Coding? Confusing back-end stuff? Ugh, boooring. Maybe to you, but not to us. How your site is built can make a big difference in the quality of the user experience and the value placed on it by search engines, which is why we never cut corners with web development. Even if coding conversations do make your eyes glaze over.

Let’s talk about the decidedly less sexy web development framework behind your gorgeous website design for a second. For most people, healthcare websites are like sausages – you’d rather not see them being made. And that’s OK. Just like you don’t need to know how a car engine works in order to make your daily commute, you don’t need to know how the back end of your website functions to see great results.

Luckily for you, we really dig the interworking of code, so you’re going to get extremely high-quality healthcare web development services within a wide range of platforms… even if you have no idea what “clean coding” means. Web design and web development work together to create a cohesive, robust website that delivers results for your healthcare practice. Please contact us online to find out how to make the back end of your website work better for you.

 

WordPress the Wonder Platform

The hands-down preferred platform for website development is WordPress, which is straightforward enough for your neighbor to set up a blog about her cats but sophisticated enough for extremely complex sites, too.

WordPress offers a number of features that add up to a great healthcare web development solution:

• Make your own updates. Adding new pages, images, and other content is super simple. For a lot of things, you won’t even need us.
• Use any design you want. There are tons of design templates for WordPress, and the platform is 100% customizable so you can perfectly integrate any website design.
• Customize your site quickly. WordPress lets you easily add site features—like contact forms, social media integration or a newsletter sign-up—with the help of plugins.
• WordPress is search-engine friendly. With clean and simple code, WordPress makes it easy for the search engines to sift through the code on your site and figure out what’s what.
• A blog is built right in. It’s no exaggeration to say that a blog can be set up on minutes on a WordPress site.

Want or need to use a different solution for web development? You got it. Our developers have experience in a vast array of coding platforms, including PHP and ASP.NET. We’ve also done work in other content management systems such as Joomla and Drupal, but to be honest, they’re just nowhere near as robust and as versatile as WordPress, so we almost never recommend them.

You need a web development solution that’s going to work long-term for your healthcare practice, and we want to work with you to come up with one. Contact us online today and we’ll talk about the best web development approach for your needs—without using any complicated technical jargon, we promise.

It takes a village to raise a website up in those search engine rankings—and for you, that village should include a whole slew of different digital marketing tactics like healthcare SEO, SEM, social media management and keeping an eye on your online reputation.

The digital marketing landscape is always changing, and you need a healthcare marketing strategy that keeps up. The most effective custom digital marketing plans are driven by ongoing production of high-quality written and visual online content. To that, add paid search management, online reputation management and a dash of email marketing until voilà! You’ve got a full-fledged digital marketing machine working around the clock for your practice.

This combination approach ensures that your site gets noticed—not just by the almighty search engines, but by real live people who want what you have to offer. Contact us online to talk more about the combination of online marketing strategies that will work best for your healthcare practice.

Our Online Marketing Services

• Digital Strategy: Your digital strategy needs to include way more than tossing up a couple of blogs or a new website design and calling it a day. Learn more about our two-step process for getting you the results you want to see for your website and your healthcare practice.
• SEO/SEM: You’ve probably heard of SEO, but maybe not SEM. That’s OK, we’ll educate you on the finer points of modern search engine wrangling to help you show Google that your healthcare site deserves high rankings.
• Social Media Marketing: Whether you “Like” it or not, social is here to stay. But the social game is always upping the ante, and without a conservative strategy and careful execution, you can easily find yourself overinvesting in the space.
• Email Marketing: Did you know you can make 7 dollars back for every marketing dollar you spend? Okay, not on everything—but email marketing can be a low-dollar, high return marketing investment if you do it right.
• Online Reputation Management: You’re never going to please 100% of the people 100% of the time, but you can implement some simple steps to ensure that there’s a fair impression of your practice online.
• Paid Media Management: If you tailor your healthcare marketing strategy carefully and never lose sight of your goals, you can see a nice return on PPC and other paid advertising efforts, particularly if you consistently monitor and refine your tactics.

Why mess around with a digital marketing strategy unless it makes a measurable difference for your practice? Let us show you the talent and creativity of our team, and explain how all these moving parts work together for a better bottom line. Contact us today to learn more.

 

Digital Strategy

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the idea of online marketing, but really your healthcare practice’s digital marketing strategy can be broken down into 2 steps: first, whip your site into shape. Next, market the heck out of it. Then you get to sit back, track the numbers every monthand toast your success. (Okay, 3 steps.)

You can read a little more about our digital strategy process, and always feel free to contact us if we can answer any questions. We’re happy to help.

