In this article, Huyen Truong from Online Marketing for Doctors shares her journey of implementing marketing campaigns for surgeons and doctors to build their brand awareness and book more appointments. We’ll cover:
- Q: Can you introduce yourself and talk about your inspiration? How do you get into digital marketing?
- Q: What is the first thing you do when working with a new client? How do you go about creating a client brief?
- Q: From brand positioning to the content strategy, how do you guide your clients?
- Q: Can you share a little bit about creating this content strategy with us? Does it have to be a long-term content strategy?
- Q: How do you help your clients see the value of that long-term content strategy?
- Q: What do you think some writers or marketers are missing in their process that would make their content more effective?
Q: Can you introduce yourself and talk about your inspiration? How do you get into digital marketing?
My name is Huyen Truong, and I have been running a digital marketing agency called online marketing for doctors for ten years. Our mission is to help doctors and surgeons generate new patients for their clinics through digital marketing. So we have them grow and scale fast. That’s what we do.
My passion for this industry comes from my background. My family members have a few doctors in our families, and one of my past boyfriends is also a surgeon. That’s why many medical professionals have surrounded me, and one thing they have in common is that they are very good at treating patients and working with patients.
But they’re not good with digital marketing or media marketing, and they don’t know how to generate and market themselves. So I thought, why don’t we help people from my family and do better in their business and marketing? So I was doing a business degree, a business consulting degree back in America, and I came up with this idea of marketing for surgeons.
Because they are good people to get excellent skills, but they don’t know how to market themselves. So that’s why I thought I should help them promote their skills and businesses to generate more income for themselves and their families through some digital marketing strategy.
Q: What is the first thing you do when working with a new client? How do you go about creating a client brief?
Unlike other agencies, we have a comprehensive approach to onboarding clients and getting to know them. Because we need to know who they are? Who do they want to become as well? Because young surgeons might not know where they’re heading to. So we have to guide them through the journey.
They’re just a cosmetic surgeon, but they want to do more liposuction work. They want to be known very well in this area, and then we can help them position themselves as experts in liposuction with effective medical marketing.
When it comes to being understood in a specific area, we need to develop the content strategy for the website content, the social media presence, and everything that ties to their brand to help them. We need to know their current start, where they’re heading, and their vision. So that’s how we get started with clients.
If they don’t have the vision, we have them shape the vision for their clinic because many of them don’t know where they’re going. They just want, ‘oh, I know how to do all these procedures; I can do everything.’
Then based on our experience, we can ask them further questions. Let’s say what areas you specifically like to do? For example, there are so many procedures they’d like to do. But still want to do one particular procedure: liposuction or eyelid surgery.
Then we say, ‘Okay, I think you should specialize in this area for this position. We help you position yourself and become an expert in that area.’ Then we develop a content plan for all different channels like websites, social media, and even offline activities for our events that will be the topics they want to cover.
We want them to appear in search engines using a specific set of skills and expertise. We also help them shape that vision and the content marketing strategy before getting started.
Q: From brand positioning to the content strategy, how do you guide your clients?
That’s part of our onboarding process, as I said to you. We’re not just providing an individual service like SEO, Google management, or social media marketing. As part of our strategic marketing process, we’d like to walk them through; okay, this is where you are now and if you want to be known as a liposuction expert?
Because some surgeons just don’t want to be doing one procedure all the time, they want to do different procedures to diversify their work portfolio. But when it comes to the commercial sense and when it comes to their target audience mindsets, they come to choosing the top guys or top ladies to do a specific procedure.
They usually have the top three who are the top three live research experts in Sydney that I can go to for my mates and my tummy work. Then that’s something we need to shape in the consumer or the target audience’s mind because that’s what they said, that’s the message you were pushing out, that’s the positioning because they say, oh, is that all liposuction works that we’re doing?
I would quickly tell them it’s not if you’re not doing it. Because our job here as surgeon marketing is to get you to be known for liposuction, when people come to you for liposuction, they can ask for other services. They can ask for a tummy tuck, they can ask for feelers and anterior, angle injections, or other services that you can cross-sell.
However, when it comes to the outbound message that you want to push out to your target audience that you need to be known for, one area is the best. You don’t want to be exploited for everything. There’s only one area you can be an expert in, and our job is to get you to that point with our marketing strategy. Then once we come in, we have the hub and the lead magnet, the magnets to get people in.
