Weaponizing your healthcare brand to generate organic traffic and grow your business or medical practice

Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google once said, "Brands are the solution; not the problem." In the bloody red sea of hopefuls selling and vying for customers on the Internet, brands are the differentiator that migrate you over to the blue ocean and render your competitors "irrelevant". The proof in real time is evident.

Brands are the solution; not the problem

Physicians, surgeons and medical groups, clinics, outpatient (ambulatory) surgery centers ("ASCs") and hospitals that build a brand and invest in brand positioning and amplification are becoming increasingly prominent when it comes to ranking higher up on Google, Weibo and other frequently used search engines. And even new arrivals with new, relatively unknown websites are somehow able to generate massive organic traffic in the early stages their market entry because they built a brand first - and then amplified it on the Internet and optimized media advertising and marketing.

I'm Dr Maria Todd, the personality behind the brand, #AskMariaTodd, a consultant to some of the most prominent healthcare brands in the world. I've assisted healthcare brands in the USA and 116 countries. Today's lesson on #healthcare #marketing and #businessdevelopment is about #branding and how to use your own brand to weaponize search engine optimization.

Before we get too far into the lesson, be sure to follow me on LinkedIn, and visit my website, AskMariaTodd? if you'd like to read more articles like these and subscribe to notifications to know when I post new content about all things healthcare business development. I focus on topics others write very little about: third party payer contracting with insurers and employers, managed care contract analysis and negotiation, physician hospital integration and alignment, shared financial risk arrangements, cash pay pricing for bundled surgery case rates, concierge medicine, stem cell business development, robotics-assisted surgery, medical tourism and health travel destination development and cluster formation, patient safety and quality management, risk management and failure mode effects analysis (FMEA), healthcare accreditation preparation, marketing and advertising.

I am the author of 23 internationally published, peer-reviewed textbooks on these and other topics and I share insights, tools, tips and tactics cultivated from more than 40 years working in healthcare and training as a health law paralegal, mediator, surgical nurse and healthcare administrator.

I've been a consultant and Master Class workshop leader since 1983 training more than 60,000 healthcare industry professionals and have consulted and delivered Master Classes, workshops, seminars, and training in 117 countries. And yes, I am still hired as a adviser to startups and established brands alike, though I also now work part time as the Director of Business Development at St George Surgical Center, close to my home in Southern Utah just 112 miles northeast of Las Vegas.

I love al fresco entertaining and I seem to be building a differentiated brand reputation for cooking healthful gourmet dinner parties on my back patio under spellbinding sunsets with surgeons, healthcare executives, clients, and other consultants from around the world. In this informal setting, the magic happens! We discuss these topics and work out strategies and tactics that have been successfully deployed around the USA and all over the world. Maybe you'll join us here one day soon.

So sit back, grab your favorite beverage, and imagine yourself in one of the chairs below as you read on about weaponizing your brand for search engine optimization and organic business development for your healthcare brand.

First I want to flip your perspective about branding. Lots of bloggers talk about using SEO to build your brand. Today, I am going to teach you how to weaponize your brand to build your SEO.

When you create a business or a product or service that is valuable to your targeted audience, you build brand presence, awareness, and reputation. I've used this approach to build my AskMariaTodd? trademark and healthcare business consulting brand over the past 15 years and it works! So today, I want to share this reverse approach with you to consider for your own strategic approach.

I am amused when here on LinkedIn, people with no brand and no reputation cold pitch me via intro connection requests and emails to sell me lead sourcing services, or "how to make six figure incomes". It reminds me of that old quote attributed to Abraham Lincoln, " Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak [or pitch on LinkedIn emails without researching your target] and to remove all doubt." You can't buy my home for cash without a mortgage and pay the country club fees, taxes and maintain it on a six figure income... just sayin.