 

Step 1: Get Your Site in Order

The first thing you should do is take an honest look at your website to see what could stand to be fixed. Some folks need a complete redo. Others just need a few optimization tweaks and they’re off to the races.

When reviewing your existing site, we’ll put together a custom quote recommending only the work that’s needed to put your site on the road to success. This typically involves some combination of web design, web development and search engine optimization. You’re free to keep a copy of our analysis even if you choose to go with another vendor. (But why would you do such a foolish thing?)

 

Step 2: Ongoing Marketing

Once your site is in the best possible position to bring in new patients, it’s time to start ongoing digital marketing efforts. The fundamentals of marketing success online are really no different than establishing a successful healthcare practice offline:

• Clearly demonstrate the value you offer
• Pay attention to your customers and treat them well
• Take a vested interest in making your product or service the best it can be

Translating this philosophy to your healthcare marketing strategy can include different tactics, like content creation or social media marketing, but every single one has to make sense. Your online marketing success should be trackable and your online marketing efforts should deliver measurable results.

 

Optimize

First make sure your site is doing all it can to get you found online…

Promote

Then turn to a series of online strategies that get you noticed…

Measure

And each month, track the results of those efforts to build on your success.

If you have any questions about how to best leverage the right digital strategy efforts for your business, we’ve got answers. Just contact us and we’ll set up a time to chat.

 

SEO/SEM

Climbing the search engine rankings is a two-step process. First, search engine optimization (SEO) tactics make sure your site is all set to play nice with Google, Bing and others. Then, search engine marketing (SEM) tactics show the search engines why you deserve to earn top rankings.

SEO and SEM are intimidating topics for anyone to tackle. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by figuring out what it takes to please the search engine gods, always feel free to contact us for more specific insights.

 

Search Engine Optimization

If you asked the question, “What is SEO?” even 3 years ago, our answer would be very different than it is today. And no doubt, our answer will be a bit different a year from now. Like many areas of online business, the best practices in search engine optimization evolve rapidly, as Google and other search engines constantly look for ways to provide more helpful search results to their customers.

 

SEO is about the specific tactics performed to spruce up your website pages so that they can be easily digested by the search engines and recognized as worthwhile resources. Even today, many web companies don’t take this seriously or use sloppy code so they can save a few bucks. So before moving forward with your site optimization, sometimes it’s best to take a few steps backwards first.

Using a proprietary 53-point checklist to evaluate the optimization quality of your site, we’ll isolate the factors we’ve personally found have the greatest impact in affecting search results, and put all our focus on those.

 

Once your site is fully optimized for search engines, it’s time to launch the search engine marketing phase.

 

Search Engine Marketing

Marketing your site to search engines lets them know what your website offers, demonstrates that the site is being updated regularly and generally shows why your site deserves to earn top rankings. If you think of your site as a house, SEO covers the blueprints and construction, while SEM is about the utilities that keep the juice running. If you don’t pay your electric bill, the lights go out. Similarly, if you don’t keep updating your site and continue to promote your business across the web, you won’t be able to attract new visitors.

Building a thoughtfully optimized website is a great start, but that’s just where the real work begins. You need to show Google and the other search engines that you exist and that you deserve the attention of web searchers. Our search engine marketing services include a customized combination of tried and true digital marketing tactics each month to show the search engines that you’re in it to win it.

Think about it this way. Just like you, every one of your competitors wants to be ranked #1 in Google, so Google has to somehow figure out who deserves to get ranked at the top by providing the best possible information and experience. Showing to Google that your site is that high-quality, highly relevant resource is what SEM is all about.

 

SEO vs. SEM

SEO and SEM really go hand in hand and you can’t be successful with just SEO. Depending on your target market and how aggressive your competitors are, you might see a bump in visitation right after you complete SEO work on your site, but after that your rankings will inevitably fade out without more attention to the site.

The only way to sustain top search results for a long period of time is to remain active online through a variety of SEM tactics. Continual updating and expansion of your web presence is an absolute must if you want more and more people to pay attention to you.

To reach new visitors through the search engines, all sites need ongoing search engine marketing services. Well over 95% of the clients we serve also need some level of search engine optimization to first position their site for the best possible degree of success.

 

 

Why OPMCG for SEO

The one thing you’ll will realize about working with OPMCG on your search optimization plan is that we are not like most search engine marketing firms. We spend the time to educate you about what we do and why our SEO/SEM strategies work. We back up everything we say and do with data and analysis. And every month we deliver metrics to each client showing where you stand so we can plot a course that’s designed to help you reach your goals.

