… the future growth and success of your business. Literally.
Especially in some industries it can mean survival where your very first impression is that one picture that someone sees when they visit your website. I’m quite serious.
I was unkindly reminded of this as I was “window shopping” for some specialist doctors and spent time on Google trying to mine and uncover as much information about these “service providers” as humanly possible.
Let me be honest – I was incredibly biased towards rejecting doctors that had either no online presence of their own (outside of medical journals and random aggregators sites) or who had a website but no image of themselves (no “selfie”) or worse, a bad one.
I should have recorded my facial expressions and my guttural response as I browsed these sites – it was more like:
Ah, gawd… nowhywat-thehex-is-who-ohnoe-whysheesh.
*Click* *Close*
Some of these Doctors need a serious lesson and crash course in marketing – heck, you could probably make an entire business around educating doctors and those in the professional services industry in basic internet etiquette.
You see, myself and my so-called generation are the Google Generation. Actually, more broadly, we are the TGIF generation (Twitter, Google, iPhone, Facebook) as my friend Leonard Sweet calls it, and we want to see you before we ever engage with you. We want to know more about you than you are comfortable with before we ever pick up the phone and call you.
In fact, we are more likely to friend you or add you on LinkedIn or even tweet you before we even promise that we’ll become your “customers” (or in this context a patient).
I ended up calling the prettiest person. Seriously. Sorry, I’m sure the rest of them were attractive but it was the wrong light or something like that. Sure, I’ll do my “due diligence” and eventually pick the best provider, but all education and background and experience being equal, I’m picking the one with the best avatar.
For 5 years I worked that industry and helped teach best practices for web. You do know, don’t you, that MD stands for Marketing Director… Not Doctor of Medicine like you may think.
The interesting thing, is the smarter that they probably are, the truer it is.
#LOL
I thought the same thing when looking at local chiropractors last year. The guy I ended up choosing had more to do with how I was treated on the phone than his website, but his site wasn’t that great.
Now I’m trying to decide if it’s worth asking him if he needs help in making his site look better, of if that would come across as arrogant and presumptuous. But I’d recommend him in a heartbeat.
i can’t help myself. i’ll probably say something.
I was looking for a an eye doctor last month and had a very similar experience. I was so shocked to see so many doctors with out a web presence. I will admit I finally picked one that had a decent looking website that actually provided doctor information that I would be seeing.
Than when I went to my appointment the doctor was just small talking and asked for my email and than shared I probably need to do more email marketing and social networking on facebook. It made me chuckle.
the web is the way… what planet do these people live on?
There must be some special place that these doctors come from that don’t care or know about the web! I can not understand it! I am right there with you searching for the best doctor on the web!
Yup, pictures are important these days. I just had a professional photo shoot.
You are SO right about this. Personally, I think video is one of the best things doctors can do for themselves.
If they are boring on video, then a Q&A piece is good in html.
And, also, appointment pages that WORK! My own primary care dr’s appt page doesn’t work. Drives me nuts. But they use one of these canned systems built for doctors (but apparently not maintained). Ugh!
My family dentist really gets it. The website is clean and up-to-date. Someone even keeps Facebook current with comments from patients. In his office, there is an updated video playing on a big screen in the waiting room with images from the website and more information and adverts for other services.
Google stooksberry and you’ll see what I mean.
It’s almost a badge of trustworthiness anymore. You have info on the internet that’s easy to find and bingo, I feel better about going to said doctor, dentist, or whoever. The curse of the information age, I guess.
John, I think most doctors totally overlook how much is needed for them to be successful. They are a business and they indeed need to market themselves much better than they do.