I use this approach of branding to build SEO as I compose content for St George Surgical Center's robotic-assisted arthroplasty program, its domestic medical travel program, and thousands of clients' marketing and advertising strategies for medical tourism, stem cell, cardiovascular, orthopedics, plastic surgery, and other specialties. My clients and my employer watch in amazement as their organic traffic grows and delivers new clients, revenues, and plants seeds and grows budgets to sustain additional marketing, advertising, publicity, and brand recognition without wasting money on wrongly targeted campaigns and lame social media marketing attempts that don't deliver.

Branding is not a dark art. It is not a logo or a slogan. And it takes commitment to hard work to develop. It is both an art and science.

And you can do your own branding, too! In fact, the only difference between you doing it and my doing it for you or guiding you and your team on how to be effective with this is one thing: what's your time worth? If your time is better spent treating patients or running the hospital, and hiring me allows you to focus on what makes you the most money, then you have your answer.

But if your time isn't worth more than mine, learn how to do this on your own and only hire expertise such as mine to be your coach on an as needed basis. Simple as that! Just don't forget to count the hours you'll need to invest in learning how to effectively market, advertise, publicize and build the brand and develop a chosen strategy for your business on your own.... not just the time it takes to execute and analyze the results of your chosen strategy and campaign returns.

As I market my business through my originally created content that I create for you, my readers and clients, I produce value. You'll do some of the same for your brand for your patients and clients: You'll build your brand, your promise, your message, theme, and identify and target your ideal clients.

You will quickly realize that rather than try to use a bullhorn to blast your message to "no one in particular" as your weakest competitors might do, you pinpoint your target and know exactly how to communicate with them.

With this approach, your brand promise, message and reputation and your web presence will bring ideal clients to you! It will happen through search engine optimization (SEO).

Your branded original content and business intelligence works to help you build SEO when used to attract interest by your ideal customer(s). You'll use it to weaponize your brand as you use it for top of mind positioning. In turn, you'll win your place on the top of your ideal patients' short lists to review first... and move your offer or service to the cool, uncrowded blue ocean. When you apply finely-tuned strategies for marketing and advertorial copy, social posts, out of home media advertising, pricing, your quality, safety and unique value proposition, coupled with featured differentiation, your messages and print media advertisement, targeted with the right placement, your brand is what will drive business to you. This approach builds your SEO and SERP.

So, in considering Mr. Schmidt's comment that "Brands are the solution; not the problem," one quickly realizes how not having a well-developed brand IS A PROBLEM.

But not having a brand is a problem that can be solved. It can be solved by you...if you know how, or someone you hire, if you are adequately capitalized, to do it for you. No one will do this for you without compensation or on speculation. So again, the choice is yours.

One big problem in healthcare is that many practitioners and healthcare facilities and health systems attempt to charge forward with advertising without a brand and know how, and no budget to hire the necessary know how to do it for them. And then, some have the chutzpah to ask for assistance on speculation or based on "success fees". Sorry. Go find a beginner just starting out with those dreams of six figure incomes. See how that works out for you. You might get lucky.

They rush right into blasting through the megaphone at no one in particular ...and they succeed. When you target nobody in particular, you get exactly what you targeted: no one. Nothing happens. No brand or business lift, no recognition, no organic traffic, no calls, no clicks, no web forms completed, no pricing requests, no appointments. Nothing. It is as if your business doesn't exist.

And if your business exists on page two or beyond of search engine returns (SERP), it may as well not exist because you won't be found online in that bloody red ocean-- a morass of commodity sellers that are "just like you".

We need twenty ideal customers each month (4 per week) to see, evaluate and trust what we say, what we offer, and take action as they decide to do business with our brands and pay us a fair and reasonable price for what they want or need to buy.

Do you need millions of website visitors per month to successfully build your business and win patients?

Nope. You don't. I don't. We need twenty ideal customers each month (4/week) to see, evaluate and trust what we say, what we offer, and take action as they decide to do business with our brands and pay us a fair and reasonable price for what they want or need to buy.

