In the digital age, the importance of a medical practice website cannot be understated – having a webpage is about so much more than simply maintaining an online presence. It’s a hub for all of your services, and at the center of the entire patient experience.
“A website is the anchor piece to all of your other marketing services, whether it’s digital or traditional marketing,” says Chelimar Miranda, Medical Advantage’s Director of Operations and practice marketing expert. “The marketing services will get the user to your practice website, but the website will turn the user into a patient.”
In this episode, we hear from both Miranda and Sarah Rayer, Medical Advantage’s Digital Marketing Services Manager, as the two discuss the importance of web marketing strategy, the elements of a successful website, and where medical professionals looking for assistance can go to learn more.
This is the second episode in our four-part patient engagement series, and the sixteenth episode in the Medical Advantage Podcast, where each we take time each episode to discuss the ideas and technologies changing healthcare, and the best practices your organization can take to stay productive and profitable. Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.
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Full Episode Transcript
Medical Advantage Podcast: Welcome to the Medical Advantage Podcast, where you can hear healthcare professionals, expert consultants, and industry thought leaders discuss the exciting new ideas and technologies that are changing the business of health healthcare. Tune in to each episode as we hear from some of the most innovative minds in medicine about the future of healthcare and how your organization can stay profitable, efficient, and on top of industry best practices.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Hello everyone and welcome back to the Medical Advantage podcast series. As always, I am your host, Celina DeFigueiredo, and today’s episode is the second in our four part series. All about patient engagement, what that term means, what it looks like, and tools and tips that providers can use to better engage with patients about their care in the digital age.
So much of patient engagement has to do with an effective practice website. For that reason, we are very excited to feature two guests today who have extensive experience supporting medical professionals and organizations with their website needs here to offer their insights today are Chelimar Miranda, Medical Advantage’s, Director of Operations for Practice Marketing, and Sarah Rayer, Medical Advantage’s Digital Marketing Services Manager.
Thank you both so much for joining us today.
Chelimar Miranda: Thanks, Celina. It’s great to be here.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: So, as we get started here, would each of you like to just start by sharing a little bit about yourselves, your backgrounds, and the work that you do on a day-to-day basis.
Chelimar Miranda: Sure, absolutely. This is Chelimar. I’ll go first.
So, my role at Medical Advantage as Director of Operations is mainly focused on delivering our clients with high quality performing websites and their marketing services. So I work really closely with each of our clients to ensure that the website that they get is exactly what they wanted.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Great. Sarah, you wanna join in?
Sarah Rayer: I will. Hi, I am Sarah Rayer. I’m the, as you mentioned, the Digital Marketing Services Manager. So my job is to work with their clients after the site is built and work with them on all their services. So that’s their SEO, pay-per-click, social media. So we incorporate all of the digital, different digital aspects and channels and I work with the clients on a monthly basis to make sure that they were achieving all their digital objectives.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: That is fantastic. Thank you both so much and we are very excited to have you on today. Now, before we jump into more detailed discussion topics, I wanna ask you two about something I heard you say when we were talking off the air, you described a medical website as a strategy or as a mothership for practice operations of sorts. Can you explain just a little bit more what you meant by that?
Chelimar Miranda: Sure. Absolutely Celina. So a website is basically your anchor piece to all of your other marketing services, whether it’s digital or traditional marketing. The marketing services will get the user to your practice website, but the website is what will turn the user into a patient.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Right. I see. So it’s the idea that a website really is sort of the heart of the interaction between the patient and provider. Right. And that a properly equipped website can sort of make or break that patient engagement experience, which of course has an impact on patient’s decisions about where they seek their care. Right?
Sarah Rayer: Exactly, and I often use the analogy of a car, right? If it’s not built correctly, you’re not gonna get where you’re going. So it’s really having the foundation set up correctly. So you need to have the right people, and it has to be built, and the foundation has to be strong for it to work, and to see results.
Chelimar Miranda: Yeah, if your website isn’t designed in, you know, the right way to convert that person into your patient, then you may lose them entirely. There may not have anything to engage with and be able to actually make an appointment. So it’s a really important part where everything really surrounds it so you can have you know, different marketing aspects that will link back to your website and then, make them into your patient.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Excellent. And with that, we’ve already started to approach the next topic that I wanted to ask you both about. We sort of begun to hit on this already, but can you tell me some of the really basic building blocks or elements of a successful practice website? What should every provider be looking to include in their website presence?
Chelimar Miranda: That’s a great question. Like you said, there are many, many things to name and to talk about, and we could go on all day, but the first thing that you really want is a mobile friendly website. It’s gonna function on your mobile device, it’s gonna function on your phone. And then on the website, you wanna make sure that there’s a phone number and a request an appointment button, or some other kind of call to action on the top of every page.