Once we get them to go in, you can market them to services. That’s how we do marketing for surgeons. We’re doing better and very successfully for many clinics. One of the first clinics we’re working with, and the target audience is mainly mothers with kids.
So we know who we’re talking to, the audience who like having kids and thinking about finishing having kids, and this particular group of the audience looking for solutions to get their pre-baby bodies back.
So all the languages, even though social media posts, surgeon website, and email marketing are well catered and relevant to the target audience. That’s the power of content marketing, and many clinics are not aware of how to leverage content marketing to position themselves in expert status.
Q: Can you share a little bit about creating this content strategy with us? Does it have to be a long-term content strategy?
When we know the purpose of the content strategy, we work out the topics that we can produce in the next 12 months. So usually we work with our client for 12 months. Our content calendar is like this month; we will work on this group of topics and this list of blog articles.
If they own higher programs or packages, we can produce video content and postcard content, so that’s a lot of different channels through which we can have our clients reach out to their target audience with social media marketing.
But overall, it has to follow the initial and strategic marketing campaign that we put together for them. We plan out a medical marketing strategy and how long the content should be? What keywords we are targeting for each piece of content, and gather the topics through the frequently asked questions.
Many patients ask our clients during the consultation process because those will be the questions people will ask online about a particular procedure. We collect all these frequently asked questions and put them together as a good list of owner blog topics that we can produce for the client website and include in our marketing campaign.
Q: How do you help your clients see the value of that long-term content strategy?
I have a big belief in the power of content marketing. I’ve been an active advocate of content marketing for almost ten years now, and I show them the example from our agency because we have to set our example so clients can see it on our website.
You probably know that we have an OMD tv show, so we’re consistently producing videos every two weeks. Then we have a postcard channel that reaches almost 100 episodes, which I’ve been working on pretty much every week for the last four years. It will not stop there; it will be an ongoing effort because success comes from consistency.
For example, if you want to be successful in any area, especially when you play a particular type of sport in which you have to put into practice and consistently work on that, that’s how you can see results; content marketing or healthcare marketing is something like that. You can’t see the immediate return, but you can see an excellent return in a long time.
For example, one of the clients found me through one of the blog articles I wrote about the content management system. He came from the US, and he saw me through that article that I wrote, and then he subscribed to my postcard and listened to my podcast. Now he’s one of our biggest clients, and he introduced us to another client from the US.
There’s a cost involved in investing in content marketing. I’ve been doing content marketing for many years, but one client now is returning nearly ten thousand dollars a month on a phone content marketing effort. So we know the revenue from his contact alone is almost ten thousand dollars a month.
We invest a lot; we put a serious investment into this area, like shooting the video, producing content, and promoting content. Because having great videos is good, but it’s not working without people seeing them.
Q: What do you think some writers or marketers are missing in their process that would make their content more effective?
I read many books and articles, and I could easily see who is a good writer or not, even though I’m not a native speaker. But I have a sense of who a good writer is because I read a lot, and then it’s something I see that many writers or content producers are missing because the shower needs the depth of the content.
So they don’t understand the target audience they are talking about very well, and they don’t understand the pain points or problems and the reader’s concern. They may have just recycled content from different sources without understanding the target audience’s pain points. That’s why when it comes to producing any particular content; I do a quick interview with our existing clients or contacts.
Sometimes I ask some questions, especially. For example, we put together an excellent ebook called “Top five-way to generate more new adopted referrals for your clinics,” This is the interview with 49 doctors, surgeons, and dentists. So this book combines only opinions from almost 50 other doctor surgeons.
So it’s not just coming from me but also from other doctors. So that’s why that’s one of the most successful pieces of content we have produced because this comes from the groups of different doctors’ and surgeons’ opinions, not just from me.
So I think that one thing that writers are missing one thing: that they lack understanding of the topics they’re writing about, the target audience profile, and the type of languages they use in writing. Because to separate your piece of writing from other similar articles is how you communicate with them through the written language.
But as if you were having a conversation with them, that’s the best piece of content for me. It’s like you’re reading a piece of an article, you have somebody talking to you, and it’s straightforward to consume for a different audience.
Even though my target audience is doctors and surgeons who are very highly educated, I choose the simplest form of writing that anyone can understand when it comes to writing. I use the lowest demon nature regarding the technical understanding of digital marketing.
So I explain everything in very simple terms so everyone can understand. So try not to use jargon or big words, that’s something I don’t like, and that’s the common mistake that I see that many writers come across when it comes to writing content.