If we just did the same thing over and over, we’d be yesterday’s news in a heartbeat. We scour the trends and read every SEO blog, industry digest and other resource we can get our hands on. This isn’t just for us to practice our speed reading skills. This is about looking for new tactics that we can put into action immediately to help our clients stay ahead.

Our evaluation process during our proposal page takes a close look at your existing online assets, and from there we’ll custom-design SEO and SEM plans to fit your needs. Please contact us to take the next step.

 

 

Social Media Management

This isn’t 2007 and we don’t need to tell you how there’s this “cool new thing” called Facebook. You know the drill by now, at least the big picture. But maybe you still really wonder how your business can leverage social media wisely – having a healthy presence that drives new business, without spending every waking moment tweeting, blogging or looking for the next Grumpy Cat.

 

Small Business Social Media Services

With Facebook now well over one billion users and statistics showing that half of these users log in every day, it’s clear where your social media marketing focus needs to be. But social media marketing involves much more than Facebook. How you integrate social with your other online channels can make or break its effectiveness.

Sector45 believes that social media marketing has to be part of the larger online marketing plan. Our core focus is getting you ranked on the search engines. Social media can help with that. But the social space also presents you with a fresh opportunity to make connections with customers and reinforce your brand every day. Nowhere is the combination of the right tactics with the right message more important than in social media.

 

A Note on Blogging

One of the best ways to get social is by starting your own blog. In fact, setting up a blog is a standard tactic for all of our clients. A blog helps you out in a number of ways:

• Regular blog posts on your site show Google that you’re continually updating your content and keeping it fresh. Plus, these posts give Google new pages to rank you for.

• Building a regular blog readership helps you keep in touch with customers and attract new ones.

• Blog content is easily and effectively shared on social platforms. For instance, a dog groomer could tweet: “Want to know the 5 hottest haircuts for French poodles?” and link followers to a blog post with pictures and more info.

• Unlike other social channels, you own and control all of your blog content. Facebook and Twitter could choose to shut down your account within a minute if they wanted to. Or, in a more real-world scenario, they could mess with their layouts and algorithms to preference paid content over anything you produce.

 

Get Help. Get Social.

From Facebook page creation to Facebook ads to larger social media campaigns involving content and giveaways, we’ve got you covered. But never forget that the key to social media success lies within your organization. Social isn’t something we can do for you. It’s something we can help you do a whole lot better. Contact us to learn more.

 

Email Marketing

Sure, social media gets all the buzz these days. But the fact is that email marketing remains one of the most cost-effective ways to keep in touch with your customers and generate new business. Building your email list is about much more than simply adding email addresses to a spreadsheet. Your email subscribers are looking for special offers and entertaining content that encourages them to stay connected.

Need help with your email marketing? Contact us for a complete assessment of your current efforts and our recommendations for improving your effectiveness.

 

Email Marketing Benefits

Marketing through email is a popular tactic for small and medium-sized businesses for several reasons. First, it is much more cost effective than interruption marketing tactics like radio ads, television ads, or print media. In addition, conversion rates are higher because people on your email list have already said “I like you and its okay to market to me.” There isn’t anything more powerful than permission marketing, when it’s done right.

 

Our small business email marketing system allows you to build and manage an email list, send out personalized newsletters, and track results. It’s completely browser-based and simple to use. Not sure what to say to your email subscribers? We can help you develop an editorial calendar, brainstorm promotions, and even assist with the writing and design of your newsletter.

 

Subscriber Privacy & Choice

Keep in mind that you have to be sensitive and responsive to the privacy needs of your email subscribers. It is not appropriate to market to customers if they have not given you permission to do so, and continuing to send emails to customers who wish to unsubscribe can give you a bad reputation and open you up to legal action and costly fines through Federal law.

The ease of sending email is a good and bad thing. It makes communication very easy, but it also makes it far too easy to upset email recipients and even get your email server blacklisted for spam in extreme cases. Sector45 offers an email marketing system that can help you do it the right way and keep your email list protected.

 

Email Marketing Examples

Effective email marketing campaigns can bring hundreds of visitors to your site, and keep your brand in the minds of your customers. We’re happy to share examples of some email marketing campaigns we’ve executed and the metrics behind them, including how many recipients opened the email and took further actions such as clicking on a special within the email or contacting the client. Please contact us for some examples.

 

Online Reputation Management

You’ve worked hard to build a business people can respect and trust. Let’s keep it that way. You’ve probably heard horror stories of irate customers bent on attacking businesses online and ruining their reputation. Take a deep breath and recognize that while you aren’t going to please all of the people all of the time, the doomsday scenario of a single customer destroying you online is pretty remote.

