The Power of Video for Your Medical Practice

“A picture is worth a thousand words.”

You’ve probably heard that phrase a thousand times. But according to Dr. James McQuivey of Forrester Research, if a picture is worth 1,000 words, one minute of video is worth approximately 1.8 million.

Video content wields an incredible power when it comes to online marketing. Not only are the chances of getting Page One listing are 53x higher if you have a video on a page, but using video effectively makes it more likely to convert prospects into patients for your practice. This week on the Medical Marketing Podcast, we’ll take a look at some of the reasons why you might want to consider implementing video in your practice marketing.

Welcome

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Medical Marketing Podcast – the show where we give you actionable tips and insights on how to improve your practice marketing, grow revenue, and take your patient experience to the next level.

I’m your host, Crawford Ifland, and today we’re going to take a look at practical ways you can implement video into your practice marketing to build trust and increase conversions. Let’s dive in.

Video and Conversion Rates

The first reason you may want to consider video has to do with its effect on conversion rates. Just listen to the following statistics – they’re pretty telling of a video’s power to communicate and engage:

• Including a video in a landing page can increase conversions by 80%.
• Video in an email results in a 200-300% increase in click-through rate.
• After watching a video, people are 64% more likely to buy a product or service online.
• Video’s effect on conversion rates is so powerful that 65% of healthcare marketers plan to increase their ad budgets to account for video.

If you aren’t using video in your marketing, you’re almost certainly leaving money on the table. And it doesn’t necessarily mean creating lots of new content – you can repurpose existing content by convert it into video form. Doing so will likely have a huge effect on your conversion rates.

But it’s not just about conversion rates. Let’s take a look at how video promotes interaction and sharing.

Video Promotes and Influences User Interaction

Video can have some profound effects on user interaction. As an example of how video can affect patients’ behavior, just look at these statistics:

• 90% of people say that videos about products or services are helpful in their decision process.
• 92% of people who consume video on a mobile device share that video with others in some form or fashion
• One-third of all time spent online is spent watching video.

Not only is video a powerful tool to help explain your products and services to your prospects, but it has lasting effects on memory and retention: 80% of people can recall a video they have seen in the past 30 days.

While good video content does take more time and resources to produce, it is incredibly “sticky” content – it’s incredibly effective in getting patients to stay on your website for longer and take more actions that are valuable to your practice.

So now that we’ve seen why video is important, let’s take a look at the types of video your practice can utilize to attract more prospects and convert more patients.

Types of Videos for Your Medical Practice

When you consider adding video into your marketing mix, the first place to start is with the patient journey. You should have different types of video that are appropriate for the different stages of the patient journey.

Consider your prospects. For most people, even the most routine medical appointment can make them nervous. Most people don’t enjoy going to the doctor because of the uncertainty:

Will it hurt?
Will it be expensive?
Am I going to get bad news I wasn’t expecting?

Even for elective medical practices, the hesitations their prospects have are mostly the same.

Video is one of the most important and effective tools for physicians to use in connecting, educating, and engaging with their patients. One of the best videos to help draw in prospective patients and familiarize them with your practice is the promotional video.

The Promotional Video: Humanize to Connect

Video has powerful ability that few other forms of communication do: the ability to humanize. Putting a human face on something that’s not inherently personified (like a medical practice) is a powerful way to help your prospects “connect” with your practice and feel at ease before they ever walk through the door.

Human faces build connection, authenticity, and trust – and patients will only put their health into the hands of someone they feel they can trust.

That’s why a promotional video is so powerful. It doesn’t have to be overly promotional in nature – the goal is just to familiarize prospects with your practice, your physicians, and help them feel that your care and expertise makes your practice the right choice for them.

Regardless of whether a patient is going in for a life-saving treatment or an elective procedure, being familiar with the process and the people behind that process can help put them at ease and lead to higher patient satisfaction.

Once a patient has been introduced to your practice and is a candidate for a procedure, the explainer video is the next logical step.

The Explainer Video: Seek to Educate

Walking through a treatment process in sufficient detail is a vital step in helping patients understand how treatment works and in putting them at ease. Video might just be the perfect tool to calm fears and explain how procedures and treatments work.

Explainer videos work so well because they’re so informative. The goal with an explainer video is to answer the patient’s most burning questions about their treatment – to inform them about their options, the risks, and let them know what they’re getting into.

Once the patient knows what a treatment or procedure is really like, it’s no longer a looming unknown. Instead, it becomes something that they can tackle with their physician piece by piece.

