In this week's premier of the final season of Downton Abbey, one of our favorite characters, Anna Bates, reveals her struggle with recurring pregnancy loss. The season takes place in 1925. How different options would have been for Anna and her husband in that period, with respect to both medicine and information technology. How would Anna have learned more about her medical condition in 1925?
Patient or Customer? Self-identity in the business of infertility
Here we are...wrapping up 2015, largely on pause between the major holidays. I'm taking it easy too, so I'm using this blog post to spell out how I can be more helpful to the infertility community in the New Year. That started an honest reflection about how we see self-identities (patients, practices, doctors, me), and what that means about our responsibilities to each other.
The Truth Is Undefeated: A hard look at "questionable techniques" and the current state of fertility marketing
You can tell I'm still relatively new to the fertility space. I don't appear in the top ten Google search results for "fertility marketing". I'm working on that, that's what brought me to check. I was both encouraged and discouraged by something else that did come up, however.
It's unfortunate for the field of reproductive medicine when our top search results for marketing include, "Many Fertility Clinics Use Questionable Marketing Techniques Online", a Jezebel reiteration of a Huffington Post article from three years ago. I would normally argue that we should avoid questionable marketing techniques by using only real patient testimonials and images. But authentic content does not fully address the issue of transparency in fertility marketing . The fundamental problem is that fertility clinics serve two different populations who sometimes overlap and who are sometimes at odds. Until we equally recognize both groups and the value of their experiences, I'm afraid we'll continue to have more problems.
New Research: IVF success impacts fertility clinic reviews. But how much?
I wish I could say that this new research provides us with all of the answers we've sought, but I think we're left with new questions. That's fine by me, I find it encouraging. We've talked about reproductive endocrinologist (RE) and fertility center reviews, and the psychology behind them. This new data helps us understand how success of treatment impacts the rating of a fertility clinic or fertility doctor review.
Top 7 Ways to Market Your Fertility Practice in 2016
2015 was an interesting year for fertility centers. We saw big mergers in both the United States and Canada to watch large practices become extremely large practices. Meanwhile, other practices sold equity to team up with larger management firms while some reproductive endocrinologists (RE) opened their own clinics. That's no surprise; infertility treatment remains a high-growth category. The Society for Advanced Reproductive Technology (SART) numbers show an increase in ART cycles every year from 2003 to 2013 and we expect the 2014 and 2015 reports to follow the trend.
The Sacred Scroll of Infertility: 8 reasons fertility clinics can't afford to ignore Instagram in 2016
This is worth saying again. Instagram is an insanely powerful social media channel for fertility marketing. I don't say this because data proves that Instagram is the second largest social network in the world. Twitter and Linkedin are large social networks too, but I typically don't recommend that fertility clinics spend too much time with them. They just aren't places where people usually talk about children or the journey of infertility. Instagram is different.
12 Blogs and Podcasts that Fertility Clinics Should Share with Their Patients
I believe that the fertility centers who provide their patients with the most opportunities for information, connection, and community are those that stand to gain. One of the most common pain-points described by people coping with infertility is not having people in their social circles that can relate to their journey.
For this reason, so many people have bravely decided to share their experiences online, and their content has become invaluable to couples and individuals struggling with infertility. Fertility centers can empower their patients by linking to some of this media on their websites, and even sending new patients home with a printed resource.
The Future of Content Marketing for Fertility Centers
I've mentioned before that every fertility center is, in fact, a media company. This thesis should inform your fertility clinic's entire content marketing strategy. First, let's define content marketing as the process of creating and curating relevant and valuable content. So how do we know what's relevant and valuable? We have to reverse-engineer the attention of couples and individuals struggling with infertility.
The 25 Best Words to Describe REs in Fertility Clinic Reviews
Now, on to the good news.
In an earlier post, I had written about the 28 harshest words that people use to describe reproductive endocrinologists. Paying attention to the words that people use to desrcribe their REs and their fertility clinics begins to offer insight on how we can improve their experience. This time, I made a word cloud of the most common positive adjectives that people use in RE reviews.
The 7 Most Powerful Ways for Fertility Centers to Use Instagram
What is the most frustrating thing about managing social media for your fertility center? If I ask this question to enough people, sure enough, this answer will be fairly common: there are too many platforms. How do we participate in all of them?
Ready for the good news? You don't. I'll make this much simpler for you. All we need to do is reverse-engineer the attention of the patient. What media do IVF patients spend the most time with, and how does it relate to their struggle with infertility?
