What Doctors Need to Know Before Hiring Another Agency

Article Updated January 20, 2020

After consulting over 700 healthcare practices over the last 5 years, I've heard several horror stories and listened to a ton of complaints about previous marketing vendors. Many doctors I have met have even been let down by multiple providers and therefore have a hard time trusting new providers.

2019 was a rough year for many doctors due to Google's relentless algorithm changes, the addition of BERT and more. With 2020 just kicking off, most of the doctors I am meeting with right now are starting to think about their past year's results and what needs to change. If you are looking to build a new website, improve your SEO or find a way to begin to measure your ROI, then this article is for you!

>> Related: Why are doctors leaving so many agencies?

Let's start with this question: Should you hire a generalist or a specialist?

There are thousands of marketing companies in the U.S. including mom-and-pop companies, big mega-corporations that serve ALL industries, companies that only serve healthcare and others that are in-between these 3 examples. Below are some points you'll want to think about in case you are looking to hire a company in one of these categories.

The Mom-and-Pops

The small agencies are typically focused on service and charge alot because they don't have many clients, therefore you help them pay for their lack of time to hunt and find new business. You might get lots of attention because you might be 1 of 5 accounts that they have, but you are going to pay for it.

For example, I met a dentist once that was spending $4,000 a month just for SEO. Her results were slightly above average, but she was paying a premium for the number of new patients she was acquiring each month. In the beginning, she needed results and it was good for the short term, but her budget wasn't sustainable for the volume of leads she was receiving.

When she left her "SEO guy" he was devastated because she was only 1 of 3 accounts and that hit his wallet pretty hard. She liked the personal attention he gave her, but he wasn't able to provide basic things like lead tracking software or review monitoring services that were both vital to her business. Sometimes the small guys simply don't have the tools or technology that a larger agency can provide because they just don't have the financial resources available.

The Big Boys

Many times the large agencies tell a good story in the beginning. One thing the big boys do well is that they typically offer a long list of services, hoping to capture all of your marketing dollars. For example, you are starting to see many of the print guys (or other traditional marketing companies like a newspaper company) are now offering digital marketing. Unfortunately, most doctors I have spoken within these scenarios have nothing positive to say about their experiences with these types of agencies that are trying to make the shift but still operate under old paradigms and strategies that simply are not effective today.

A common trend I have heard about from doctors is that their sales rep is often trying to up-sell them new services every time they meet even when their current campaign is lacking results. They also tend to have alot of turnover with sales reps due to big corporations and their quotas trying to make stockholders happy. Because of high employee turnover, they tend to have high customer churn rates, too ... some as high as 30% customer churn per year!

The common theme is they tend to over-promise and under-deliver. For example, when I was new to DoctorLogic, I received an email from a plastic surgeon that hired us to build him a new website and help with SEO and lead generation efforts. He and his team really liked our back-office software and lead tracking capabilities. He had already been working with another agency for about 4 years that was running PPC (Google Paid Ads) and a few other services for him that we didn't provide. He sent us an email letting us know he fired them. I'll quote him, but I'll leave out the name of the big company just to be nice.

Thank you for getting the Pixel tracking on the site! It allowed us to determine conclusively that XYZ Media was not providing a valuable service to us and we have discontinued our association with them as a direct result. 300 clicks, 12 second avg stay on the site. No consultations and no calls as a result. We had paid this company more than $100,000 over the past 4 years and they continue to this moment to say they are performing above industry standards. UGh..

>> Related: Measuring Your ROI in Healthcare Marketing

The Specialists

While there are companies out there that only work with dentists, only work with plastic surgeons, or have work with multiple healthcare specialties, not all are created equally. Most of these companies started as a mom-and-pop agency and started acquiring doctors over other business verticals so they became specialists. Many of these companies still lack financial resources to innovate and invent tools that doctors really want and or even worse, really need. Some have been specialists from the beginning and have been around a while. Because of their size, they start to trend like the big boys and have issues with performance, customer service, turnover, etc.

