Top 5 Marketing Tactics to Include in Your 2019 Budget As your elective surgery practice embarks on your end-of-year planning, you may be wondering what types of marketing tactics you should be focusing on for 2019. At Fast Track Marketing, we have helped hundreds of elective surgery clients – and businesses in other industries as well – boost their leads through our marketing strategies. We don’t recommend the same strategies year after year; we continually monitor the effectiveness of our methods. Elective surgery marketing – actually, marketing in general – is a constantly changing beast. Here is what we recommend you put your marketing dollars toward in 2019: Targeted Emails. Concisely target specific audiences you want to grow within your practice through email marketing. This is an affordable way to hyper-target your prospects. We use effective methods to target age, net worth, insurance, secondary insurance, household income, zip codes, etc. Targeted email marketing is far from dead. In fact, when written and designed with your target audience in mind (using powerful words that really speak to them and strong calls-to-action), this medium works great to attract patients for LASIK, cataract surgery, aesthetics procedures, dry eye treatments and more. The emails we produce see an average open rate of 10-15% and a 2-5% click-through rate depending on the offer. Email has a median ROIof 122% – over 4x higher than other marketing formats including social media, direct mail and paid search. (DMA and Demand Metric) Reputation Ramp Up. We have implemented a new program called Reputation Ramp Up that is helping our clients improve their online presence and boost new reviews. You have the opportunity to see how the program works by taking advantage of our free 30-day trial. If you sign up now, you can decide if this service is right for your practice – and if it will be effective in helping your practice generate more positive online reviews in 2019. The average practice that implements Reputation Ramp Up sees 4-10 new reviews in the first 30 days! (Fast Track Marketing) Social Advertising. There are so many different ways to go about advertising on social media. In addition to standard online posts, we have found social ads extremely effective in boosting leads for services such as LASIK, cataract surgery, aesthetic procedures and dry eye treatments. We typically encourage our clients to incorporate strong calls-to-action such as online self-evaluations, monthly specials or online scheduling tools to help them maximize the effectiveness of their ads. 50% percent of Gen Z (18- and 19-year-olds) and 42% of millennials (20- to 36-year-olds) think social media is the most relevant channel for ads. (Adobe’s State of Digital Advertising) Video. This doesn’t have to be intimidating, hard to produce or professionally made (i.e., expensive). People simply love watching videos. You can promote all aspects of your practice by creating things like monthly vision awareness videos, videos featuring your doctors, Live video feeds from your practice, patient testimonial videos, educational videos – the options are endless. Once created, these videos can be used in your social media posts, on your website, in digital marketing (emails, newsletters, etc.), in ads – anywhere your prospects might potentially visit. 90% of customers say video helps them make buying decisions and 64% of customers say that seeing a video makes them more likely to buy. (Forbes) Website Update. Right now is the perfect time to focus on auditing your current website, including taking a close look at your website analytics, to make sure that the site is providing the results you want. If you see high bounce rates, short interaction times, unsatisfactory results with search engine optimization (SEO), website leads, it might be time to update your site. Our team is incredibly talented in not only creating modern, up-to-date sites; our sites are also high performers with SEO. The top 5 search results on Google get 70% of the clicks. (Amazee Metrics) If your practice would like help developing a marketing strategy for 2019, or if you would like help implementing these (or other) strategies, contact Fast Track Marketing’s Director of Business Development, Brandi Musgrave, at (303) 731-2634 or brandi@fast-trackmarketing.com. You can also take advantage of our free 30-minute Marketing Analysis that will evaluate your current situation, review your marketing materials, evaluate marketing reports and provide you with quick tips to implement immediately. Click here to arrange a free Marketing Analysis.