 

Putting Reputation Management in Perspective

It turns out that there’s a lot you can do to control how your brand is perceived online. You can encourage positive reviews, monitor online customer feedback and respond promptly and thoroughly to any disappointments. If you do these things, you’re very likely to enjoy an online reputation that’s in sync with your true level of customer service. And with the right tools, it’s pretty darn easy to keep a close enough eye on what’s being said about you online.

We encourage you to contact us online for a more in-depth explanation of the reputation management services we provide.

 

The 4 Steps to a Healthy Reputation Online

1. Be good to your customers offline.

Here’s a gooey nugget of truth: If you’re tuned out and providing a lousy customer experience offline, you won’t have a good online reputation, either. Make sure every customer who comes in your door is given the attention, service and solution that they need. Make them want to rave about you to anyone who will listen, offline and online.

2. Foster positive reviews.

This is NOT about paying people to say good things about you online. That’s shady and wrong. But when a customer shows appreciation for your product or service, you have the perfect opportunity to guide them online and ask them to write a review.

 

Review templates can help you boost your positive reviews. Your office can send out our customizable templates 24 to 48 hours after a service is completed. Customers are taken to an online Review Link portal that decides where to send them based on several factors including where a customer has online accounts (such as Google, RealSelf, etc.) and where you still need more reviews. The overall result is a strong track record of authentic online reviews.

 

3. Monitor what customers are saying about you.

Besides your website, check your social media accounts and review sites to see what people are saying about you. Use this as an opportunity to confirm what you’re doing right and spot areas for improvement. It’s a good idea for small and medium-sized businesses to spend at least 30 minutes a week reviewing what people are saying about them online.

 

 

 

With our Review Report Card, you can keep track of your reviews on over 75 websites at a single glance. Our software performs over 1,000 unique searches and can alert you every day via Review Notifications when new reviews are discovered. This allows you to respond to negative reviews quickly and hopefully reach a quick resolution with the customer.

 

4. Respond promptly when you spot a problem.

If you see a negative review or complaint online, try to get in touch with the customer privately, address their concern and ask them to update their online comments. If that doesn’t work, a public response may be appropriate. Legal action might jump into your mind but we encourage our clients to put that thought on rewind unless it’s an extreme case of provably false and damaging speech.

 

We can help with any correspondence needed to convince review sites to delete reviews that are untrue or inaccurate. On sites where removing reviews isn’t possible, we can help you craft a public response to neutralize negative reviews.

 

Our Reputation Management Process

Overall, positive reviews are worth their weight in gold. Reviews matter more and more to online searchers and, in turn, to the search engines themselves. You simply can’t afford to leave how your business will be perceived online up to chance – you have to engage with customers and solicit reviews or you risk losing ground to your competition.

Please contact us if you have questions or would like more information about our reputation management process, which has helped dozens of clients successfully manage their reputation online and build a healthy portfolio of glowing online reviews.

 

Paid Media Management

Organic search engine optimization is when folks go searching for a service or product like yours and your site magically comes up in the top few search results. The right digital marketing strategy is a great tool to help you land one of those coveted top spots. But SEO and SEM aren’t the only ways to catch prospective clients’ attention.

 

Paid Social Media

That’s right: the social media landscape has officially become pay to play. But hey. Can anyone really blame those social platform giants? Who wants to maintain an online infrastructure for billions of users out of the goodness of their hearts, receiving absolutely nothing in return except warm fuzzies? Not Facebook, that’s for sure. And not Twitter or Instagram, either.

 

The best-known example of paid advertising online is pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, like the ads that Google puts in their search results. But there are actually a number of paid advertising investments that may be worthwhile for your business, including paid and promoted social posts.

 

Paid social posts can pack a powerful punch for your business, especially if 1) your organic social posts aren’t being seen by enough people and 2) you don’t like wasting your advertising dollars. With the right guidance on your paid social strategies, integrating paid and promoted social posts with your existing social media management campaign can be a very effective use of your marketing dollars.

 

PPC & Remarketing

These two paid advertising channels reach customers at two different stages of the sales cycle:

• Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising draws in new visitors to your site who may not have otherwise found your site listed in a search engine’s organic results.
• Retargeting comes in after anyone visits your site and doesn’t convert (by contacting your or purchasing your product/service). Retargeting keeps you in the mind of that visitor and encourages them to come back.

 

Your Options for Pay-Per-Click Advertising

Google AdWords is the most widely known type of pay-per-click advertising, but there are many others that may be worth considering for our clients, such as Facebook Ads and Bing Ads. All of these services are geared toward driving traffic on a pay-per-lead basis.

