A recent survey of hospital marketers ranked online videos as the most effective weapon in their social media/digital arsenal. Experts who discussed the results with American Medical News said physician practices could also benefit from leveraging this inexpensive, easy-to-use technology.

In a previous FiercePracticeManagement article, New Orleans urologist Dr. Neil Baum shared the benefits of his video series in which he personally describes a multitude of urologic conditions and treatments, supporting this benefits-of-online-video theory. According to Baum, the videos not only keep his practice more efficient by educating patients during wait time, but they've also drawn numerous new patients to his practice.

The easiest way to incorporate videos into your marketing plan is to post them to your existing website. Consider the following tips to create videos that connect with patients:

• Start by posting videos of your physicians on your website's physician finder or profile page, as it's probably one of the most popular areas of your site. "That's really key because you start to get some of that emotion and personality ... as opposed to just a few lines of text and a phone number," Mike Stutman, senior vice president of strategy and innovation for Acsys, the firm that conducted the study, told amnews.
• Don't worry about buying expensive equipment. Adequate high-definition shooting capabilities are commonplace on devices, such as smartphones and handheld video cameras. According to Alex Fraser, a senior strategist for Acsys who has experience producing videos for healthcare organizations, a Google study found that regardless of video quality, 60 percent of people who viewed a video from what they considered to be a credible source went on to make direct contact with the physician or hospital featured in the video.
• To drive the most traffic to your videos, post them to YouTube--the second-most powerful search engine after Google--with appropriate keywords in the description and captions. Next, embed the YouTube link into your webpage to capture visits from those who visit your website directly.

To learn more:
- read the article from American Medical News
- check out the report from Acsys (.pdf)

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