This way, it’s really easy for the user to contact you and again, make that appointment and convert into a patient. Then you’re gonna wanna make sure that the website is optimized for search. So what that means is that a search engine optimization specialist will go in and implement specific code to each page that will actually speak to the search engines.
And then the last big one I would say is fresh new content on a regular basis. And that’s really where the blog articles and the marketing services come in. You’ll want to create blog articles, social posts, and et cetera on an ongoing basis to generate that traffic.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Great and taken together these are things which really are ultimately designed with the patient in mind, right? How do these elements positively impact patient engagement and make it more likely that patients are landing on the site, will be acquired and retained as patients for the practice?
Sarah Rayer: Chelimar, do you want me to take?
Chelimar Miranda: Yeah.
Sarah Rayer: Yes. Okay, perfect. So, one of the things that we always try to do is we always have a standard template and process that we use for all of our clients to make sure the site is easy to navigate. There’s simple calls to action. Like as Chelimar was talking about the request an appointment form, the call to make, you know, call for an appointment form.
So we’re always making it very easy for the potential patient to access the office and the doctor and learn the information they need as well as making the the sites accessible for people.
Chelimar Miranda: Yeah, and just to add, you know, a little bit to that, you know, one of the ways to help and engage the patients on an ongoing basis, again, are those blog articles. But making social posts and you know, some really fun ideas are like Facebook Live videos that your doctor can do or like throw back Thursday and things like that will again, engage the patient and make it kind of fun, but also always have that website as an anchor piece to be able to, you know, call and make that appointment.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: That is so fantastic. I really appreciate you both sharing that. And I wanna shift here just a little bit to to talk a little bit more about the work that the two of you do to deliver these things for clients. It’s one thing to discuss. Generating content and creating a website, but I’m really curious to hear what does this process actually look like for you?
You mentioned that in addition to building and supporting and maintaining these functions as part of a web presence, you’re also in the business of account management. So can you talk to me a little bit more about that?
Chelimar Miranda: Yes, absolutely. That is probably our biggest plus point here at Medical Advantage. We really work with our clients. And so what we do, we have like Sarah was saying, we have a process that we follow. We are also very flexible, you know, so we’ll work very closely with our clients.
But what we do is first we meet with them so that we can truly understand what their needs and desires are. And Sarah and I were talking about this before as well, and sometimes they don’t even know what their needs and desires are. So it’s really a brainstorming session where Sarah and I get to meet the doctor if they’re available, work with, the practice and the staff, understand their specialty, understand what makes them unique, and then we create a full marketing approach around that.
Then we carefully walk them through each of these steps and the whole process, making sure that they understand. Oftentimes we have to get on a call and we present them with something and we really educate them on what this is so that they truly understand what they’re getting. And then at the end of the day, they love the product and the services that we offer.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: That’s so great that you’re able to have such a unique and tailored approach to not only starting, but maintaining these relationship and services with all of your clients. Sarah, I’m really curious to hear a little bit more from you on this topic and get your perspective.
You mentioned that one of the services you provide is a monthly call with clients to check on their web performance. What sorts of performance indicators do you look for in those calls? Do you help them adjust if something is just not performing the way that you would expect?
Sarah Rayer: Yeah, exactly. So once a site goes live, after a month of it being live, we start doing monthly marketing calls with the clients.
So within those calls, we take a look at their SEO, is it performing? How are the keywords ranking? Are their rankings going up? We look at their social media. We look how it’s tracking, is there engagement? Provide suggestions of how to engage perhaps on social media ads. Then we also look at, you know, I would say at least a couple times a week, I’m looking at every single client’s website looking closely at their conversions.
Are we making sure that their converting? Their bounce rate is not too high? Are we seeing the traffic from the right geographic location? Am I seeing their SEO go up?
And if any of those aren’t performing as I’d like them to, I certainly, I go to my team internally, we make sure that we have the conversion tracking set up. We make sure that the form is set up correctly on the website. Do we maybe need to move it a little bit to the above the fold on the page or do something different? With SEO if, you know, we’re constantly making sure that our blogs are optimized for SEO. Are we doing enough internal links? Are the keywords weighted appropriately within the blogs?
So we’re constantly trying to achieve better performance each month. And my philosophy is I really treat every client as if it was my own. So what would I like to see month to month? And so I want to make sure that they feel that they’re being taken care of and we’re looking out for them as if it was our own account, which it is. So I think we’re very hands-on and we have a really great digital marketing team. So we’re constantly working and improving.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: That is great. Sarah, do you have any particular examples of maybe some ROIs or statistics or feedback that you’ve had from clients on these calls?
