Blending Traditional and New Age Marketing
Ceatus VP of Marketing, Tamara Evans, was invited to speak at the recent Vegas Cosmetic Surgery meeting about integrating traditional marketing with new age digital strategies. She presented to a packed audience about how these types of marketing are different, but more importantly in today’s online world, how they are similar. The objective of traditional marketing was to have the prospective patient directly contact the practice.
Now, traditional marketing efforts, such as word of mouth (WOM) and print, are driving patients online. This means that digital marketing and traditional marketing have merged. She explained that the branding and messaging for these marketing efforts must be in concert. When traditional promotions focus on a specific aspect of the practice, then the practice website, SEO, blog and social media must also emphasize this same focus. These efforts require an in depth understanding of the online landscape by a skilled digital marketing agency.
Ms Evans further explained that this integration goes one step further when it comes to social media. Because in today’s world, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter are the new forms of word of mouth advertising. But most practices do not take advantage of social media as a WOM referral, more often they utilize these platforms strictly for promotion, i.e. as an opportunity to constantly promote specials or announce new technologies or services, similar to their traditional newspaper and radio ads. This strategy does not effectively blend old and new marketing and actually causes both to suffer.
Why? Because prospective patients go online to learn about procedures and the surgeons who offer them and to be engaged by the practice, before contacting the practice. They don’t go online to be bludgeoned with constant promotions. Ms Evans went on to explain how to utilize social media as an effective WOM tool to engage prospective patients, and how to calculate the ROI from these efforts.
To learn more about blending traditional and online strategies, and how to optimize your social media strategies, please contact us.