There’s no need to inundate the patient with overwhelming amounts of information, but in general, the more context and information you can provide, the better. Peel back the protective veil of medical jargon and explain in human terms what patients should expect from their treatment in order to empower them. Explainer videos are a great tool for empowering patients and helping them “buy in” to the process.

The Behind the Scenes Video

Once a patient has received treatment your practice, you want to convert them into an evangelist for your brand – someone who refers friends and family to you, write a great review online, and tells everybody they know about the great experience they had.

Perhaps one of the most effective videos a medical practice can utilize for their existing patients is a “behind the scenes” video. These videos are not quite as rehearsed and scripted as promotional videos, but they’re still important tools to engage existing patients and help new patients understand more about your practice.

Behind the scenes videos often lend themselves to being shared on social media as small “glimpses” into the everyday life of your practice. Existing patients who had a great experience will remember their experience and think back fondly on the wonderful care they received. New patients just coming across your practice for the first time get a glimpse into life at your practice – these videos are another great way to humanize your practice and put a real face to a name.

Use these types of videos to help patients get to know the practice and the people in it – not just the doctors, but your office staff who are integral parts in helping patients have a terrific experience. When patients are familiar with all aspects of your practice – even the parts they usually don’t see – they will feel more comfortable when coming in for a visit, booking a procedure, or referring friends or family your way.

These are a few types of video that you might want to consider adding into your practice marketing, but there’s one we forgot, one that might be more powerful than anything you produce: video testimonials from your patients themselves.

Video Testimonials

Traditional patient testimonials are good. You should have them on your website and in your marketing. But video patient testimonials? They’re unstoppable.

Most physicians collect feedback and utilize patient testimonials on their practice website – and that’s a great strategy. It’s a good practice that uses social proof to your advantage. Just look at the statistics about traditional testimonials:

• 77% of people take the time to read product/service reviews before they make an online purchase, and 90% of consumers admit their buying decisions are influenced by online reviews
• 79% of Internet users trust online reviews as much as recommendations from friends or family
• Customer testimonials have the highest effectiveness rating for all types of content marketing, with a rating of 89%

But studies indicate that there may be an even more effective way to present that information. If the statistics are correct, video testimonials are even more powerful:

• 65% of your audience are likely visual learners
• Website visitors are 64% more likely to purchase a product or a service after watching a video
• Website visitors who view video stay on a website an average of 2 minutes longer than those who don’t view videos

It’s a no-brainer: video content is incredibly powerful. Video gives potential patients a chance to find the information they are seeking and make an informed decision.

And when that video content comes not from the practice, but from other patients like them, the conversion rates skyrocket.

So now that we’ve seen why video is so powerful, let’s go over a few practical tips to implement video in your practice marketing.

Practical Tips to Implement Video in Your Practice Marketing

If you want to get started producing video content for your practice, here are some tips and best practices:

1. Keep It Short

When it comes to video, you only have a limited amount of time to capture a user’s attention. Only 5% of viewers will stop watching a video after 1 minute, but over 60% of viewers will stop after two minutes. Keeping a video short and incredibly informative is the #1 thing that most first-time video producers get wrong.

2. Make It Funny

Even if you’re not using video as a traditional advertising strategy, it can still be powerful to make your video content engaging and enjoyable: enjoyment of video increases purchase intent by 97% and brand association by 139%.

There’s a huge opportunity to leverage video to market your practice by creating engaging content that people actually want to see. Don’t create bland, boring videos just for the sake of having a video. Make it engaging and human. Your patients will be far more likely to remember it.

3. Be Sure It Loads Fast

According to Google, 4 out of 5 users will click away if the video stalls while loading. In order to ensure that your video displays quickly, be sure to compress it appropriately and upload it to a popular streaming service (such as YouTube or Wistia) and embed it in your website rather than hosting it yourself.

4. Try Different Platforms

Don’t limit yourself to video ads on YouTube. There are lots of great ways to create fresh, engaging content for your patients to view and share.

Podcasts (and video podcasts) are on the rise – they’re a great way to generate great video content that people like to engage with.

Live streaming video content on platforms like Facebook Live and Instagram Stories can be a great way to share behind the scenes content from your practice or informational content that your patients may find useful. If you’ve got a quick tip or thought that patients may find useful, these can be great platforms to share on – plus, they help with your social media content creation as well.

Video = Powerful

Creating great video content for your medical practice isn’t easy. It takes time and investment – but it is worth it. Video is one of the most effective ways to showcase your expertise, humanize your practice, establish trust, and convert prospects into patients.

When you integrate video into your practice marketing, you can leverage the unique advantages video offers that no other medium can. Approach it strategically, and keep these tips in mind, and your chances of attracting new patients with the power of video will increase dramatically.