance of having undiagnosed cancer? AND the majority of these patients need bariatric procedures or sleep machines.
You can help these patients and drive high-contribution margin clinical intake at the same time.
Why is diapers.com so valuable? Because of their database. You should have a great database of patients with co-risks.  If you have such a database, you are sitting on a goldmine of high-contribution margin.
