Cynthia Barnes of Fort Wayne, Ind., writes:
“After moving to Fort Wayne, Ind., and being unable to find an African American doctor, I decided to create BlackHealthCareProviders.Org.
“The site has a nationwide free referral service that helps consumers find black health care providers in their own neighborhoods. The challenges I face are getting the word out to enough doctors so they’ll visit the site and register, and spreading the word to enough consumers to let them know that this directory is available.
“I’d like to make money from the site eventually, via pharmaceutical endorsements, but for now it’s just a labor of love. What ideas do your Hounds have for marketing the site to doctors and consumers?”
(Shutterstock photo)
Get involved with your local Black chamber of commerce. That would be a great place to connect with Black professionals, including doctors and people who can connect you to them. It would also be a good way to generate traffic from people looking for providers.
Also, can you identify some churches that have predominantly Black congregations? That might be another way to build inroads to the community.
Create a competition nominating your favourite AA doctor and why and ask for the surgery details too. Also there could be an AA doctor’s association you could target.
I’m not an expert at this niche, but it’s like any specific demographic or interest niche.
I would be willing to bet that there are online listservs (email conversation lists) or LinkedIn groups for African-American doctors and medical professionals to network. However, they’re not going to let just anyone join. My suggestion would be to start working on making personal, one-on-one connections with 5-10 African-American doctors. Once you’ve built a rapport, explained your site, ask them to post or alert their colleagues online.
In addition, I’m sure there has to be professional, offline organizations of African-American doctors. You need to research those and find out if it’s possible for you to attend a local meeting to discuss your website.
Finally, this isn’t PR, but you may want to consider doing some paid online advertising. Right now, the rates for advertising on Facebook are low (they won’t be low for long), and the beauty of Facebook is that you can microtarget those ads based on any number of demographic factors from the person’s profile.
And, just like most search marketing, you can control the budget, so you can start slow, see what the results are, and you’re not hit with a huge bill at the end of the month.
Jeff
Hi Cynthia, I’ll bet that churches would be great network soutces for you to get the word out and find lots of doctors (and nurses!) – after all, they are in caring professions – one for the body, one for the soul. And what about restaurants? After all doctors have to eat too…. Good luck, I think this is a great idea for what could be an underserved market???
Like any other marketing, just get the word out anyway you can, ads, blogs, forums, etc..
what about posting the site on healthcare directories , also what about trade / industry publications …you could advertise in there to get some traffic. Have you created a PR release , i’m sure this would get picked up as its quite a niche and unusual
You can monetize an association with membership dues. Create a professional directory by local area. But what do you offer? I believe you could build a blog or site with posts, news,articles, symptoms, etc. regarding health issues that especially affect your niche market – Black patients. Health care professionals could comment or write an article and add their website signature. Use LinkedIn to gather your list. But first get your own article out there and get some press doing some public speaking about health issues for Black men and women. Invite professionals and community. See you on Oprah!
Probably it’s because your idea sounds very racist. What’s the point in starting a website like this or only targeting “black doctors”? Why should the race matter?