Author Topic: Marketing Question  (Read 2456 times)

shelbylmk

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Marketing Question
« on: March 10, 2018, 04:36:29 PM »
I am trying to figure out some other places/websites that I can advertise on that wouldn't cost an arm and a leg. I recently met with someone who has access to 3-4 small magazines that I could advertise in but they wanted almost $400 a month for a 1/4 page ad. I am also advertising on Craigslist, Google Places, and a local TV station classified ads. Does anyone else have any ideas? I believe that I have a copy of the 16 marketing ideas book. Thank you for any help.

williamportor

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Re: Marketing Question
« Reply #1 on: March 11, 2018, 07:28:21 AM »
I'd suggest reading through the posts on this forum. There are a lot of good ideas on marketing. 2 things you might keep in mind:

1. A national sales trainer once told me the highest quality prospecting contact is face to face, the second is voice only (phone) and print being at the bottom, so don't overlook going door to door and passing out your business cards to office managers, or telephone cold calls if your schedule permits.

2. To answer your questions about web advertising, I'd suggest Internet Marketing an hour a day by Matt Bailey, and Guerrilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson (# 1 IMHO) both should be available in your library.
« Last Edit: March 11, 2018, 07:37:27 AM by williamportor »

PMRNC

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Re: Marketing Question
« Reply #2 on: March 12, 2018, 09:26:48 AM »
It shouldn't have to cost you anything but TIME. The number one method for marketing a website is to be and stay 'engaged" this means having a blog or newsletter that connects to social media. If your website is fairly new, you'll want to blog or stay in front of your audience once or twice a week. LinkedIN has great platform where you can even post your blog as article and link to your website. If using facebook, you'll want a professional facebook "page" for your business and build the audience there as well. Once you build a bridge from the website to your social media platforms you'll get traffic back and forth between the social media platforms and your site. IMHO a blog works better than a newsletter for starting out because newsletters you need to have people sign up where as a blog you can stay engaged on your own terms.

Before any of the above you want to make sure that the website is appealing, inviting and has all the backend things done such as meta tags, categories, tags, keywords and good page titles. A lot of people think just putting up a website is enough, If you don't do the backend work needed (SEO) and you invest in advertising that costs money, you could be throwing the money away.  Today's website must have a method of engagement and GOOD SEO!  With or without paying for advertising you will still need to give it time. The average website with minimal engagement (less than once per month) will take over a year or more to reach the top 100 pages of a search in Google.
Linda Walker
Practice Managers Resource & Networking Community
One Stop Resources, Education and Networking for Medical Billers
www.billerswebsite.com

BikhamHCare

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Re: Marketing Question
« Reply #3 on: March 26, 2018, 12:49:00 PM »
Try to online marketing through internet Marketing Like-forum participation, question answers and try to Serch engine Marketing process. Its more effective techniques for these days Thanks.

markatMBH

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Re: Marketing Question
« Reply #4 on: May 02, 2018, 10:30:00 AM »
Hi ShelbyLMK,

Few business activities have caused more failure and pain to business owners than “marketing”...

...pain that usually comes as a result of certain myths and misconceptions that the entrepreneur often starts out having, even before the business is created.

These marketing myths are a bigger problem than you might think, because they cause you to make very costly decisions, take you down the wrong path and can even lead to the whole operation shutting down.

You’ve heard that the number one reason small businesses fail is that they run out of cash.

But you hardly ever learn why.

Small businesses run out of cash because they use it to chase the wrong audience in the wrong way.

The good news is that these myths are fairly easy to dispel.

My own misconceptions were slowly (and I must say not completely, good heavens!) dissolved by many early, and even later failures over the past 30 years.

As the old adage goes “Failures are just practice shots.” So not to worry when failure happens – simply keep going.

So, a few items here about your marketing and your billing business because how you market is the difference between success and failure...not only for your own billing business of course, but in reality for any business.

If it wasn’t true that marketing is among the most important business functions, and the one that determines business success more than any other, marketing budgets would not be as high as they are, and marketing people would not be compensated the way they are.

You see, Fortune 500 companies in their B2B services lines typically spend 12%-15% of their total budget on marketing - and large cap startups spend over 20% of their annual budget on marketing.

