As a medical provider or plastic surgeon, patients research your results and credentials thoroughly before ever visiting or choosing you.
Because:
- • Not all surgeons have the same training and experience.
- • Not all surgeons get the same results.
- • Not all plastic surgeons are…actually plastic surgeons.
- • Stuff happens, and how it’s addressed or made right matters.
That research process is something you should do yourself before hiring a digital marketing agency.
Because:
- • Not all marketing companies get the same results.
- • Search engines apply unique rules and ranking criteria to health and medical websites.
- • SEO, paid ads, and social media are almost always done differently for medical services than they are for ecom and other businesses.
- • Search and Social are constantly evolving, and “growth hacks,” short-term logic and quick-fixes often do more harm than good.
Informed Consent for Your Own Medical Marketing
This isn’t “hire us, not them.”
It’s what to look for and look out for in whatever digital marketing partner you plan to use.
A bad agency could tie your website up in shady contract clauses so you never really own it.
Or botch your branding, build you a slow or schlocky site that doesn’t rank well, or cause your social and ads accounts to be flagged or banned.
More commonly however, an agency could simply lack experience in medical marketing specifically, making your account an overly expensive test case.
Based on over 11 years of Studio 3’s medical marketing experience, this list will help you avoid all that and more.
Questions You Should Ask
Here’s what you should ask a medical marketing agency before hiring them:
- What software do you build websites with?
- Who writes the content for our website?
- Are there limits to how much content our new website can have?
- Is your writing done in-house or is it outsourced?
- How long is our contract and are there any automatic renewal clauses?
- What happens if we choose to part ways before the contract term is over?
- Do we own our own website in full once paid for? Would our site be taken down if we parted ways?
- What analytics or insights will we get to show progress on what we’re paying for? How often are reports available or updated?
- Will we have a dedicated company contact throughout our contract term?
- How big is your company and where are your staff based?
- How many clients do you have in our industry or vertical?
- What industries or verticals is your company most experienced in?
- Any restrictions on the number of clients (competitors) you’ll take on in our area (city)?
- How is our monthly retainer managed or allocated?
- What services are you strongest in? What services do you suggest we go elsewhere for?
- Any limitations on the number of requests, updates, image uploads, or hours spent on our account each month?
- Do you have case studies that show where your clients were before and after your work on their marketing?
Answers You’ll Want to Hear
Just like every surgeon, every marketing company does things a bit differently.
So there is no “one perfect answer” to each of these questions.
Rather, here we’re providing data on your options in general, and the key pros and cons to help you better understand what you’re getting into, and spot potential red flags for follow up.
1. What software do you build websites with?
Custom-written code is the best choice for a well-established practice’s website.
WordPress is the second-best alternative and often a good choice for new practices.
Non-technical explanation: If your website isn’t custom-coded, then it’s using a template of some kind with “a million” features and variables. Each variable, whether “in use” or not, adds glut and slows your site. It’s also using a “page builder” (such as Elementor, Oxygen, Divi, or WP Bakery), which adds even more code.
So custom-coding is the best option for so many reasons, including speed, security, uptime, integrations, adaptability and functionality.
Anything you need can be written right into the code and as concisely as possible.
[Wix and SquareSpace are acceptable for ecommerce specifically. WebFlow has some beautiful templates and is good for certain uses, but it shares the cons of Wix and SquareSpace—heavy code that could hurt your site speed. Even if users won’t notice a load lag, search engines will, and they test for speed in four different ways.]
2. Who writes the content for our website?
Agencies will either write your site content themselves, or will ask you to provide it to them.
It’s best if your agency writes your content for two reasons.
One, it’s a lot of work, and a lot of what you’re paying them for.
But more importantly, a long-term partner should know you and your subject “about as well as you do,” and how well this content is written will affect your rankings.
If you have to provide your own site content upfront, will you also have to write your monthly blogs? Why not also build the site yourself?
(It’s giving “bring your own implants for 20% off your breast augmentation.”)
In all honesty, an agency asking you to provide your own content is basically admitting they don’t fully understand online marketing—because content is the core of it.
