Doctor who? That's the question healthcare consumers will have if they can't find you. We are constantly amazed by the number of healthcare organizations reluctant to use the Internet to help consumers find them.
By internet, we don't mean your web site. Sites are great, and we love them. But web search is what brings home the bacon. Eighty percent of Americans use the internet to search for health information, and of these 66% of consumers begin at a search engine vs. only 27% at a specific web site. Specialists in elective surgery such as bariatrics have been the groundbreakers on the internet, but conventional wisdom inside hospitals has said that physician referrals drive the majority of patient volume, so why bother?
Hmm. We ran a few Google tests for supposed low-interest consumer categories such as radiology, and found 18,000 impressions on a test ad within a 15-mile radius in a single month. Pause. Think. Impressions in pay-per-click mean that the Google text ad was served up on the screen only after the consumer had typed one of several specific radiology phrases -- MRI, radiologist, breast screening -- into the Google search window. 18,000 consumer web searches. In one month. For radiology. Within 15 miles of a small town in Connecticut.
Conclusion: If you think physician referrals drive all healthcare decisions, you are wrong. The pharma marketers have known for decades that consumers make up their own minds (Purple Pill, anyone?), and hospitals and small-town practitioners are just catching on. The cheapest way to advertise to consumers is to catch them on Google, when they are already looking for you. Pay-per-click campaigns can be targeted to tight geographic areas and even single PCPs can test the channel for a few hundred dollars.
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