If your pricing has been established to incorporate a reasonable and fair margin for your services and you grow 4 new patients per week, you are going to grow by 20 paying patients per month, or 120 paying patients per year. Do the math!

Measurable, sustained growth! That's what you need.

You see, when you have an effective brand message, a brand promise, and a solid reputation for outcomes and patient delight, and you grow 4 new patients a week, you also grow 4 new uncompensated brand ambassadors. These ambassadors are so delighted with your brand that they share their delight and endorsement with others as a reward for a job well done.

When this happens your brand grows exponentially so that at the end of the year, rather than have 120 new patients, you could actually have 4 that you captured online or through other marketing channels, and each one of them tells one person who becomes your patient. And each one of those exponential new patients tells one more.

When my sisters and I had a band that played weddings and private parties in the 1970s and 1980s, that's what our father taught us about branding and business growth.

We played one wedding in 1977 and that bride was so happy that we could track more than 480 weddings and private parties and anniversaries from that original gig over a nine year run. And each one of those new clients also brought exponential business that helped us grow organically.

Back then, we didn't advertise on the internet. But 52 weeks each year, we had 2-3 gigs and on holidays sometimes we had both afternoon and evening gigs on the same day. They tell me that on weekends, I used to sleep in a position as if I was holding a bass guitar. But our band business grew exponentially without spending money on advertising. And we played gigs from as far north as Orlando and as far south as Key West from our Fort Lauderdale home base.

We had a reputation for delivering what the brides and party hosts wanted. We didn't play in smoke-filled bars and night clubs full of inebriated audience members. We chose not to because that wasn't our ideal client and we didn't want the health effects of playing in poorly-ventilated, smoke filled rooms that would make our clothes reek of stale beer and cigarettes. And we learned early on that rarely do bar bands play the society gigs we played and enjoy the parties and events as we did.

We played the exact blend of music that our target clients wanted. If they had a special song we didn't know, we rehearsed and learned it. We delivered desired results. Our customers had fun at their own parties. Their parents had fun, their aunts and uncles had fun. Their coworkers and employers had fun.

We played gala dinners, corporate parties, weddings, bar mitzvahs, birthday parties, and other family-oriented celebrations. Our repertoire covered 5 decades of music. It was easy because we grew up listening to 5 decades of music. We were third generation musician professionals. And we were really good. We each sang solo and in three part harmony. Our sound was a unique, differentiated, genetic blend of three female voices and bass, piano and drums, and occasionally, I doubled on trumpet, flute, acoustic guitar, and other instruments or played piano. My two sisters swapped out on piano and drums as well. My father was a musician and an arranger. We could make three instruments and three voices sound like 10 musicians or like the Lennon Sisters, the Lettermen, the Andrews Sisters, the Pointer Sisters, Manhattan Transfer, Rare Silk, but we also cranked out Elvis Presley, Three Dog Night, Bachman Turner Overdrive, Lynyrd Skynyrd (I played guitar and bass) and we played Italian tarantellas, chicken dances, Greek hasapiko, Jewish horas with the bride and groom and family members on a chair in the air, Brazilian jazz, Argentinian Tangos and Spanish Cha Cha Chas, along with Russian Troikas. We played Country Western hits from Patsy Kline, Glenn Campbell, Willie Nelson, and the 80s jazz covers from Grover Washington Jr, Bobby Caldwell, Al Jarreau, Kenny G, Ramsey Lewis, George Benson, Randy Crawford, Basia, Bette Midler, Olivia Newton John, Gilberto and Jobim and Eric Clapton. We sang in Spanish, Italian, Russian, Greek, Yiddish, Portuguese, French, and English.

The audiences were spellbound. We also did all the emcee work to coordinate the event and keep the party in continuous fun and activity. We knew our customers, we knew our business and we delivered as promised. None of us worked a "day job" outside of music the entire time we were in college. We graduated with no education debt. We were focused like a laser beam.

