Speaker: Marketing your services is an obligation
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NEW YORK – Optometrists have an obligation to communicate to their community the services they offer in their practices, Dave Kading, OD, FAAO, said here at Vision Expo East.
“There are patients with dry eye or keratoconus or patients with certain binocular abnormalities who are not getting the care they need because they can’t find you. There might be hundreds of thousands of patients who could be missing out on what’s best for them,” he said. “It’s imperative we bring [what we do] to our colleagues and to our patients.”
Kading urged attendees to consider how they can grow specific areas of their business.
“Don’t just go out into the world and say you offer eye exams,” he said.
While the most effective marketing is word of mouth, the practice website is the key driver of business.
Your website must accomplish three things, Kading said: draw you in instantly, have a call to action and allow you to schedule an appointment.
He recommended running analytics on your website. Find out how visitors came in, what brought them there and what they did when they came.
To accomplish search engine optimization, “be relevant, be often and be recent,” Kading said.
Any content on your website, including blogs, videos and articles, should be continually updated.
“You can also do paid search,” he said. “You can pay to show up first when someone searches.”
Over the course of a month, Kading said his paid search appeared 35,801 times, and 379 people clicked through.
“But even if someone doesn’t take action, you’re providing constant brand awareness,” he said.
“Email marketing seems old school, but it’s cheap and it tells the patients you currently have what else they need to know about you,” Kading said. “I saw a patient for a diabetic eye exam, and she’s struggling with her grandchild who just became myopic and lives in the next town. I can send her an email about what we offer in our practice that could help with that.”
He encouraged attendees to take advantage of social media.
“You are the business, and you want people to have an impression of who you are through social media,” he said. “Hire a teenager to do it for you, making sure they understand how to manage a business account. Monitor it, do something specific, do something purposeful.”
Two or 3 weeks’ worth of content can be created at once and then scheduled to send by using software such as Hootsuite, Buffer or socialoomph, he said.
them and approve them.”
Have your content be active and worthwhile, he said, with pictures or videos of people in your office. Make clear why you do what you do.
“This can make a big impact,” he said.
Kading said he hosts events for patients and other doctors in his area.
“It’s a great way to get your name out,” he said. “You can’t do just one event. This is a marathon. You need to be seen as the specialist who is continually talking in people’s ears.”
He hosted an education event for other doctors on myopia management.
“Our objective with all educational events is to make the doctor better at what they can do for their own patients and be seen as a specialist that the doctor can call if they have questions about their own patients and to be seen as a referral source,” Kading said.
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Kading D. Global Contact Lens Forum – Unconventional marketing of your specialty lens practice. Presented at: Vision Expo East; March 31-April 3, 2022; New York.
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