How Ortho Centers Should Market a Sports Medicine Line

Two organizations in two very different population centers share their secrets to success.

Sports medicine and orthopedic surgery are, to use an apt if lame pun, joined at the hip. Patients who access sports medicine services often end up undergoing procedures in the same healthcare organization’s surgery centers. The question is, how do these organizations get patients into their algorithmic funnel in the first place?

That’s where the decidedly non-clinical art of sports medicine marketing takes the field. (Apologies for another lame pun.)

Beyond traditional channels

If you immediately think of TV, radio, billboards or print — the traditional mass media platforms — to market your services, you’ll likely be disappointed if your primary goal is to attract new patients to your clinics and ultimately your surgery centers.

“Very few people pick their physicians based off someone on TV or a billboard or a radio ad,” says Michael Behr, MD, medical director for Piedmont Orthopedics by OrthoAtlanta. “In today’s world, it’s really social media-driven and word of mouth.”

Traditional media channels can still be useful tools in the marketing toolbox for big announcements. For example, in June, orthopedic management services organization U.S. Orthopaedic Partners (USOP) joined three practices – Oxford Ortho & Sports Medicine, the Orthopaedic Institute of North Mississippi and Mississippi Sports Medicine and Orthopaedic Center — under a single brand, Mississippi Sports Medicine and Orthopaedic Center.

“When we did the rebrand, it was really an awareness thing,” says Aaron McKevitt, USOP’s senior director of marketing and growth. We needed to make sure people were aware that the same doctors you have always relied on are still right there in your community. They just have a different name.”

Mr. McKevitt and his team got some PR hits from the effort, but the influence and staffing of traditional media outlets is in a steady decline. “I was thinking maybe there might be a bit more interest,” he says. “I think that’s less to say about how big an impact this rebranding was going to have on the community, and probably more of a statement about local journalism in small towns.”

As a day-to-day marketing tool that drives business and revenue, traditional mass media approaches aren’t fruitful or sustainable. “I wouldn’t consider a ton of traditional advertising as part of our bread-and-butter marketing tactics when we’re just thinking day to day, ‘How do we keep the clinics full?’” says Mr. McKevitt.

Grassroots and online

So how do sports medicine/orthopedics organizations like USOP and Piedmont Orthopedics by OrthoAtlanta succeed from a marketing perspective? By focusing on a consistent combination of digital/online and community-based tactics.

“Most of our focus is grassroots, making sure our physicians are out meeting people and making sure our brand is online,” says Cindy Shepard, director of outreach for Piedmont Orthopedics by OrthoAtlanta. “You need the website. You need a presence on Google and Bing and Yahoo and Maps and all of those places so when someone is looking for a provider, your information is there top and center so they can find you.”

“It’s a multi-pronged approach,” adds Dr. Behr. “One is being in the community, covering high schools — the things we as sports medicine physicians love to do — but it’s also exposure to the community. It gets back to serving the communities where you have clinics. And then social media. In today’s world, if you ignore social media you have your head in the sand. It’s in the algorithm that people use to make their decisions, so you need a presence there.”

Dr. Behr says working high school and small college sports events is a proven approach that essentially entrenches his practice in the local scene. He advises doing so, if your docs have the bandwidth for it, even if the return on the investment of time isn’t immediately clear.

“For those of us in sports medicine who are at Friday night football games and have done it for many, many years, it’s a little hard to know exactly how much that voluntary work converts into business,” he says. “We do it because we love to do it. It’s the best way to provide care for the athletes on the field. In our practice, we’ll do physicals for the high schools and we let the schools charge the kids about $15. It’s really a double community service, because it’s a way to help fund their athletic programs, and it gives the kids access to their preseason physicals.”

Working with local athletic programs presents the opportunity to display your branding in stadiums and gyms, but that shouldn’t be the main area of focus, says Ms. Shepard. “They usually don’t have a problem with that, but you might be in a stadium where you’re covering the high school game and four orthopedic practices have banners,” she says.

“Sports medicine is a different audience than general orthopedics,” says Mr. McKevitt. “It’s fast, it’s function forward, it’s athlete-centric, and there we leverage our legacy. We have a nationally renowned fellowship program in Jackson that puts fellows across the state, including to our competitors, as well as across the country. With our role as the team docs for Ole Miss Athletics, the premier athletic flagship program in the state, our role with the Mississippi High School Activities Association, and our long relationship with dozens of community high schools and trainers, we feel that pedigree lets us market care that’s focused on a rapid return to play and coordinated rehab. That’s something we feel our competitors can’t offer at the same level we do.

Digital elements

“It’s a daily thing. It’s a puzzle, and there are all the pieces of the puzzle,” says Ms. Shepard. “Google is a whole entity of itself that changes daily. We have a small staff that stays on top of that. We make sure that as we bring new physicians on board that we get them online and get profiles built for them. Rankings will happen naturally as you get the information loaded out there.”