Take a moment and think about how high that is...

By the way, that percentage increases as the annual revenue of the business decreases – which appears strange but makes sense since smaller businesses have taller hurdles to jump in trying to reach their audiences.

These large numbers simply would not be the case if the marketing function did not return some multiple of the money spent.

Now, a startup service business such as your billing service should expect to spend north of 15% of your budget on marketing, especially when you’re starting out.

(There are rather successful specialty medical billing services whose ad spend alone is 20% of budget...and that’s because the return is significant otherwise there’s no reason to spend the money in the first place).

[If you want to actually see how important marketing is to startups, go to Crunchbase.com and look at the ad and marketing budgets of newly funded businesses.]

Your marketing spend is an important number, because in it you must already have the critical component numbers such as expected cost of client acquisition and lifetime (sometimes annual) client value accounted for.

Here’s a hypothetical: say that you acquire a new client, a dermatopathologist (single provider) whose annual charges are $1.25M and for whom, after a year of billing for her, you collect 40% (so gross collections of $500K), and whom you charge a gross collection fee of 8%. So, for the year your billing service earned $40K in revenue from this client. Again, all hypotheticals.

Now, the question is, “How much would you spend to acquire this client?

Truthfully, this is a bit of a difficult question to answer unless you have organized your business’ value chain / value ladder and have articulated even a rudimentary operating plan.

Nevertheless, the question illustrates the fact that there are certain timeless principles of marketing and business development.

The purpose of these principles is to attract and delight your prospects and customers. And that these can be measured, in a rational, organized way.

These principles are very valuable to learn before you spend your money on this or that technique for acquiring customers, and there are excellent resources all over the place (the interweb) where you can learn those principles without much hassle.

Where to begin.

For the classic principles you can hardly go wrong with, Dan Kennedy (the recognized father of direct response marketing) and Jay Abraham (the godfather of the entire field as it is currently practiced).

From there you’ll learn about many more who can teach you how to think about, how to plan, and how to deploy your marketing assets.

There is an entire crop of what the older folk call the online marketing wizkids. The best of the best reside in niches:
For organic (“free”) traffic growth - Neil Patel
For Google Ads - Perry Marshall
For Facebook Ads - Keith Krance
For beginner guides of various topics, one of the most helpful is Miles Beckler. Miles is kind of “new” - he’s only been doing it for about 10 years (wink).

Firstly, “marketing”, like your other business functions is best thought of as an ongoing activity of and for your business.

The actual purpose of this activity is to produce marketing assets...marketing assets that return real results such as, email optins, leads, and sales.

In fact, if you’re a business owner there’s no escaping the fact that you are a marketer. So congratulations on that! (where’s that smile emoji?)

And your job as a marketer (I mean, business owner) is for your prospects and clients to feel completely understood.

The best way to do that is to start an ongoing conversation with your audience.

This requires 2 things.

First, you must know your audience – and know them very well.

To do that, an important exercise for you is to develop your ideal client’s persona or avatar.

You can get this done in an afternoon.

Here’s a step-by-step guide by the number one organic growth marketer online Neil Patel. Others exist of course, but if you’re starting out this one is my favorite.

Second, you must understand the various media that you will use to start and continue that ongoing conversation, and (here’s the most important part) pick one, and go all in with that medium or one of its channels.

How do you choose which medium to focus on, and or which channel?

( In deference and respect for the forum I’m going to pause here since my reply to you has already passed the thousand word mark. Let me know by replying in here if you want me to continue my comments to you and I’ll be happy to continue with examples…)

Cheers!

Medical Billing Forum

Re: Marketing Question
« Reply #4 on: May 02, 2018, 10:30:00 AM »

nancylopezbp

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Re: Marketing Question
« Reply #5 on: July 19, 2018, 10:18:29 AM »
Advertise online. I’ve seen businesses grow by investing in just Google ads and not much else. To avoid paying a bomb make sure your ads are highly specific to avoid unnecessary clicks and also use broad matching keywords.

Medical Billing Forum

Re: Marketing Question
« Reply #5 on: July 19, 2018, 10:18:29 AM »