THE FOUR FUNDAMENTALS OF FERTILITY MARKETING IN 2021:
how to close the gap between marketing and IVF sales
This is an update to an article I wrote in October 2017 called The Eight Fundamentals of Fertility Marketing in 2018. What’s changed about fertility marketing in 2021, 2022, and beyond?
I’m going to show you how to use the four phases of the Fertility Patient Marketing Journey so that you can close the divide between “sales” and marketing. You’ll bridge this gap by balancing your fertility company’s 2021 and 2022 business development strategy with abundant clarity and complete accountability.
Like you, my firm Fertility Bridge has to thread the needle between thoroughness and clarity. Err too far on the side of clarity: risk accountability and certainty of success. Err too far on the side of thoroughness: confuse the hell out of the people who need your help (I still screw this one up sometimes).
The eight concepts that I wrote about at the end of 2017 are every bit as relevant today, there’s just an easier and clearer way of accounting for them. We’ve since structured the Fertility Marketing System so that it can be summarized with one visual aid. The four phases of the Fertility Patient Marketing Journey allow us to zoom out for clarity and zoom in for thoroughness…
First, here is a brief summary of the eight fundamentals of fertility marketing that were covered in 2017 and 2018.
EIGHT FUNDAMENTALS TO GETTING NEW FERTILITY PATIENTS IN THE DOOR
1). Well-managed relationships with referring providers.
Our early reporting indicated that 40% of REI patients were referred by a physician. More complete data shows that it’s actually almost 60%. But only 21% say it was the most influential factor in choosing their fertility specialist.
2). Targeted Advertising
This includes paid search advertising and paid social media for fertility centers, B2B fertility companies, and direct to consumer fertility tech.
3). High-ranking web presence
Even in 2018, I wasn’t referring to website only, but we put an even greater emphasis on local search and social media listings today.
4). Conversion Optimization
In 2017, I was referring to “Strangers to Leads” conversions, which is the first phase of the patient marketing journey. More holistically, conversion needs to be optimized at each phase, including but not limited to new patient appointment requests, incoming calls, and conversion to fertility treatment.
5). Compelling Creative (Content and Design)
Still true, but rather than thinking of creative as standalone, it should be the criteria of every pillar of each of the four patient journey phases.
6). Vibrant social media community
Fertility centers need to understand that “word-of-mouth” from happy fertility patients moves new patients through their journey faster than anything else, which is why this appears in more than one phase of the patient journey.
7). Sterling and authentic online reputation
See above.
8). Remarkable patient experience
FOUR PHASES OF THE FERTILITY PATIENT MARKETING JOURNEY
The purpose of the Fertility Patient Marketing Journey is to broaden fertility companies’ narrow application of marketing and help you close the divide between sales and marketing. Even in large corporations, you hear about the great divide between sales and marketing. It’s why you see dog-awful creative that companies spend millions of dollars to produce and distribute and it doesn’t increase sales a dime.
Fertility companies, especially clinics, can’t afford to silo marketing from sales. We don’t use the words “sales” when referring to fertility clinics and their patients, but that’s what treatment and consults are. The Patient Marketing Journey helps fertility companies apply their marketing in ways that are much more helpful to their patients and staff, and much more profitable for them.
.Fertility centers frequently apply their marketing strictly in terms of new patient acquisition. They may think that only the first phase of the journey is in fact, marketing, and the latter three are sales-only. This mistake is the cause of our great divide… You may not need any more new patients in the door. What we all need is to get new patients through the journey with as little emotional and mental cost to themselves and to your staff as possible.
Note: the Fertility Patient Marketing Journey is not the complete patient journey. It is the phases that take place immediately before, during, and immediately after their time with your clinic.
Double note: What I’m showing you here is only one Fertility Patient Marketing Journey. Egg donors have another, women freezing their eggs, LGBTQ+ patients have different journeys for different demographics--same-sex female patients do not come to you the same way that same-sex male couples do. The phases are the same for each, but the pillars within the phases are different. So this is only one patient journey, and I’m sharing it with you because it’s the most common.
STRANGERS TO LEADS (NEW PATIENT INQUIRIES)
The first phase of the fertility patient marketing journey is “strangers to leads”. When most fertility executives and practice owners think of marketing, they usually think only of this first phase. You might call leads, new patient appointment requests, or new patient inquiries. They’re the same thing.