A Self-Education in Social Media for REs, with Dr. Brian Levine
Brian Levine, MD, is a reproductive endocrinologist (RE) with CCRM New York. Dr. Levine sits on the American Society for Reproductive Medicine's (ASRM) tech committee and speaks on social media to the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ACOG). I thought he would be a great resource to keep us abreast of the rapidly changing landscape in communication technology.
There are other REs who participate in and talk about social media as it relates to reproductive health, like Dr. Serena Chen and Dr. Kenan Omurtag, but there aren't many. I asked Dr. Levine why that is.
Why on Earth Would an RE Review Google and Yahoo?
Did I miswrite the title of this blog post? Aren't reproductive endocrinologists reviewed on Google and other search engines, not the other way around?
If you believe in content marketing, it's because you've seen results from it. If you've seen results from content marketing, then you likely agree with Gary Vaynerchuk when he says that every company is a media company.
Infertility and Ovarian Cancer Risk As a Blog Post for Your Fertility Clinic
As I mentioned in my post about how to come up with topics for your fertility center's blog, one of the best habits you can develop is to write about the latest news in the field of infertility. I am not suggesting that you re-post a link to a news article on your site. You can do that if you absolutely don't have ten minutes to write your own post, but I'm concerned with increasing your fertility center's search engine optimization (SEO), not that of cancernetwork.com.
28 Scathing Words for REs Across Fertility Center Reviews
If you are a reproductive endocrinologist (RE), you don't have an easy job. I don't mention this to state the obvious, nor flatter you, nor am I referring to surgical talent, study, or training.
It's heir-apparent that one of the most difficult aspects of the role of an RE is serving a population under enormous emotional and mental stress, who are often financially burdened, subject to unfair social pressure, all within great deal of outcome-uncertainty.
What Every IVF Patient is Looking For On Your Fertility Clinic's Website
4 Reliable Guidelines for Responding to Positive Fertility Clinic Reviews
6 Critical Rules for Responding to Negative RE Reviews
Here is the most important thing for reproductive endocrinologist and infertility (REI) specialists to keep in mind when responding to reviews: the reviewer is not the only person to whom you are responding. The reviewer has an audience. That audience is comprised of the people who are using these reviews to decide if they should become your patient. This is why Google ranks these sites on the first page of a search for your fertility center or physician name.
4 Powerful Facts About Fertility Center Reviews to Improve Your Practice
Online reviews are your practice’s public image to everyone who has not been inside your clinic and interacted with your staff. Your most common ratings are what patients see when they type your practice name into a Google search. Your online reputation correlates to patient experience. If your patient experience is critically flawed, no amount of internet marketing will save your online reputation. Equally, many practices do an excellent job of caring for their patients, yet that remarkable care is invisible to the rest of the world.
Forget Twitter: The 2 Most Important Social Networks for Fertility Centers
It's annoying, isn't it? So many social networks come and go, how can a Reproductive Endocrinologist and her practice manager be expected to be fully engaged in a dozen social media platforms? The task becomes much less daunting when we reverse engineer our patients' attention. We don't have to be experts of every social network, we just need to know on which our prospective patients spend the most time.
Turn Your Social Media Channels into an IVF Referral Network
A fertility center’s Return on Investment in social media can be traced back to the activism of its community. The value of social media is not that we have a free broadcast mechanism to reach people with any time we like. None of that is true—it’s neither free, nor a broadcast mechanism, nor will people see our message whenever we please.
The value of social media is your community. Fertility centers acquire new patients through social media when they have a passionate, connected, community of people that zealously advocates for them. This is "word of mouth". Communities will gladly rise up for their fertility centers—providing better advertising than we could ever hope to buy—but only if they are engaged. To engage your community:
• Respond to all direct messages as quickly as possible
• Reply to all comments and posts
• Thank those who leave reviews and compliments
• Crowdsource: Ask for input on various practice initiatives
Responding to comments and reviews is a critical part of community management for infertility clinics.
The most direct way to use social media to attract new IVF patients is to empower current and former patients with a "word of mouth" referral network. When you interact with your community of supporters, the number of people who are they are able to refer to your practice increases dramatically. If you look at the Facebook pages of the vast majority of fertility centers in North America you will find that patient communities are largely ignored. If you are unable to dedicate the time it takes to respond to, thank, and inspire your community, your ROI on social will be very limited.