But an agency that chats with you for an hour and asks you everything about you, your training, credentials, procedures and practice—now that’s an agency.
3. Are there limits to the amount of content you can produce for new websites?
There should not be limits to how big or extensive your website can potentially be, but you should expect to pay more for more pages or longer content.
This question matters because search engines won’t rank you for a service or topic your site contains no content on. Want a 1,000-page website? We launched one last month.
But our typical client sites are around 75-150 pages, depending on their service area and procedure offerings.
Good work agreements also contain clauses about ongoing content additions; helping you hone in on your largest markets.
Like breaking down “Los Angeles” into its many suburbs—since that’s what your potential patients are actually searching.
4. Is your writing done in-house or is it outsourced?
While there’s nothing wrong with great outsourcing even if done overseas, that’s not what we’ve found to produce the highest quality content or best ranking websites.
If things end up performing poorly, you’ll be looking for potential causes and solutions.
And since Google has established consensus on most topics—hello Gemini—poorly-written or inaccurate content is a negative ranking factor.
Writers who “speak your language” are your best option, and we’ve learned the hard way that they’re best trained and retained in-house.
5. How long is our contract, and are there any automatic renewals clauses?
This one is somewhat counterintuitive: You want a contract that covers more than just a site build.
A brand-new site is step one, but getting it to actually rank and be remunerative for you is a much longer (and arguably more important) play.
Roughly 90.6% of online content gets no organic traffic at all.
So contracts should allow for a site launch, a runway to get things ranking, and a review and refine period.
(Breast implants take time to settle, rhinoplasty results look best one year after surgery... you get the idea. Same with a website; we have to give it time to rank and do well, while we continue working on it.)
6. What happens if we choose to part ways before the contract term is over?
Early termination agreements are common and acceptable in contracts, just be sure you know what they are and you agree to them. If an early-termination fee or clause sounds unreasonable or illogical, it probably is, and the best time to clarify or correct it is before signing.
7. Do we own our website in full once paid for?
You’ll want to walk away from an agency, if you ever do, with full ownership and full control of your website: All of its content, images, and assets, and the domain name (website address) that it is hosted on.
You should own your website outright, or have a very clear path to obtaining full ownership, such as paying an early termination fee.
This sounds too obvious to mention, but it’s a hiccup we’ve run into when onboarding clients from some agencies.
8. What analytics or insights will we get to show progress on what we’re paying for?
After having your website built and going live, you’ll likely be paying for monthly services like search engine optimization (SEO), new blog articles, site maintenance and hosting, requests (gallery updates, tweaks, announcing specials), new pages, paid ads, and more.
These are all valid expenses, assuming you’re also given a way to see whether they’re remunerative. You should be given access to things like “Google Analytics” and “Google Search Console.”
Or better yet, a client portal you can log into at any time to see metrics for all of your digital marketing efforts.
White Label Warning
White label marketing agencies are becoming increasingly common: companies that sell services they don’t personally perform, but outsource overseas instead.
Since they have no employees of their own, your account becomes one of hundreds handled by a large team overseas who you’ll never interact with.
The fanciest of these comes with a decent-looking client portal.
Whether you’re about to hire a company of this type can be hard to spot, but this new marketing model is something to be aware of.
White label agencies might be a smart choice for some small local service businesses, but are not a good fit for medical providers.
9. Will we have a dedicated point of contact or do requests get sent into a queue to be addressed by the first employee available?
Both options are workable, but you should expect to have a dedicated point of contact throughout your entire site build, as well as if you are paying a retainer for monthly services.
An account manager, not you, should deal with your agency’s internal matters, including following through on each deliverable to successful completion.
10. How big is your company and where are your staff based?
There may be nothing wrong with a new or small agency, if that works for your practice and you know what you’re getting.
If you’re in a competitive market, we strongly suggest you work with a well-established agency.
The medical field itself could already be considered highly competitive, and it becomes even more competitive if you practice in a large city like Los Angeles, New York, or Dallas.
11. How many clients do you have? How many clients do you have in our industry or vertical?
As the saying goes, “Jack of all trades, master of none.”
As a surgeon you probably specialize in a handful of procedures—face, breast, butt, or body—which helps you get the best results for every patient.
