Healthcare marketing is very vital to the prosperity of every business, and medical practices are not excluded. To Know whether a medical business is growing, there should be at least up to 40 new patients every month. Plus, to attract new patients, a practice must provide robust services at reasonable pricing.
While it’s essential to maintain a relationship with your existing patients, it’s equally essential to ensure you grow your practice and add new potential patients. To do this, here are ten, simple, low-cost methods. Once started, you can see your patient base increasing without much effort.
Step #1: Meet The Demands
Be responsive and be current with the changing demography in your society and patient population. Recruit adequate staff If you notice there’s an increase in the number of patients with a particular disease or disorder.
Employ adequate staff to expand your current services and it’s advisable to introduce new services to meet the needs of new patients. Fosters the new services through strategic advertisements to the target audience.
You can hire a dedicated and experienced pediatrician If your services are extended to pregnant women and young children. Also, if an employer sends packing a huge number of employees in your neighborhood, consider a reasonable direct payment option for the uninsured.
If you detect your business has been affected by a clinic at a drugstore, consider hiring a physician assistant to carry out standard medical examinations and prescribe medications.
Most importantly, Always be a good observer who is sensitive to what people need, be a step ahead, and predict the future. Not disappointing existing patients and meeting their demand can increase the number of New potential patients thereby making your business flourish.
Step #2: Focus On Your Patients
The number one most important priority of any medical practice is effective relationships between patients and physicians. Unfortunately, quality patient-doctor relations are often one of the first things forfeited in the name of efficiency.
Spending enough time with patients should be an utmost priority of any physician since taking care of patients is what got you into medicine and you also took the oath. Remember? Concentrate on spending as much time with your patients as they deserve.
It may not be comfortable for you but you’ve to do it, and figure out how much time you have and how much time your patients need. Build your staffing and financial agenda around that, rather than doing the opposite.
Step #3: Ensure You’re Live On Social media
Yes, social media will improve your medical business. Alas, physicians often prefer using LinkedIn, many of them are not used to using Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the likes to promote their business because they may not be the best medium to communicate sensitive data.
However, there are several ways to take advantage of these media platforms to gain more potential patients. Start by motivating existing patients to follow you up on every of your social media platforms, they should ‘like’, ‘comment’, and ‘retweet’.
Once they do so their friends will see it, hence you’re becoming more popular. The page should be attractively designed to engage new visitors and prompt them to ‘like’ and ‘follow’ your page.
Creating a YouTube account where you can share wellness and personal health tips as well as answer questions on common health issues will also drive traffic to your page and the services offered at your medical practice will have more visibility.
The YouTube channel can be promoted through other social media sites and it can be used to engage with other leading organizations in your community.
Step #4: Train Your Team
You may be a highly skillful and well-trained doctor, but if your staffs are incompetent and unprofessional, don’t expect to have a smooth medical practice. Your staff is the most important asset that can catalyze your business, they must know how to interact with patients more effectively, in other words, they must possess exceptional people skills.
More importantly, your staff shouldn’t be stagnant, they must know other things apart from the services you offer, and they should know some specific details such as pricing, what to expect during a consultation, equipment used during procedures, etc.
Step #5: Use The Right Medical Software
To curb the issues facing those who practice independently, you need effective tools that automate and streamline practice management. As reporting and administrative requirements keep increasing, this is more important than ever.
Without deviating from the truth, automating and delegating tasks with a doctor scheduling app is the only sustainable solution that helps your practice grow. Organize your administrative services through online appointments/patient portals instead of communicating via mobile phone or through physical meetings.
This would be a great hit among younger patients and especially it will save patients time since they can use the latest technology and apps through their phones to check the availability of appointments instead of making calls.
Step #6: Grow Your Reputation Through Customer Reviews
With the help of the internet, we can find answers to everything we are curious about. That means, if you already have a good number of positive patient reviews online, then you are on the path to receiving more patients.
However, if your case is the opposite, then you need to create venues for patients where they write positive reviews about your care provision. A quick review of what other patients have written about you will give an insight into your online review status and you want to keep at least a 4.5-star rating, to not lose potential patients.
Nevertheless, people may give you a negative review about one thing or the other, you just have to get down to the problem and improve the quality of service.
Step #7: Stress What’s Unique About Your Service
To be successful in any field, there must be something so unique about you that others do not have, discover this thing and then advertise your brand. This entails what you want your medical practice to be known for.
For instance, should your branding emphasize classes in eye care and child care? Once you’ve decided on a brand, hold firm to it. You must always be responsive on your social media sites to answer questions concerning your brand.
Also, post and showcase your practice on every one of your platforms. Remember! More people than ever before rely on social channels such as Instagram and Facebook to find services, in which health care is not excluded.
Step #8: Create Potential Patient Engagement
Do you normally participate in fundraising events or community service projects? This is another great opportunity to get noticed and build a reputable image for your medical practice.
If you are known to contribute to a helpful cause, such as a silent auction or Alzheimer’s walk, take the advantage of this to let people know about your practice and organize some sort of event, like a dinner dance such that a nearby school can benefit.
Try not to repudiate invitations to a conference/discussion that will give room for advertisements of your brand. Be assertive to support a new community in all means you can and you will get noticed by new people who will one day become potential patients.
Step #9: Invest In Advertising PPC
Pay-per-click (PPC) advertising enables you to build on keywords and have your ads appear in the search keywords whenever someone searches for those keywords. It can serve as a means of driving traffic to your websites as well as generating leads.
However, it’s very vital to be aware that it can be a bit of a gamble, as you will only be charged when someone clicks on your ads.
If you are considering this option, there are various sites you can make use of such as Google ad words, yahoo, Microsoft advertising, etc. Running this is quite tedious, hence it’s advisable to seek professional support.
Step #10: Build A Mobile Responsive Website
Last but not least, ensure you have a modern and easy-to-use doctor website for the success of your practice as well as for building new patients. Make your websites responsive and work well on mobile devices.
Of course, the major reason why you have a website is to educate your potential patients so that they will be impressed to trust you with their lives. Creating a relevant and informational website is the most essential marketing tool at your disposal.
Conclusion
Marketing strategies keep upgrading every day, and as a medical practitioner, you must not be stagnant. You must regularly review how precious your existing patients are. Over time, patients who used to be highly profitable might demand fewer consultations. Likewise, others might increase theirs as time goes on.
It’s essential to keep an eye on patients’ future potential, as well. It may be worth nurturing a relationship with a potential high-growth patient. Effective interaction between you and your patients can also help in identifying ways in developing new and improved products and services.
Ella Marcotte
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