The objective here is to get as many qualified eyeballs that need your services and get them to take an action: calling or requesting an appointment online.
The pillars that fall into the “Strangers to Leads” phase:
Paid Media
Local Listings
Online Reviews
Brand
Brand Continuity
Web User Experience
Organic Search
Content
Informational Events
Referring Provider Outreach
Pro tip: optimization is different from maximization. You want to get people off the fence so you can help them, but you don’t want to do it at the cost of helping them move through the later phases.
You have the same challenge as I do. Fertility Bridge can help any fertility center that follows our process. If I focus too much on the end-prize of more profit, more revenue, and higher volumes, prospects eagerly want to engage with us without fully understanding their role in the process. I want happy clients, not happy prospects, however, so in my effort to brutally set expectations, I may discourage them and they lose sight of the prize (when I err it’s always on this end).
So too is it for fertility centers. Many clinicians feel they have perfect IVF success rates. Watch out for that. Some seem to be blinded by the remarkable progress of this field of medicine. “Wow. Women under age 35, who do at least 3 cycles of IVF, have an 80% chance of having a baby.” But think of that from the patient’s perspective. One in five couples or women are not going to be successful in their treatment: best case scenario! At the very least, one in five couples are going to spend a lot of money, time, and energy and not get what they want.
Yes, for some you are a miracle worker, and leading with that expectation will pack you with leads in the first patient journey phase. But over-promise in phase 1 and harm your online reputation, support group networks, social media presence, and your staff in later phases of the journey. We need to get people excited enough about the destination to start the journey, but not deceptive about where you lead them in the later phases. It’s a delicate balance.
If you need help with this balance, schedule a 15-minute call here.
LEADS TO NEW PATIENTS
There is a gap between sales and marketing when someone visits your website or calls your office before they come in for a new patient visit. The second phase of the fertility patient marketing journey is “leads to new patients”. The gap can happen in any of the following:
Call Center
Lead Nurture
Cancellation Rates & Process
Referral Source Attribution
Referring Provider Testing
Welcome Sequence
Pro Tip: If more new patients are what you’re after, before you spend a penny more on advertising, first look at your inbound messages, form submissions, and phone calls.
When Fertility Bridge helps with quality control of a fertility group’s call center or phone staff, we’ve measured that the baseline is 1 new patient appointment scheduled for one of every five new patient visits. 5 could-be appointments are escaping for every person you book.
Because we have a serious Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) problem in the fertility field, most centers do not have an adequate system for responding to and following up with online requests. Centers that do not follow up with online leads lose 25% of would-be consults.
There is a right and a wrong way to follow up with and answer new patient inquiries. When done wrong, fertility centers are seen as pushy and their cancelation rates go up. Assessing and reducing cancelation rates falls in phase 2 of the new patient journey because it doesn’t matter how many consults we book if we don’t show up.
Pro tip: you can greatly reduce cancelation rates when the appointment is set--even more effectively than the follow-up.
If you need help with reducing your IVF center’s cancelation rate, click here.
AN IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT MARKETING TO SALES
We’re sliding from marketing to sales as we move from the first half of the journey to the second half. Stay with me now--we want this to be seamless.
Timing is everything in helping fertility patients move through their journey. In order to optimize the flow from marketing to sales, we need to help patients understand what they need to know when they need to know it. You’ve got a lot of information to drop on the new patient in the third phase of the marketing journey and this takes a toll on your conversion to treatment. It’s too much for most couples and individuals to digest.
We’ve established that the first phase is all about helpful education and pre-suasion and the second phase is a blend. The third phase is all about to follow up.
Before we move to the third phase of the journey, let’s look at an example of how we can prepare someone in the first two phases to help them move on to treatment in the third.
On our website (first phase) and in answering phone calls (second phase), you’re asked, “how much does IVF cost?” When you give them an answer like “$12,000 + meds”, they politely thank you and hang up. They call another center and delay their treatment time by months or years...if they ever come back to you at all. This is almost always negative for their prognosis, and worse still, we’ve set an incorrect expectation in their mind because we felt we had to fill the vacuum in a question that we can’t answer.
The prospective patient might need multiple cycles and donor gametes, and you quoted them $12,000?! Or they might just need to have intercourse at the right time, and you quoted them $12,000?! What the hell does the price of an IVF cycle have to do with anything? The only thing that matters is the cost of their treatment and your receptionists and call center have no way of knowing that from a phone call. The right answer is the explanation of the process of how you’re going to get them the right answer.
