Episode Details

In this episode, Barbara and Spencer discuss:

• Talking to your patients to put yourself in their shoes when considering marketing. 
• What digital metrics you should pay attention to as a healthcare professional. 
• Website accessibility, marketing, and HIPAA compliance. 

Key Takeaways:

• Pay attention to the language that the patient or client uses compared to the language that you use. 
• Pick and choose the metrics that you are choosing to pay attention to. The ultimate goal is conversion. 
• To play it safe, don’t upload anything beyond the email addresses into your email marketing system. 

“Pay close attention to your patients for your marketing cues. Successful marketing is understanding the map in the patient’s head, then working to bridge the gap between what they know and what they don’t know.” —  Spencer Brooks

TRANSCRIPTION

Barbara:         Welcome to another episode of Marketing Tips for Doctors. I’m your host, Dr. Barbara Hales.

Today’s guest, Spencer Brooks, is the founder and principal of Brooks Digital, a digital firm that empowers health nonprofits to use their web presence to improve the lives of patients. He’s helped organizations such as The diaTribe Foundation scale their digital presence from a few thousand annual visitors and subscribers to over 2.5 million visitors and 200,000 subscribers. Wow! Spencer’s superpower is helping organizations get their complex, difficult-to-use website under control so they can provide the right information to the right person at the right time. Welcome to the show, Spencer.

Spencer:        Absolutely, Barbara. Thank you for having me today. I’m really excited to be speaking with you.

Barbara:         Tell me, Spencer, how do you put yourself in the shoes of an ideal patient to understand what they want?

Spencer:        That’s a great question, Barbara, because I think this is a very difficult thing to do. One of the things that I’ve found after working with a number of health organizations over the years and really just honestly anyone who’s worked in a particular discipline or specialty for a long time, myself included, has trouble actually looking if you think about like reading your own label almost, putting yourself in the shoes of someone who is maybe new to your specialty. And that can be very difficult because in terms of marketing you’re going to struggle to understand the language to use. What words do I even use?

How does someone who doesn’t know what I know describe what I do? And how do I structure my website, how do I — there are so many things that come from being able to put yourself in the shoes of an ideal patient. So I think that’s first of all the challenge of even doing that, is we want to be able to be outside, like I said, almost outside the jar to read your own label.

So I think to start doing that obviously you have to begin by defining your ideal patient and that’s a prerequisite. I’d like to think about this at least with my background in working with health organizations is thinking