Skip to main content

Missing the Mark-eting

By Paul Louiselle, for HealthLeaders Media  
   March 31, 2010

Marketing in healthcare, and in particular within a highly specialized medical practice, can be somewhat of a crapshoot. Determining what is effective and what is a waste of your valuable time and money can be difficult to discern. However, with a little determination—and a plan—healthcare leaders can greatly improve their message and the degree to which they reach those who need to know about your services.

Minnesota Epilepsy Group, a Level IV epilepsy Center located in St. Paul, Minnesota has been in practice for over 20 years. While you would think competition within the highly specialized field of epilepsy would be minimal, it’s far from reality. Within a few short miles, a comparable epilepsy program exists and a short drive to Rochester, MN, brings you to the doorstep of an adversary who wrote the book on marketing specialty services, including epilepsy.

In 2006, after arriving at Minnesota Epilepsy Group as the Executive Director, I took a hard look at our current market position and our marketing strategy. The following is a summary of what I found:

  • An outdated website
  • Poor optimization within our website
  • Poor “organic” results from Google, Bing, or Yahoo searches
  • Significant investments being made in Yellow Page advertising
  • Large and expensive advertising in consumer-based publications
  • Staffing a booth at expensive annual conferences
  • No data on what was important to our patients and how our patients made decisions to use our services

While difficult to measure, it my conclusion that our competitors had the upper hand in conveying their message and reaching their (and potentially our) patients. We were missing the mark—and wasting a lot of money in the process.

The first thing we did to understand the gap between our current reality and where we needed to go was to ask our patients a few questions. This was accomplished through a questionnaire that was distributed to 300 of our existing patients. Some of the key findings extracted from this survey included:

  • A large number of our patients were referred from their primary care physician or their specialty physician.
  • A large number of our patients were referred from a friend or an acquaintance.
  • None of our patients made decisions to come to us due to our presence in the Yellow Pages.
  • A growing number of patients researched us on the Internet prior to making a decision to utilize our services.

Based on this information gathered through our survey coupled with what we knew about the way people make healthcare decisions; we developed a marketing strategy to reshape the way we touted our programs and services. This strategy is outlined below.

Website Development

The website we had was outdated and poorly optimized, meaning that epilepsy-related internet searches rarely brought people to our website. Given this, we spent the next several months developing a new website.

Considerable time was spent discussing and answering the question - what is at the core of who we are as an organization? After considerable discussion, three messages rose to the top – we employed competent people, we utilized the most sophisticated technology available and we provided a hi-touch service. It was this message that we set out to convey in our website.

Not only did upgrading our website provide a “fresh” face for us, but more important, it provided higher hit ratios from search engines due to the optimization work that was conducted within the website.

Blog Development

I had suggested that our organization develop a blog to compliment the new website we had. The idea was to have the blog be a dynamic avenue to promote our program and services and ultimately drive more traffic to our website. Long story short, the physicians were supportive of this as long as we did not provide medical advice within the blog and that we did not allow an open dialogue within the blog. This was perfect and fit with my goal.

Since writing our first blog in April of 2009, our blog has received 8,292 visitors. This translates to 36 visitors per day. The top ten searches that brought people to our blog included:

  • Epilepsy surgery Minnesota
  • Epilepsy doctors Twin Cities
  • Epilepsy doctors Minnesota
  • Intractable epilepsy Minneapolis
  • Intractable epilepsy Minnesota
  • Epilepsy medications
  • Epilepsy in children
  • Seizure doctors Minnesota
  • Epilepsy doctors Midwest
  • Epilepsy Minnesota

Many of those who visited our blog also visited our website through the many links provided within our blog. It is obvious from the search engine criteria above that the blog is attracting people looking for epilepsy care. While we have not surveyed our patients recently, it is our intent to discover how many of them found us as a result of this new vehicle.

Pay Per Click

In addition to the investment in the website and blog, we invested in “pay per click” services from a local internet marketing firm—Star & Trib in our case. These “pay per clinic” services bring business to your website by listing your site when search engine criteria matches those that you identify in your setup.

While it is obvious to the consumer that these “pay per click” listings are marketing rather than genuine or “organic” findings we felt it was important to have a presence here due to our competitors who also used this service.

Since initiating this service in July of 2009, we have had 504 hits on our “pay per click” site with the following searches generating the highest traffic:

  • Epilepsy Doctors Minnesota
  • Epilepsy Surgery Minnesota
  • Seizure care Twin Cities
  • Epilepsy Care Twin Cities
  • Seizure Doctors Minneapolis

Reduce Print Marketing to Customers

Based on the feedback we received from our patient survey—not one patient found us through the Yellow Pages—a decision was made to drastically reduce our investment in this medium.

Our reductions in Yellow Page advertising came in the form of decreased ad size and transitioning our ads from color to black and white. Because some of our patients stated that they looked us up in the yellow pages to find our address or phone number, we felt it was still necessary to maintain some presence in the Yellow Page book.

In addition to the yellow page reduction, it was decided to eliminate print advertising that was directed to the general population and increase our print advertising to the physicians who may refer to us. To this end, we had began running ads within the physician society print publications which are distributed to over 600 primary and specialty care physicians throughout the state.

Since decreasing our ad size, not one of our patients has complained that they have been unable to find us in the book.

Increase Print Marketing to Physicians

Given the feedback we received on how our patients found us, we decided to advertise directly to the physicians who referred to us. We placed an ad within Metro Doctors, a local publication read by approximately 600 specialty and primary care physicians.

While it has been difficult to discern the impact that this has had on our practice, we believe it is a better use of our scarce marketing dollar than advertising in print material directed to patients.

Decrease Booth Attendance

Minnesota Epilepsy Group routinely attended, as an exhibitor, two conferences annually—the American Academy of Neurology and American Epilepsy Society meetings. In addition to booth attendance, six to eight clinical staff would attend to present papers and other research we were involved in.

Our rationale in having a booth at these conferences was the exposure it gave our practice and the degree to which it facilitated the recruitment of talented staff.

We decided to eliminate our booth attendance at the American Epilepsy Society meeting. This decision was based on the realization that our practice already received significant exposure from our presentation of epilepsy research at the conference and the fact that, over the last 15 years, our booth was never really the reason we were able to recruit talented staff.

It was still found to be important to encourage and support our clinical staff in presenting research studies this conference.

In addition to the financial savings, our decision not to attend this conference allowed us more opportunity to focus our attention on the preparation of our research material.

Impact on Patient Volume

Patient volume has grown within our practice by 45% since 2006. I am convinced that our growth has been largely attributed to our physicians and staff providing exceptional care and customer service, one patient at a time. No advertising strategy can beat this approach. Having said that, I do believe that the changes we made to our strategy has significantly improved our ability to leverage the great care we provide.

If you haven’t taken a hard look at your marketing strategy and market position, now is the time. As leaders within our practice, we can’t afford to waste our time and resources on ineffective strategies. Start the process by listening to your patients; let them drive the formation of your strategy.


Paul Louiselle, MA, CHE, Executive Director, Minnesota Epilepsy Group

Tagged Under:


Get the latest on healthcare leadership in your inbox.