The importance of Marketing Through Education (MTE)

Submitted by Bruce Abel on Wed, 11/18/2015 - 18:34
Marketing Through Education

Ensure that your practice website is the only educational resource that your patients and referrers need.

A specialist practice website performs many functions - first and foremost is information about the conditions you treat and the procedures you perform.  But both your patients and referrers are hungry for a more in-depth understanding so why not go one step further and make your site the authoritative resource instead of forcing them to look elsewhere on the Web.  This can be in the form of a “latest news” section which provides regular updates about the more common conditions, or a blog, or better still a series of integrated PowerPoint slide shows and video of the specialist that patients can view at their leisure.  The latter are relatively easy to produce and of course a picture tells a thousand words.  The content that you provide for patients is different to that intended for your referrers so a solution for this is to have a secure area on the website just for this group.

Serendipitously, this has the wonderful advantage of engaging a potential patient or referrer and keeping them on the website.  And the evidence relating to the importance of this is quite clear in other business sectors when it comes to converting a potential deal into an actual deal.  The concept is called Marketing Through Education (MTE).

An even more compelling reason for referrers to visit your site and view this educational content is to allow them to accrue CPD points.  Online Medical has partnered with the Australian Institute of Medical Education (AIME), an online education forum for GPs and an accredited provider of CPD.  All material produced for a specialist practice has the opportunity to also be available on the AIME site meaning a double exposure for the practice.

For more information about the use of Marketing Through Education, please contact us directly.