My heart sank a little after I had this meeting with my new client. It basically comes down to a few new clinics managed to grasp a lot of business via internet marketing and leaving this 30 years experience, university visiting lecturer’s once well-established clinic in danger. I can feel for her. She is full of passion for her work and yet the business is going downhill.

Last week, I got an enquiry from a professional lady about building a website for her clinic. She mentioned a humble budget of HKD10,000 in contrast to her profession and location of her practice. At first, I thought she has no idea how much a website cost or she is being cautious about spending. But after the meeting, I find that her business is in trouble.

The lady realised that her business is dropping. She looks around and finds that her major competitors all have websites. So she has decided to have a website too. As much as I would like to get some business, I need to warn her that getting a website on its own is not enough to get clients. It needs promotion. There is no “walk-in” traffic to the website if you don’t let people know it exists. It needs offline marketing or internet marketing, preferably both.

Her competitors, on the other hand, are doing full power digital marketing. When she showed me the websites of her competitors, she exclaimed that those websites were different again.

“It didn’t use to have videos! And it didn’t use to have Chinese articles!”

We looked at the search engine result page (SERP) for search queries that related to her business, The same few competitors occupied the top positions in most cases. She sighed,

“We have a very high success rate with our therapy to the children. They are not doing it as well as us.”

“You can see the kids smile compare to the time when I first met them.”

I can see her frustration that she feels she can do a better job and make more people feel better if more patients just know about her clinic.

Is it too late?

So, is it too late for her to catch up? I will say being late is better than none. But if she doesn’t follow up with either real life publicity or online marketing, the website is not going to help. And the battle costs.

As the lady was once an active speaker if she can resume that it will get her more publicity and helps to establish her authoritative status.  As for online marketing, it will be much harder especially several of her competitors have solidly gained good positions in search engines’ eyes. Her website needs to start off with a basic internet marketing setup, follows with a plan which steadily both:

• creating useful information on her website and
• building and attracting references to her website to tell search engines that their website’s content is worthy and respectable.

And she needs to do more and of better quality than her competitors to exceed. Can it be done? Sure it can be done if the project has gone into a good hand. Not someone who promises fast results via tricks or disreputable fast track cheats that will be cracked down next time search engine updates their algorithm. Is it too late for her to save her business? I don’t know.  It depends if she can catch up with the modern marketing strategies and go for it.  Sadly, duck your head, do a good job and hope for word of mouth is not adequate these days to get business and survive.