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Tel Domains and Other Doctor Marketing Ideas
- By Ben Anton
- Published 4th March, 2010
- Real Estate
- Unrated
Ben Anton
Learn more about .tel names for doctor offices at TelSweepstakes.com.
View all articles by Ben Anton
What do you show on your website? Does your office even have one? There are only so many pictures of doctors smiling at clients that can be found in a stock photo library, and they’re not that compelling for customers wanting to find a doctor online these days!
Simply throwing up (or paying for) a stock doctor's office website isn’t going to be a great investment of your time or money. A standard website that has the traditional clinic blurb about your practice, mission, vision, values and so on is not going to drive the business forward. It might be personally satisfying for the first couple of months but, like a car, as soon as it’s launched it will begin to lose value unless it is maintained, the paintwork polished and the records kept up-to-date.
There are other ways to market a doctor's practice that can be much more fun and less painful on the pocketbook. Here are a couple of online marketing ideas for doctor's offices that you can pursue with little investment, but with the same care and attention that you’d give your patients. Take two of them and call me in the morning!
KEEP IT CLEAN
Think about a clean web presence that will encourage people to come to you. The first thing to do is to make sure that people can find you online. While Yellow Page services are a good start, these can become extremely expensive if you’re looking to utilize more keywords and widen your reach. Instead, think about a .tel name, which can be purchased annually for as little as $10 a year. A .tel domain provides a massive space for you to list your contact information and links to other pages, a logo, location record and all the keywords you want. A .tel doesn’t need any technical expertise to set up and can be changed quickly and refreshed in minutes.
BRUSH UP YOUR BEDSIDE MANNER
Now that you’ve got your central point of contact under your control, think about all of the other free and excellent resources that you can utilize to link to your .tel and web site, to show how friendly you are? First, why not set up a Flickr account and take pictures of your staff working during the day and patients as they leave if they’re happy (or get them to take a picture of you when you’re talking to them!), so you can show potential customers the real side of your office’s
success – the people that you help day in, day out! Once you’ve done this, why not think about a fan page on Facebook, where you can post these pictures and invite your customers to join the community. They can give encouragement to each other and you can update them on the progress of the office in a friendly way and get people to bond as a community. Your patients' smiles will be far more powerful than stock footage on a static website! Additionally, consider creating a health-themed playlist in an online music-sharing site like Pandora.com or Last.fm, or ask your customers to recommend songs. Additionally, why not ask for favorite pictures of calm scenes to help people relax prior to coming into your practice – there’s always one patient that’s nervous!
MAKING THE ROUNDS
Consider a free blogging platform that can be used for almost anything you want. There are a whole host of them, some which can even be updated using email, such as Posterous. Why bother with the hassle of an expensive website when you can have something that will provide compelling content, which you can update in five minutes and which will be far more interesting to search engines and therefore potential patients? Talk about your practice – people are intrigued with all sorts of content these days. Help patients when they’re not in your office with useful hints and tips. Here you can share health tips, encourage people to follow an active lifestyle, support the elderly in the community, as well as provide advice about potential vaccination requirements. But try to keep it light-hearted! If you’re struggling with the right words, find a local wordsmith or copywriter who can help you articulate things better.
Using all of these free resources linked to your .tel domain will provide a simple, clean, living presence on the web that will set you apart from your competition and make your clients feel like they are part of your community and are cared about. Additionally, the authority of the services that you’re using will help your site be more discoverable if you link them all together by putting the web addresses of each into your .tel and vice versa. This is called back-linking and generates a very positive impact when used in conjunction with search terms that patients use when looking for specific services, so make sure you ‘tag’ (label) your posts, music streams, blog updates and other pieces with relevant keywords as well as utilize them well in your .tel domain.
~Ben Anton, 2010
Simply throwing up (or paying for) a stock doctor's office website isn’t going to be a great investment of your time or money. A standard website that has the traditional clinic blurb about your practice, mission, vision, values and so on is not going to drive the business forward. It might be personally satisfying for the first couple of months but, like a car, as soon as it’s launched it will begin to lose value unless it is maintained, the paintwork polished and the records kept up-to-date.
There are other ways to market a doctor's practice that can be much more fun and less painful on the pocketbook. Here are a couple of online marketing ideas for doctor's offices that you can pursue with little investment, but with the same care and attention that you’d give your patients. Take two of them and call me in the morning!
KEEP IT CLEAN
Think about a clean web presence that will encourage people to come to you. The first thing to do is to make sure that people can find you online. While Yellow Page services are a good start, these can become extremely expensive if you’re looking to utilize more keywords and widen your reach. Instead, think about a .tel name, which can be purchased annually for as little as $10 a year. A .tel domain provides a massive space for you to list your contact information and links to other pages, a logo, location record and all the keywords you want. A .tel doesn’t need any technical expertise to set up and can be changed quickly and refreshed in minutes.
BRUSH UP YOUR BEDSIDE MANNER
Now that you’ve got your central point of contact under your control, think about all of the other free and excellent resources that you can utilize to link to your .tel and web site, to show how friendly you are? First, why not set up a Flickr account and take pictures of your staff working during the day and patients as they leave if they’re happy (or get them to take a picture of you when you’re talking to them!), so you can show potential customers the real side of your office’s
MAKING THE ROUNDS
Consider a free blogging platform that can be used for almost anything you want. There are a whole host of them, some which can even be updated using email, such as Posterous. Why bother with the hassle of an expensive website when you can have something that will provide compelling content, which you can update in five minutes and which will be far more interesting to search engines and therefore potential patients? Talk about your practice – people are intrigued with all sorts of content these days. Help patients when they’re not in your office with useful hints and tips. Here you can share health tips, encourage people to follow an active lifestyle, support the elderly in the community, as well as provide advice about potential vaccination requirements. But try to keep it light-hearted! If you’re struggling with the right words, find a local wordsmith or copywriter who can help you articulate things better.
Using all of these free resources linked to your .tel domain will provide a simple, clean, living presence on the web that will set you apart from your competition and make your clients feel like they are part of your community and are cared about. Additionally, the authority of the services that you’re using will help your site be more discoverable if you link them all together by putting the web addresses of each into your .tel and vice versa. This is called back-linking and generates a very positive impact when used in conjunction with search terms that patients use when looking for specific services, so make sure you ‘tag’ (label) your posts, music streams, blog updates and other pieces with relevant keywords as well as utilize them well in your .tel domain.
~Ben Anton, 2010