The same is true for marketing and an agency that specializes in your scope of work is much more likely to get the best ROI and results for you.
If you’re one of a small handful of medical accounts an agency has, your agency probably lacks a broad enough picture of the industry to know what’s happening and why to your website, search rankings, ad rates, etc.
For context, we service nearly 400 plastic surgeons alone, so when a “Google Core Update” happens, or when CPC rates (the cost you pay per click in your advertising) suddenly fluctuate, we can pretty instantly spot the differences between the websites or ads accounts that responded well and those that didn’t, and take action based on that massive dataset.
12. Any restrictions on the number of clients you’ll take on in our area?
Speaking of search engines, there’s only one Page 1 and Position 1.
Thus there are various schools of thought on whether you want to be an agency's second (or 10th) client in a highly competitive market.
On the one hand, you want an agency entirely committed to your success above even their own other clients in the area, and on the other, you want the best and most experienced agency you can find.
Since this isn’t surgery—where every patient can honestly have “the best” for their body type—you want to ask your agency about this and how they deal with it.
13. How is our monthly retainer managed or allocated?
SOP is that you’re provided a list of services the agency performs, and you decide which you’re interested in.
The error to look out for here is whether those services are done on a “set and forget” model, or if they’re continually reviewed and revamped.
If something you paid for isn’t producing a measurable increase in traffic or leads, it should be reviewed—proactively by your agency.
How new your practice and website are and how long things have been being done also factor in.
Some of your agency’s work is a longer-term play (content marketing for example), while other work has an immediate ROI (like paid ads and boosted social).
Good agencies will also advise you to focus on each in different ratios and at different times (relative to how old your site and practice are.)
Ultimately however, organic search—which is free—and Page 1 rankings—the holy grail every surgeon needs and wants—should become one of your highest sources of leads, but that’s not an overnight process.
14. What services are you strongest in? What services do you suggest we go elsewhere for?
Effectively marketing your practice includes everything from branding to blogs, search engine optimization to social media, and paid ads to patient conversion.
In an ideal scenario, this would all be handled by one agency.
But again, you want the best bang for your buck.
So this is a great question to ask your agency to hear their take on their strengths and weaknesses.
As far as answers go, transparency and honesty are probably the best signs, and you should ask for case studies on the services you plan to pay for.
15. What industries or verticals is your company most experienced in?
These should match the vertical you’re in.
Marketing cosmetic and medical procedures is different than small business and ecommerce marketing.
And, as mentioned, Google’s algorithm is specifically designed to distinguish authoritative medical content. (Google Medic core update, August 2018).
So for these reasons and all others mentioned above, you want to hear “[insert your vertical here.]”
16. Any limitations on the number of requests, updates, image uploads, or hours spent on our account each month?
A minimum monthly retainer should cover routine maintenance and hosting. That gives you a working website from month to month.
Beyond that, expect to pay more for new pages or blogs, for paid ads and social media, and for search engine optimization—the long-term play that gets you to Page 1 of Google (where 99.37% of people get their answers.)
Search engine optimization (SEO), will likely be your largest expense.
Done right, it’s also one of your best marketing investments.
For each new “keyword” you want to be on Page 1 for—such as “breast augmentation los angeles” [and “near me” for users in Los Angeles] you should expect to pay a higher retainer.
(Otherwise, if there are limitations on other work and updates, are they reasonable to you? Do they meet your needs?)
17. Do you have case studies on where your clients were before and after your work on their marketing?
Case studies are a marketing agency’s before-and-after gallery, and you wouldn’t want to hire a firm that can’t show you proven prior results.
Look for percentage increases as the most accurate before-and-after comparison, but make sure they’re also backed by numerical values. (A “200X increase sounds great, until you learn it’s 2 leads over 1, which is insufficient for a practice like yours).
In addition to case studies, you can also browse Google and Yelp for reviews.
These are also all questions you can ask us at Studio 3.
Our first clients were all cosmetic surgeons and doctors.
And we still service some of the best plastic surgeons in the world.
Google them to see what our sites look like and where they rank.
Or check out our own “before and after gallery,” here.