Sarah Rayer: Yeah, sure. One of the things that we certainly do for clients and we have been very successful at our pay per click campaigns which is Google Ads.
For those who don’t know, we had a number of clients who came in from other agencies and we were able to, with reworking their ads, using some dynamic ads, retargeting, that kind of thing, we were able to get their conversion rate up by a thousand percent. And yes, that’s a real number. So, so it’s really by the hands-on approach and not being complacent and going well they’re done. So we are really focusing on continual growth, continual conversions.
We have another scenario too, with somebody who they weren’t getting enough conversions on their website. So, you know, initially they liked the design of the landing page with the form a little lower. But I explained to them if we put it higher up on the page, that that will allow them to perhaps get more conversions. And by doing that simple little tweak, their conversions went up by 60% in a month.
So it’s really also educating the clients. It’s not always, sometimes clients can get really get into quote unquote the weeds about little details. Like, oh, I want it to look this way or look that way. And it’s just educating them on, you’re not going to affect the design of the site, but there are certain little tricks that we can do to improve.
So with that said when we’re dealing SEO which is correlated to the website, but pay per click, everything goes back to the website. So if we have those conversions, the goal tracking. That’s what makes the site, that’s what makes the campaign successful. Because if we have a good website, it will show on Google and Google will put our ads above and if we’re doing really great in the search. So everything works in tandem together,
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: That is just astounding. Thank you so much for sharing that, the success that you’ve had and really being able to hone into the unique obstacles that a practice might be having to having that visibility online and really optimizing those services to have the best performance.
I am just astounded by some of the success that you’ve mentioned just here, and I’m sure those are just only a few examples of things that you see and hear every single day, and I can only imagine that many of our listeners might be looking to get some help with their websites or ask some questions.
So as we start to wrap up here, do the two of you mind giving just a brief overview of the services that you offer and you know, for anybody that might be interested in learning a bit more and how they might get in touch with you if they have any questions?
Chelimar Miranda: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So our team does everything from logo design. If you’re a brand new practice or single practitioner and you want a brand, we can start there.
All the way to developing a responsive website, social media marketing, enhanced SEO. As Sarah mentioned, we do the Google ads, pay-per clicks, we also do Facebook ads and we do online reviews management, which is a really important service right now because a lot of users are making their choices based on star reviews and star ratings online.
So we actually offer that as a service where we will manage those and help increase that star rating and we do lots of other things. But the best way to reach us is by visiting the medicaladvantage.com website and clicking on the button on the top right hand corner and schedule a consultation.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Thank you so much. And as we start to wrap up here are there any just outstanding tips or tricks or things that maybe we didn’t get to cover quite yet that you’d like to share with our listeners?
Sarah Rayer: I think I would say you can’t skip the details. You have to work with an experienced agency. There’s more to building in sites than just a site. You need a strong foundation, so you need to make sure the site is built correctly, is fast, has a great site map, making sure that the content is strong and keyword heavy, keyword dense. So it’s not as simple as just, you need the good foundation to have a successful digital presence online.
Chelimar Miranda: Yeah. It’s not just, oh, I’m gonna create this quick template at site. There’s a lot that goes to it. And then having a company with years of experience in not only digital marketing and web development, but healthcare is, you know, incredibly useful because we really understand what it takes to convert a user into a patient.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: That is so wonderful. I really appreciate you both taking the time to share your expertise and enthusiasm for driving patient engagement and physician success through the online space. I do very much appreciate you taking the time to chat with us today.
Chelimar Miranda: Thanks, Celina. It’s been fun.
Celina DeFigueiredo-Dusseau: Great. So for our listeners that might be seeking any more information, I would like to invite you as our audience to find us on LinkedIn and Facebook or our website medicaladvantage.com, where you’ll find additional resources such as blogs, webinars, white papers and much more related to the topics of patient engagement and much more.
As you should have any questions or wish to speak with us in more detail, you can also reach us directly at info@medicaladvantage.com. Thank you always to our guests for your time today and to our audience, thank you for listening and we will see you next time.
We’ll be back with the third installment of our patient engagement series soon, where we’ll be discussing an exciting new technology, changing the way that providers document visits. See you then.
Medical Advantage Podcast: Thanks for joining us this week on the Medical Advantage Podcast where we discuss the ideas and technologies changing healthcare and what they mean to your organization. For more information, visit us at medicaladvantage.com and make sure to subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast, so you never miss a show.
