Leveraging digital media

How one hospital built awareness and leads by drawing from the digital marketing toolkit

Rod Solar

Published: Thursday, August 29, 2019

I think it’s common knowledge now that if you want a healthy body, there’s no magic bullet. The celery diet is neither sustainable nor effective alone. You need to combine a balanced diet with an active lifestyle, plenty of rest and recuperation, and a positive mindset. It’s this combination that achieves the best results. We can apply this concept to your practice. If you want a healthy marketing function, you can’t rely on a panacea to solve all of your marketing challenges. Equally, you can’t expect a shotgun approach to work either – firing as many pellets as possible and hoping something hits. The best results come from a synergy of approaches aimed at very focused objectives. In 2018, the ESCRS Practice Management Conference set its attendees a challenge; create a marketing campaign that: Helps create awareness about the practice clinic; Results in an increase in inquiries and new patients that translate into additional revenue. Ready to take on the challenge using a multidisciplinary approach was The Beirut Eye & ENT Specialist Hospital (BESH). BESH is one of the top specialist eye hospitals in the North Africa and the Middle East region. It offers a complete range of services covering all subspecialties in the ever-growing field of ophthalmology. BESH took the criteria set out by ESCRS and designed a digital marketing mix to generate awareness about glaucoma and promote the company. And it won! In fact, it exceeded all expectations; reaching thousands of individuals, screening hundreds of patients, collecting data for more than one-thousand patients and scheduling hundreds of follow-up consultations. Sharing the company’s success story at this year's ESCRS will be BESH General manager and Director, Michael Cherfan. He will be revealing the company’s winning approach and sharing helpful advice and tips so that you too can leverage digital media to improve awareness of your clinic, increase inquiries, attract new patients and ultimately drive revenue. Specifically, he will explain how you can design an interdisciplinary digital platform that focuses on four main channels: Website Social media SEO / Google Connectivity By the end of this presentation, you will have the knowledge and awareness of how one clinic completely revamped their digital presence to benefit from improved publicity and more leads. The ESCRS Practice Management and Development Programme will take place on Monday 16 September from 08.00 – 18.00