The Official VisionWeb Blog

When business professionals discuss product marketing in general, that can include anything from competitor intelligence to product-specific emails to surveying customers about product improvements. In optometry, we would consider product marketing to include descriptions and organization of frames or other dispensary items as well as sales and promotional messaging of your practice overall. Every eyecare practice should invest a bit of time every month creating product marketing content, especially pieces they can automatically send to patients.

Today we’re going to focus on a few creative ways that writing or producing product marketing content can be a relevant and necessary move for your optometry practice.

Shane Shepherd, whom you might know as the presenter for expert billing webinars, built our Revenue Cycle Management team at VisionWeb. He brought with him tons of billing, coding, and claims processing experience from years of working with eyecare practices. He's dropped some insurance related knowledge for us that we hope you'll find useful when dealing with patients paying with insurance cards. 

Today, he is talking about common questions he gets surrounding primary, secondary, replacement, and supplemental insurance claims, specifically in regards to Medicare.

Coming up with patient engaging events in your practice can be tricky. We want to help jumpstart your year by giving you a snapshot of events and moments you can look forward to. A solid game plan is crucial to setting up your marketing campaigns for success and deciding a budget. Of course, your circumstances might change throughout the year, so keep your calendar flexible when that happens.

Start filling up your content calendar for the year now. As events and promotions pop up, you can fill in the gaps. Here's a list of events and promotional ideas for each month of the year:

Optical capture rate compares the number of patients who received their prescription and the number of patients who filled their prescriptions at your practice. Since frame and contact lens sales are a big source of revenue for many practices, it’s important to have your optical software keep up with the number of sales you make. You would want to have a high optical capture rate. In fact, the industry benchmark says that 60% of your patients should be filling their prescription in your practice.

Showrooming is often an obstacle for practices trying to increase their optical capture rate. Showrooming is when your patient gets a prescription from your practice, tries on a frame that they like, and then buys the product online at a lower price. We'll help you stop showrooming and improve your optical capture rate with the tips below.

Most of us check a social media account, or a few, pretty much daily. It's a good source of personal information, connection to loved ones, and even news. However, it's tough to figure out your social media plan as a small business. How frequently should you post? Should you pay for promotions? What content should you share? 

We're going to answer some of these questions as they relate to patients and customers today, not 10 years ago. Social media content is one that changes relevance almost weekly, so we recommend staying on top of trending topics and checking in every day.