Robert S. Bray, MD, neurosurgeon and founder of DISC Sports & Spine Center in Marina Del Rey, Calif., has been developing his medical marketing strategy since he first began private practice in the 1980s. After serving as Chief of Neurosurgery in the Air Force, Dr. Bray set out on a path of private practice, building up several notable spine programs and eventually founding his unique structure at DISC. Over time Dr. Bray developed and utilized evolving marketing strategies to connect directly with patients. “We put up a billboard and that generated a big response in the late 1980s,” Dr. Bray said. “We tried a lot of different things and learned what worked and what didn’t. Effective marketing for medicine has evolved over the years. We had negative feedback from the first billboard because people didn’t think it was right to market in medicine; now, it’s a necessity and expected because if you are not in the presence of the public in some way, you don’t exist.”
Here, Dr. Bray discusses eight key concepts to develop a dynamic marketing strategy for spine groups.
1. Tell a story. Storytelling has always been and remains a fundamental cornerstone of effective marketing. Using in house multimedia video production and social media, DISC is able to relate success stories from the elite athletes their surgeons treat. Any practice, however, can work to develop narratives of patients who have positive outcomes. The key is to not just provide a testimonial, but present it in context and tell the story of recovery.
“The single most important thing we found effective is telling stories,” says Dr. Bray. “People want to hear the first hand account. The compelling drama of athletes whose careers would have ended from an injury, but after treatment were able to battle back and win national and international titles strikes an emotional chord.”
A patient facing surgery is dealing with a highly stressful and personal situation. Patients relate to stories of the athletes on an interpersonal, emotional level. The story is not so much about the fact that the athlete was injured or underwent surgery but about the return to sport, and about the relationship between the athlete, the surgeon and the physical therapy team that pave the road to recovery. Patients are inspired by these stories of perseverance, as they are more than simply testimonials. They are honest and compelling narratives of passionate people returning to peak levels of performance.
DISC also cares for Red Bull America athletes, who pioneered this type of marketing.
“Red Bull spends a lot of their marketing money telling stories,” says Dr. Bray. “We gained marketing expertise through taking care of these athletes because Red Bull knows how to optimize exposure. Work in relationship with the people you are profiling and document their treatment and recovery as it happens. We film B-roll of the athletes during and after their recovery to develop a story around them.”
When patients see an athlete who underwent the same surgery they are facing, effortlessly flying fifty feet through the air on a motorcycle they are left with a sense of inspiration, of confidence and of strength. It is this mindset that helps patients develop the conviction to undergo necessary surgery and take an active role in their rehabilitation and recovery.
2. Generate exposure with educational and sponsorship opportunities. Find the opportunities in your community to promote education or sponsorship and take advantage of this exposure. DISC has a multi-tiered approach to community involvement that includes both educational lectures and providing medical expertise for local sporting events.
“We put on a series of lectures for chiropractors and physical therapists, as well as internists and other referral sources,” says Dr. Bray. “We make them educational-based and generate exposure for our group. The series might be focused on sports medicine or insurance coverage and we’ll sponsor lunches and different events around those topics.”
DISC has seen positive return on investment for educational opportunities, and has now begun a series of lectures targeting high school coaches, parents and young athletes about injury prevention. To continue their educational efforts, the group also sponsors athletic events such as the Off-Shore Sailing race series.
“We have a presence at every one of the regattas and we provide bags or other materials that are a token from DISC,” says Dr. Bray. “We help the organization develop brochures. We also have a presence at triathlete events. Grassroots community-based activities that align with your purpose can be very beneficial.”
3. Launch an Internet and social media strategy. While the Internet wasn’t a relevant advertising space for Dr. Bray in the 1980s, his group has experimented with different online marketing tactics over the past decade and continues to develop new tactics that optimize their online presence.
“The Internet has become a mandatory part of existence for marketing and it has undergone rapid change,” says Dr. Bray. “For some businesses, even email is history; they are past that and on to Facebook, Twitter and other social media for communication. The way people communicate has accelerated and continues to change, and our Internet strategy has evolved as well.”
The most challenging aspect of online marketing is often the dynamism; if the website and social media sites are static, they aren’t worth much.
“The Internet presence has to be as dynamic as the Internet is,” says Dr. Bray. “The structure has to be multimedia, linked into social media and it has to be ever changing. Information has to be up-to-the-minute with updates. As our Internet presence has developed, the content, sites and structures have become increasingly dynamic in a similar fashion.”
The DISC website is constructed for daily updates with new information or human-interest articles. The group’s marketing team also re-builds the website on a regular basis to optimize their ability to connect with potential patients. “In our office there is a board with our whole social media strategy planned out,” he says. “We do not post blindly, we use the content and stories we generate to create an interactive, cross platform experience. Our online presence is strategic and intentional and we track the results. We know what we want for Internet traffic, both organic and ad driven. There is a whole game plan. It’s become very sophisticated.”
