Marketing for ECPs (Part 4)
If you’re an eye doctor or an optician, you probably did a lot of studying about eyes, optometry, chemistry, biology, anatomy and biochemistry. However, if you’re like most eye care professionals (and other doctors, chiropractors, pharmacists, lawyers, etc.), you may have only had one or two marketing classes.
So, you’re an expert at taking care of people’s vision. But, how do you get patients in the door? Where do you get marketing ideas for eye doctors, opticians and optical stores? Where do you learn about marketing for eye doctors?
This series of articles contains excerpts from our e-book entitled, "Marketing Boot Camp for Eye Care Professionals." For more information, click here.
This article series offers some basic marketing for opticians and some specific ideas you, the eye care professional, can use right away in your practice to help attract and build your patient base. This is by no means an exhaustive guide to marketing for optical stores, but it will help generate some ideas you can use immediately, especially if you’re new to marketing.
You'll learn:
- Basic Marketing Concepts
- Ideas to Market to Today’s Educated, Online-Savvy Audience
- Tips on Utilizing Social Media
- Basic Website Upgrades
- Much More
Website Design Considerations
In this day and age, consumers are turning to the Internet before they shop. Recent research shows that as much as 97% of consumers use online media to help them make purchasing decisions. That’s why it’s imperative to have a website. But, there’s more to it than just having a website.
This chapter will focus on basic essential considerations when designing your business website. It is not intended to be an exhaustive guide to website design, but hopefully will give you some important things to consider in making sure the investment you’ve made in your business website pays off. Your website is often your first impression for potential patients. Poor design and functionality can send patients searching for your competitors.
Designing a business website or blog can be very complex, but here are a few important considerations:
1) Know Your Audience
It’s critical to know who you’re reaching - or, who you want to reach. Your design should speak to the right age group, interest group or regional group. Tailor your design and content to your specific audience.
2) Know Your Competition
Often, the best place to start is to see what your competition is doing. Differentiate your message and improve on what you find to attract patients. It’s also important to do this on a regular basis because messages often change.
3) Keep It Simple
Sometimes, the measurement of a great website is simplicity. Keep in mind the average user spends less than a minute or two on a website. Make sure your message is simple, clean and easy to understand. Avoid complicated navigation and focus on a main message you want your patient to know. You may only have a few seconds per page!
4) Call To Action
A strong Call To Action (CTA) is what turns visitors into customers. There should be a CTA on each page compelling visitors to take action to read more, download a coupon, contact you for more information, or schedule an eye exam. If you collect the visitor’s name and email address, you can follow up and nurture them into a customer.
5) Analyze Results
Over time, you will want to take a look at who’s using your website and how they’re using it. Google Analytics is a great, free tool to help you understand how many visitors, click rates, bounce rates, time spent on pages, the path visitors take, and much more. Analyzing the data helps you to understand how to improve to visitor’s experience. This will help increase the chances of them becoming a customer.
6) Tie It All Together
Make sure you put links to all your social media sites in obvious places on all your pages. Also, make it simple to contact you or set an appointment for an eye exam. If you have an email newsletter, make sure you make it clear and simple to register.
7) Blog About It
One of the best things you can do to drive traffic to your website is to create a blog on your website. A blog is a page where you write articles or share information about you, your business, your promotions and other information your audience might be searching for on the Internet. If they find the article, they may find you when they weren’t even looking for you. Web search engines like the ever-changing nature of blogs and will rank your website higher when you consistently post blog posts.
8) Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is critical to getting traffic to your website. The discussion of SEO is complex. For the sake of this introduction to marketing, I want to be sure you know that people can’t just find you if you build a website.
A website should be built with SEO in mind, including things like:
- keywords: words or phrases people put in Google to search for something that should be included in the text of your website
- backlinks: links to your website from other credible websites
- links to your own website: include links to other information on your website from your blog posts. This helps boost traffic to individual pages.
- links to others: one easy way to drive more traffic to your site is to develop relationships with other related sites.
- sitemap: a page listing and linking to all the other pages on your site. This makes it easier for web spiders to search your site.
- image descriptions: adding an “alt tag” to images allows you to include a keyword-rich description for every image on your website.
Next Steps
Hopefully, this chapter has given you some ideas you can implement on your website. This is a very complex subject and can be overwhelming. If you’re not a web-developer type, perhaps you can pass these along to your web development company to make sure they’ve implemented some or all of these ideas.
This concludes the blog series based on the e-book, "Marketing Boot Camp for ECPs." Look for more marketing blog posts and e-books in the near future!
Download the e-Book!
Everything you've read here is an excerpt from our e-Book entitled, "Marketing Boot Camp for ECPs." Read the rest by downloading the entire e-Book.
http://info.icarelabs.com/marketing-boot-camp-for-ecps
Want More Information?
Need more than just marketing ideas for optical stores? Learn how Icare Labs can help you with significant savings on your monthly lab bill.