Pricing can range quite a bit. Some offer basic packages as low as a few hundred dollars a month for basic hosting and maintenance and others are boutique oriented, which are highly custom and very pricy costing several thousands of dollars per month. Your specialty will determine what you can afford. Also, your longevity of owning your practice, might determine your budget as well.

If you get most of your business from doctor referrals or insurance companies by being an in-network provider, you probably aren't investing too much in your marketing. For example, if you have been a general dermatologist, you might have been in this group. Investing a couple of hundred dollars a month might be all that you need. However, if you are now offering cosmetic procedures and want to attract the cash buyer, you'll need to start thinking about marketing in a new way to invest in your growth. Acquiring patients for elective care (cash patients) will require a new mindset, new operational best practices and new marketing tools.

Mindset

If you haven't traditionally invested much in marketing in the past, your website is probably older than 3 years and it simply validates that you exist but it doesn't rank well or convert many leads. In other words, it's not a moneymaker.

Let's say, now you want to focus on acquiring new patients. In order to do so, you'll need to invest in a website that promotes your new cosmetic procedures. You'll also need to invest in ongoing marketing because building the website isn't enough. It needs to get found online for the procedures that you offer or it's basically worthless. You can invest in SEO, PPC, Social Media and other methods, but regardless of the path that you choose, you need to find a way to drive new visitors to it each and every month.

Let's say you have a goal and want to generate $500,000 in yearly revenue from your cosmetic procedures that you are now offering. You should probably be investing somewhere between 8%-10% of that revenue goal towards marketing ($40,000-$50,000/year). Break that down per month and you are looking around $3,300/mo. up to $5,000/mo. If your revenue goal is higher, then your monthly marketing budget will need to adjust.

Visit the Small Business Administration for more information about marketing budget recommendations.

Operations

While you are building your new website, you might need to invest in hiring a sales coach or practice management consultant to help you change the way some of your operational practice. For example, your staff might need training on answering the phone, sales training for consultations to improve close rates, how to take before-and-after photos, asking for reviews, etc.

If you have never used before and after photos in the past, you'll need to adapt if you are moving into the cosmetic arena. 3 out of 4 patients researching cosmetic procedures online won't even contact your practice if you don't have before-and-after photos on your website. You can spend time and money to get people to the website and the last thing you want to happen is to leave it and go to your competition!

>> Related: Win more patients with better galleries

Now that you are focused on patient acquisition, you might need to ask happy patients to write reviews for you. Whether you do this at checkout or follow up with an email, you'll need to incorporate asking for reviews into your operations if you aren't doing that today. Most of your new patients will want to read reviews about you and your practice before they come in for a consult or schedule an actual procedure.

>> Related: Grow NEW Patients and Revenue with Reviews

Marketing Tools

So now you know that galleries and reviews are important, how are you going to use these two elements for marketing?

Most agencies do things manually. They want you to send them your content, so they can nickel-and-dime you for the time it takes them to help you market your practice online.

At DoctorLogic, we have invented software to make it easy for practices to market themselves online and they never pay beyond their monthly rate.

>> Related: Why Doctors Like Partnering with DoctorLogic

DoctorLogic has a proven track record and we serve all size clients from Individual Practitioners, Medical Groups to Enterprise Accounts. We offer a Patient Acquisition Platform that was built specifically for medical marketing. Our software is built so that it saves practices time and it helps create up to 100X more Google-friendly content than the typical agency. More relevant content found more often = more new patient leads.

We also have advanced lead tracking software so doctors can see that their investment is working and generating new patient opportunities. If you are considering building a new website for your practice or looking for a new online marketing partner altogether, I welcome the opportunity to visit with you.

During our consultation, I'll provide an analysis of your current online performance and tell you what you need to do to be successful whether you choose to partner with me or not, so you really have nothing to lose.

To your success!

John Vakidis

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Do you have questions about marketing your practice more effectively online? If so, shoot me an email to [email protected] or call me at 469-458-7126.