4. Deliver quality care. Word of mouth has always been important for spine practices to attract new patients, but now with the Internet reaching a huge audience across the country, word-of-mouth can be helpful or devastating. Make sure you deliver quality care to each patient to back up your marketing efforts so all the information patients write on social networking sites is positive.
“Many patients, even if they were referred to us by another doctor, will check us out first on social media,” says Dr. Bray. “Whether it’s Yelp or HealthGrades, they are on all types of social media looking for reviews. They are very difficult to control because the information that goes out on them is not refereed. Your structure has to be quality and truly deliver quality care.”
DISC patients often leave positive reviews on these websites, but if a disgruntled patient leaves a negative response, it could hurt the practice’s business. Spine groups must follow up with their social media presence and strive to deliver quality to every patient.
“Take the Ritz Carlton approach to caring for patients,” says Dr. Bray. “You have to make their experience such that they want to come back and tell their friends. In the past, this might mean telling two or three close friends; now they post on Facebook and thousands of people see it. Make sure you have a high product that will stand up to review.”
5. Keep a positive message with your materials. Don’t use catchy marketing tactics to substitute for quality of care at your facility; it will catch up with you. Accurately frame your center in the marketing material and allow your patients — and their outcomes — to speak for themselves.
“There are a number of products or places that have used catchy marketing tactics to generate patients and I think that patients are becoming more sophisticated and realizing that the Internet is not refereed,” says Dr. Bray. “They are searching through other pieces of social media for back-up. If you generate a whole bunch of patients that you take advantage of or say something that isn’t realistic, or use negative ads against other groups, patients won’t like it. Social media is killing that off.”
Marketing might be smoke and mirrors for groups that aren’t providing good quality care, but surgeons who do can optimize their reputation online to drive patient volume.
“One of our marketing strategies has been around infection control,” says Dr. Bray. “We’ve done 8,000 cases without an infection, and that takes work on the quality and structural end. However, we can market our quality out there where there is so much negative press about infections and tell people we’ve worked hard to overcome that and been successful.”
6. Make it personal for the surgeons. Focus on highlighting individual surgeon accomplishments on your website or in the marketing material.
“We are currently in the process of doing video highlight interview reels with the surgeons,” says Dr. Bray. “We talk about what is special about our surgeons and we’ll put those videos out on multiple platforms. The world has gone multimedia; it’s not just a print ad or a picture.”
Go beyond just listing the surgeon’s credentials to tell a story about them and connect more deeply with potential patients.
“You can’t just say here I am, here’s my name and where I went to medical school,” says Dr. Bray. “You have to have something to tell your patients. If you talk about who you are and tell the story about how you’ve grown, people will connect more with you.”
7. Use several different marketing tactics to reach your target audience. Executing a true marketing strategy means building a marketing team and using several different tactics to reach patients. It’s not just a spot ad in the newspaper or creating a practice website; you must engage patients every day with social media as well.
“You can’t create an effective marketing program with a few thousand dollars per year,” says Dr. Bray. “It has to be a big part of your budget if you want a structure that can sustain growth. The marketing team must be dynamic and fresh with people who understand how things are changing.”
As much as a traditional marketing budget can not be overlooked, online word of mouth remains equally essential. Social media platforms are vastly important because they can reach a high volume of people on an interpersonal level. If one of your patients posts about a positive experience on Facebook or Twitter, a network of hundreds of people will see and relate to it.
“This is a very rapidly evolving structure and will continue to evolve, and that’s our challenge,” says Dr. Bray. “The most important strategy for the future is to create a program that is ever-changing and dynamic with a rapid response to the marketplace.”
8. Track return on investment. It’s sometimes difficult to track whether an investment in marketing is worthwhile, but new online analytics can help surgeons figure out how many people view their website and other online marketing strategies.
“Return on investment for our marketing strategies has been tremendous,” says Dr. Bray. “We’ve been involved in pay-for-click campaigns and used Google Ad words with a different phone number so we can track the number of people calling from that.”
The marketing initiatives can be expensive, but consider the money you make from each case brought to the center because of these efforts. “Knowing what I spent on marketing, I have a two- to four-fold return on cases in the OR, so the money spent on marketing comes back into the center. People should look at their budgets and figure out what resources they have available to put behind their program.”
Finally, with all the new marketing tactics available, don’t forget about the traditional techniques that served your practice well in the past. If your goal is to drive referrals, it’s still important to have a relationship with referring physicians and market to them in addition to the general public.
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