An Interview with Internet Marketing Expert Joe Mercadante

Joe Mercadante is an Internet Marketing Expert and the Founder of Unleash Marketing. Joe and his team provide Internet marketing services to doctors, hospital departments and medical practitioners.

Joe, Thank you for talking with us. Kindly describe your journey as an Entrepreneur.

I started my first company in 2004, and have been providing Internet marketing services to clients ever since. About 10 years ago, I made the decision to focus all of our energy on working with medical practices, doctors, and hospitals, and we’ve become true experts in that space.

What were the initial challenges that you faced in your endeavor as Internet Marketing is getting a saturated segment?

It took some time to find our space, and for the first few years, we did a great job for our clients and had a lot of early success. Since pivoting to serve only the medical practice and hospital community, we’ve been able to stand out for sure. There are only a handful of companies that focus on this industry and that understand the complexities of medical insurance and HIPAA and some other components, so we’ve become one of the leaders in this space in the last decade.

Tell us more about what kind of Marketing services you provide?

We’re a full service agency, but we primarily provide website and landing page design, social media management, review and online reputation management, paid search campaigns through platforms like Google, Bing, Facebook and Instagram, and some very advanced reporting. An easy way to think of it would be: everything related to making a medical practice, doctor or hospital stand out online and attract more new patients.

As an Internet marketing expert who has helped hospitals and doctors expand their presence, how do you describe the evolution of Internet Marketing in the last 5 years?

Great question. It’s definitely changed in a few ways. First, there’s much more competition. If you own a medical practice (or really almost any business for that matter), you can bet that almost every one of your competitors will have a website and be running Google and Facebook ads. It used to be that doing these things alone would make you stand out in front of potential patients (or customers), but now, advertisers are having to outsmart and out compete the other online competitors and how well (or poorly) you do that as a business owner really determines your ultimate success.

When it comes to making Internet Marketing more effective, what lessons have you learned through your experience?

No question, that strategy and relevance are the key. Internet marketing campaigns that don’t target a very refined audience are like throwing brochures out of a helicopter above a city. It’s not effective.

If you’re going to market online, and you’re an eye doctor, run ads that only display to 30 – 45 year old women with photos of moms at the eye doctor with their kids, and wording that relates to them – “Are you a busy mom? We make eye exams easy for the whole family with flexible evening and weekend hours”, and a landing page that both represents your brand, but also makes your audience feel that you’re catering to them. That’s just one example, but being very specific is the key. Campaigns that we manage might have 10 or 15 different subsets, each with an audience, a set of ads, and several variations of landing page environments.

What suggestions would you like to give to small businesses in order to help them formulate a better marketing strategy?

As we’ve said, be specific but also be data-driven and analytical. Fortunately, at this point there are tons of tools (many of them are free) that allow you to see every click, every conversion and more.

I talk to folks all of the time who are spending money on some form of online ads, and don’t have tools like Google Analytics, or incoming phone call tracking set up to be able to tell what their marketing campaigns are actually producing. Don’t spend a dollar until you can tell where every single lead, patient, prospect, customer came from and how much they spent with your business.

How can people reach you, or learn more about the services that Unleash Marketing provides?

The best way is our website, UnleashMarketing.com – from there, you can see more about our services, you can request a free consultation, see our portfolio of some recent projects, and check out our blogs and social media, which are great resources for anyone who wants to learn more about Internet marketing.