You’re preparing and educating them so they don’t get information overload and freeze in the third phase. When people aren’t frozen, they can move...on to the next phase.
NEW PATIENTS TO TREATMENT
You’ve got plenty of new patients in the door but you (usually) can’t get someone a baby or pay your staff from consults and testing alone. I can’t qualify who is a candidate for IVF because I am not a clinician. I can affirm that many people feel pushed into IVF and many people feel their time was wasted by not being directed to IVF sooner. IVF, and fertility treatment, in general, isn’t right for everyone. If IVF is not right for a patient, for a host of reasons, they should absolutely not move forward with it--as long as it wasn’t because we weren’t helpful or clear. If someone can’t afford IVF, they can’t afford IVF, but it shouldn’t be because they didn’t have help in exploring and understanding all of the options available to them.
In order to effectively help patients move from consult to treatment, we need to master:
Post-Consult Follow Up
Treatment Plan Materials
Financial Counseling
Cancelation Rate
Patient Support
Real-time patient feedback
Pro-tip: Follow up with patients after their initial consult and follow up visit. If you’ve been on the fence about this, this is your quickest way to more IVF cycles. Don’t be afraid to follow up. Be afraid to follow up in the wrong way. Once again, you can do damage in your follow up to new patients. It has to come at the right time with the right message.
If you need help with converting new patients to treatment click here.
POST-TREATMENT DELIGHT
Finally! We've helped our new patients from strangers to successful treatment. They’re at home with a baby, pregnant, or at least, have much-needed closure. I can finish writing early?! Hooray. Guess there are only three phases to the fertility patient journey after all. Article over.
No ma’am. There is a fourth phase in the fertility patient journey and that is post-clinic delight. While delighting patients is important for every fertility center, the problem tends to be more acute when centers are packed with new patients. This is common among clinics in major cities who are at capacity for every provider and their lab(s). These busy IVF centers don’t have any challenges with the first three phases at face value, but this is often where we start to see the problems that come from success.
If you’re looking at the four phases of the patient journey on your phone or computer, it appears linear. But imagine you’ve printed it out and you shape the paper into a cylinder. The fourth phase of the patient journey now precedes the first… ad infinitum.
Almost every REI practice owner says they want “treatment ready” patients, or “IVF patients” or “qualified patients”. As you can see from the four phases, how you work the system from end to end is what qualifies patients. But indeed some patients are more prone to move through faster than others. Patients who have heard about the ups and downs from a friend, or at least a real person, are the most likely to convert to treatment. We want your happy patients to be as loud as possible and your unhappy patients to not be so unhappy that they feel they need to vindicate themselves.
Pro tip: if you have more new patients than you know what to do with, your lab is maxed, and you’re not adding any capacity, spend almost all of your marketing efforts turning this group of happy patients into a community. If they’re not engaging on social media, you don’t have a community. When they send their friends to you, you will keep the virtuous cycle of the patient journey on repeat.
USE THE FOUR PHASES OF THE PATIENT MARKETING JOURNEY TO CLOSE THE DIVIDE BETWEEN FERTILITY MARKETING AND SALES:
HELP MORE PEOPLE. BE MORE PROFITABLE
My friend Rita Gruber says that “marketing is throwing the ball, but the practice (operations) has to catch it.” Truth be told. But you don’t care if your marketers are Don Draper and Peggy Olsen if you’re still unable to improve your revenue and profit and make life better for your patients and staff. If you view marketing as an expense, you’re in a vicious self-fulfilling prophecy because you’re not connecting your efforts in the first phase of the Fertility Patient Marketing Journey to the outcomes in the later phases. If you want to ensure that marketing is not an expense, it has to flow smoothly into sales and that overlaps with operations. Start from right to left and improve sales the most quickly. But to improve sales sustainably and at scale, move from left to right because pre-suasion and helpful education in the earlier phases affect conversion to treatment and satisfaction later on. You must help patients understand what they need to know when they need to know it.
I can’t tell you exactly what to do in a way that will guarantee your success without an earnest engagement between your company and my firm. But I can point out two or three of your biggest problem areas just from reviewing your goals and current marketing from a bird’s eye view.