We delivered value at an affordable price that our ideal customers wanted and needed for their celebration. And the referrals kept coming week after week, year after year without spending any money on advertising. All we did was build our brand and weaponize it. We didn't even have a telephone book listing. All we had was the reliable remit and business cards for marketing.

When someone wanted references, we had them and we had upcoming gigs they could come and observe us in action. No videos, no podcasts, no record albums, no social media, no advertising budgets.

So now, knowing this, is it any wonder why I feel so comfortable among different cultures around the world, on stages as a featured international keynote "entertainer", or behind a microphone? Or that I can produce any healthcare marketing event or brand reveal without missing a beat?

Once I transitioned to healthcare, which I was doing during the week while we played music gigs on weekends, I had a very different approach to build my healthcare skills, round those out just like we did with the music variety in genres, and honing skills to an exacting level because that's what Maria Todd does. I didn't know how to do it any other way. And here's an interesting tidbit: My brand seems to naturally resonate with surgeons and physicians and healthcare executives who are also accomplished musicians and vocalists in their own right. So much so that the local art museum has invited me (and I accepted) to participate on their board of advisers and produce an event called "DocArt" a mix of performing and visual arts by healthcare professionals, as soon as the COVID lockdown is relaxed and we can assemble in large gatherings again.

Now, there's a reason why I shared this story with you: Part of branding is telling your "why" story. I consult by example, not cookie cutter strategies. I draw from examples I "own". I can cite dates, clients, events, locations, and examples of similar projects. I can supply thousands of references. I write original content with an original style.

You can do these things too. It takes time, but it is possible to do this yourself. You might benefit from a coach who can help tease out your why story, your unique approach, push past your humility and tastefully bring out what differentiates you without seeming boastful or mercenary.

And just like surgeons get referrals from ER call and colleagues, we got referrals from other bands who trusted our remit when they were already booked or otherwise unavailable. And we received referrals from past customers who were also repeat customers themselves.

Even when the business and trend to start using disc jockeys and records gained traction, while other bands' business dried up, we experienced a slight dip but we still got hired because of how we managed the event and brought the party to life, even though we charged more than disc jockeys.

And the best part??? We had a blast at work. We enjoyed what we were doing, where we were doing it in the finest country club settings and event venues, entertaining happy people, eating prime rib, drinking champagne, and being appreciated for a job well done. So what I am sharing with you in today's lesson is not just about healthcare. It is about targeting your ideal client or patient through targeted branding and weaponizing your brand to build your business. Isn't that the best of all worlds?

So when you weaponize your brand, four things occur:

1. you provide value to your patients and clients
2. you deliver something unique that cannot be duplicated by competitors
3. you create stories and messages people want to read, listen or be a part of, and
4. you build brand equity.

The opportunities are endless but first, build the "brand".

I can help you and I work with a team of brand advisors and fellow consultants who can help you in every aspect of healthcare brand creation, business development, product development, and targeting.

Once you have your brand developed, we'll show you how to weaponize it and then stand back and remain as a resource while you execute on the strategy yourself, or contract the parts you need from experts like us. We sell coaching on the "how" if you need it. You provide the "what", the "who" and the "where".

YOU are the expert behind your own uniquely differentiated brand of orthopaedics, cardiology, oncology, stem cell therapies, rehab, infertility ophthalmology urology, gynecology, spine surgery, or some other speciality service.

If anybody could do what you do, offer what you offer, and copy how you remit and only differentiate on price, you'd be a commodity and you wouldn't be unique. If that's what you are aiming for, please. call. someone. else.

You don't, and won't ever compete with Cleveland Clinic or Mayo or Johns Hopkins. You won't ever be Bumrungrad International.

You don't need to. All you need is four new people to find you online, align with and decide to place their trust your brand, to do business with you and become paying customers. AN AVERAGE OF FOUR PER WEEK. That's your goal. It is achievable. It won't cost a lot of money, either. In fact, measure cost by this rule I use. Make at least $1 more than what it costs you to market and advertise and promote your business on every campaign. That's easy enough to achieve, right?