“We spend a fair amount on marketing,” adds Dr. Behr. “We allocate most of it to the social media outlets, and we use all the usual metrics. Google gives you all that stuff – how many click-throughs and conversions, all the usual things people look at when they use social media in their businesses.”

“With any modern marketing project, digital has to be the first, the go-to,” says Mr. McKevitt, whose team leans on social platforms, particularly Facebook and Instagram, but is also leveraging TikTok to reach younger patients. “I’m a big believer in investing into organic social not because it is going to be an immediate driver of patient volume, but because I feel it’s important for us to maintain an ongoing dialogue and relationship with our local community,” he says. “Our organic social gives us an opportunity to do that well.”

Mr. McKevitt says search engine marketing (SEM) remains the most efficient way to capture immediate consumer intent. “People searching for ‘best knee doctor near me’ are ready to act, so that’s where we start,” he says.

Another powerful digital tool is a smartphone app called HURT! that Mr. McKevitt’s practices offer free to all community members. “The app is available 24/7 so patients can get quickly triaged and directly into our clinics same-day or next-day as needed,” he says. “All you need to do is log on and within a minute or two you’ll get an orthopedic specialist who is able to triage. They may say, ‘Just rest and do RICE method [rest, ice, compression, elevation] tonight and call me back in the morning,’ or ‘RICE tonight but we’re going to get you an appointment first thing in the morning with the most convenient practice location we can get you into’ or ‘Go to the ER tonight.’ Because at 11 pm, you can’t get into an orthopedic clinic.

“It’s been a really good relationship for us,” says Mr. McKevitt. “We can’t be at every single Little League game throughout the state of Mississippi on Saturday, but we can work very closely with the leagues and provide this app so if a young athlete faces some type of injury on a Saturday morning, they can quickly get on the app with their parent and get triaged, figure out what the next best steps are, and if they need to come see us.”

“Very few people pick their physicians based off someone on TV or a billboard or a radio ad. In today’s world, it’s really social media-driven and word of mouth.”
— Michael Behr, MD

Reputation management is important online. “Fortunately, we don’t need to handle a lot of negative reviews, but occasionally something comes through,” says Ms. Shepard. “You can set up alerts from all of those sites and our operations team and administrators look at those and ask, ‘How do we make sure we’re addressing any issues that come up?’ Is it something where they can call the patient and say, ‘We’re sorry you had this experience. How do we make it right?’”

Dr. Behr says patients sometimes will reverse or update negative reviews after being engaged by the practice. Ms. Shepard advises that, to be compliant with HIPAA, don’t engage online. Contact the patient directly instead.

Patient success stories are a powerful part of the sports medicine marketing mix. Ms. Shepard says the best way to raise the subject with patients is for physicians to do so during their final follow-up appointments with patients.

“Typically, the patient volunteers,” she says. “They’ll say, ‘Thank you so much, I never thought I’d be able to dance again or play golf again, and here I am.’ That’s the trigger for the physician to say, ‘I’m so glad we were able to provide this service for you. Would you mind telling your story?’ If the patient says yes, we have some forms and questionnaires so we can capture their story and share it.”

Ms. Shepard says the testimonial medium should be whatever the patient is comfortable doing, whether it’s written or a video. “We don’t push,” she says. “We just say, ‘Would you mind telling your story?’ and then whatever they say they want to do is what we go with from there. If they say they want to write their own story, there are a number of outlets online – Google and Yelp reviews, Healthgrades, all kinds of online services. If they say they want a video, we typically will just use phones. We have people in-house who will edit the clip down if we need to.”

Persistent and consistent

The key, these experts say, is to maintain consistency in sports medicine marketing, not to focus on quantifying how these marketing efforts are specifically converting into dollars or patient volume. Don’t get discouraged, maintain your community focus, and your efforts will likely pay dividends in an ever-changing healthcare market.

“In general, things that don’t work tend to be broader and less targeted,” says Mr. McKevitt. “It also depends on what you mean by ‘what works.’ Certain things like organic social or PR or outdoor advertising will drive awareness, but when you’re at that next quarterly board meeting, you won’t be able to say, ‘We saw an increase immediately in new patients or surgeries’ or anything like that. Certain things work for different purposes. Certain things will not drive numbers immediately.

“Our North Star Metric for marketing is new patients,” says Mr. McKevitt. “I am very cognizant of the internal metrics we use to measure how well we’re doing on individual marketing platforms. It might be followers or engagements for social. For SEM, it’s a bit more direct; we’ll look at how many appointments we drive, how many surgeries those turn into, and then we’ll ask, ‘How much did we invest and how much did we get out of that?’ For things like organic and PR, we use numerous metrics and benchmarks to ensure we’re doing well in those areas that aren’t quite as definitive as ‘new patient’ but they’re the best metrics we have for those individual channels.” OSM