In our experience, the return on investment for PPC advertising can vary greatly from platform to platform. There is no doubt that PPC can be a smart marketing investment, particularly for clients who want to drive more traffic immediately to their websites.

That said, we are firm believers in the value of search engine optimization (SEO) and ongoing search engine marketing (SEM) to capture as many organic searchers as possible. Investing in these tactics creates long-term value for a website that can last way longer than the immediate impact of PPC advertising, which ends completely as soon as you stop your spend.

 

More about Retargeting

Retargeting, also known as remarketing, advertises to people who have already visited your website. These are the ads you see on other sites for products and services you’ve viewed previously. They may seem a little creepy at times, but the fact is that when set up correctly, they can drive a ton of new business with a very affordable cost per acquisition.

Retargeting works because it keeps your brand in the minds of visitors. In our experience, remarketing is even more effective when you sweeten the deal by offering a bonus exclusively in your retargeting ads. We recommend linking retargeting ads back to specific landing pages that are more focused on conversion than the general pages of your website. In this way, you’re sharing something new with the folks who come back, and giving them even more incentive to take the next step.

We share a lot more details about our approach to remarketing in our Retargeting info sheet , which is worth your while to read if you’re considering this type of advertising.

 

Paid Advertising or SEO?

A question we get a lot is, “Which is better, PPC or SEO?” You’ll get the classic lawyer answer from us on this one: “It depends.” For many of our clients, a successful online marketing effort involves a bit of both.

Search engine optimization is a longer-term play where we work to convince Google that your site is worth ranking highly for the people searching for the services and products you offer. On the other hand, PPC can get you visitors to your site immediately.

The downside of paid online advertising, however, is that once you cut your spend, the faucet dries up. It’s only an immediate payout. Plus, if you don’t watch your spend closely, the return on investment can be very poor. If you’re familiar with AdWords, you know that Google makes it look pretty easy and straightforward to set up some ad campaigns. But things can get tricky in a hurry, and if you aren’t careful, you’ll blow right through your budget without a whole lot of results to show for it.

 

Sector45’s Advantage

Time and time again, we see clients who’ve been burned on PPC and paid advertising. Sector45 takes a conservative approach to paid advertising, focusing on opportunities that are most likely to drive the most traffic to your site and continually monitoring your ad performance, fine-tuning campaigns where necessary. We leverage our experience to guide you in selecting a smart mix of paid advertising opportunities.

Want to know more? Contact us and we’re happy to share a few client case studies in the paid advertising platform you’re considering.

 

Social media is a rapidly growing yet challenging way to reach new customers. Harris Ad will craft effective, meaningful social media strategies based upon a simple principle: Two-way conversations encourage prospects and customers to engage with your brand. Harris Advertising will create an engagement, monitoring and promotional strategy to more effectively connect with your audience. Understanding how to leverage your company’s social media presence requires understanding the medium, the audience and the opportunity. Rather than viewing social media as a push medium, Harris Ad will help you create a strategy to build an authentic voice for your brand. Harris Ad’s strategy focuses on adapting to the latest trends in the social media space by implementing a complete social media marketing strategy and integrating it into your overall marketing communications strategy. Harris Ad will assess your needs, market opportunities and tactics to deliver a successful plan. Beginning with a competitive assessment, Harris Ad will identify a baseline market and opportunity assessment. The goal of our measurement strategy is to understand how your competitors, your own social properties and your campaigns are performing. As data-driven marketers, we want to focus on what works through analyzing your traffic, results, conversations and results from social media. Harris Ad also offers full social media monitoring so you can listen to how influencers are talking about your brand on social sites, blogs and throughout the web. Harris Advertising begins by reviewing your existing social channels to identify opportunities to improve and grow your presence. Combined with a competitive analysis of blogs, communities and link profiles, Harris Advertising will produce a complete strategy including timeline, budget, and campaigns and tactics to help your company win in the social space. Ongoing monitoring and analytics will help to fully comprehend your market opportunity. Understanding the full experience of social media goes beyond the basics, and encompasses creative direction through video and graphics, mobile implementation through apps and accessibility as well as a technical link to your website and business. Harris Ad will create a full social media strategy that builds a brand experience through social profiles, on site blogs and a larger assessment of your brand position. Harris Advertising will develop custom profiles for the top 35 (or more) social networking sites which can reach your customers. From Facebook to Twitter and beyond, our team will help you take ownership and successfully develop your social profiles. We will also create a professional blog strategy which is an extension of your social efforts, optimizing the content strategy, design and two-way engagement to drive search traffic, awareness and engagement with your brand on-site.