Weaponize the brand you've built to do the rest for you...to be your influencer marketers to their friends and families and work colleagues or golfing buddies.

You won't scale overnight or "go viral". You don't need to try. But you must be consistent, focused, and strategic. You must couple the right strategy for your unique brand of healthcare with the most effective (not right or wrong) tactics, placement, messaging, timing, and pathway.

When you do things ineffectively, you'll know it because of how the results play out. You'll learn by trial and error. You'll learn from professional coaches. You'll evolve in your sophistication and knowledge of what to do, when, how, and why it works. You'll learn to listen and ask questions of your existing ideal customers. You'll learn to analyze what your ideal customers tell you, the words they use, trends in their demographics and psychographics. You'll adapt to your universe, market downturns, bull markets, COVID, trends, breakthrough technologies and your own continuing education. That's what Darwin explained. Darwin said, "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change."

As your business grows and morphs and as your passions for your craft and the surgeries you perform your brand will also evolve, just as mine has. The newly introduced technology tools you'll use such as robotics, stem cells, new diagnostic tools, new medicines or protocols, consumables, and new scientific methods in clinical practice, along with telehealth, and as remote patient monitoring evolves, your brand messages will evolve, adapt, develop, and be reprioritized.

A brand is a living thing. It is part corporate or business culture.

Your brand will adapt to its environment as we have during this COVID public health emergency pandemic. That will be your assignment. Grow and promote your brand to ideal targeted prospects and established customers.

It matures. We don't build a brand and as direct response marketing mogul and inventor of the " Veg-O-Matic", Ron Popeil who the coined phrase, "set it and forget it!" for which his Showtime Rotisserie gained fame on television in America. Popeil himself a "brand" and his company "Ronco" is the epitome of building a brand and using "his" brand to grow a thriving business. In August 2005, he sold "Ronco" for $55 million to a Denver holding company but he - the man behind the brand - still serves as spokesman and personality of the brand. How do you think he felt when he had his first four customers in a week? We all started somewhere. You will too.

But if you try to promote your business without a brand, without knowing enough about your customers (however much that may be), their needs, wants, status, situation, psychographics, and how your remit solves that need or want, you won't be effective.

And if you can't tell a story about your brand, and if you can only list your prices, features, accreditations, accolades or the technologies you have acquired, you will be a doomed before you ever begin.

If you cannot tell a story that patients or clients want to listen to, watch or read, and feel they can instantly connect on an emotional level and imagine themselves as your patient, benefitting from whatever your brand remit, and you attempt to advertise and market and promote ineffectively, you will not grow your business.

How you construct targeted messages, develop pricing, and prioritize special abilities you can offer, as my sisters and I did with the music menu for the band, will impact your success. The same goes for specialties like ortho and gyn and urology with robotics. Some specialists will develop a newly adapted passion for the robotic assist. Some will always be uncomfortable with the robotics and find reasons not to adapt, and will focus their passions elsewhere. These are all good things when there is an effective strategy and executable tactics. Each will be able to grow their four patients per week and exponentially scale from that. The same can be said for stem cells, concierge medicine, and oncology or interventional radiology and cardiology. That's what I love about healthcare. The craft can take many avenues, many delivery themes, many areas of specialization and sub specialization.

The successful healthcare practitioners and facilities will offer a product and build a brand that exists and that has been developed to solve a problem that enough people have that a business can be sustained and developed without being all things to all people.

Targeting in branding doesn't mean "just do one thing". It means research and target customers who need what you can offer and tailor the messages to them and deliver the messages where they are and by the means in which they consume information they are likely to trust. Not blasted through a bullhorn at the sky yelling lists of features and declared expertise and cheaper prices and hope it connects with "somebody".

Need help? Intrigued by what I wrote? Call me. Let's talk. +1 (800) 727.4160.