By: Will Ross
While business growth is what we as marketers strive for, there are certain growth challenges that are bound to come along the way. Growing pains for medical practices may differ from the traditional brick and mortar business, but there are similarities that everybody can draw from all types of businesses.
Here are three ways I plan on avoiding these “growing pains” from a marketing perspective as we continue to scale in the coming years…
Qualifying Leads
Lead form filtering
Within our various forms of advertising, lead forms are an incredibly viable and necessary function to turn a regular lead into a recurring patient. It is easy to take the easy road when you’re creating a lead form. Whether it's from Facebook Ads, organic contact forms from our website, or any other source that requires a form - you should always make sure you are taking the lead down the road that turns them into an ideal patient.
Outside of the generic patient info, ask them questions such as: How long have you been dealing with [Insert condition you treat or area of expertise]? Would you consider yourself a candidate for [Insert procedure]? On a scale of 1-10, what is your pain score? Questions like these can filter out the less-serious candidates and ensure that potential patients with real and urgent issues are the ones who you see on a consistent basis.
With growth, comes a longer wait time, which can potentially hurt your practice if you aren’t careful. Ensuring that your patient base is qualified and in need of your service, means that the likelihood of no-shows drops, and patients are okay with waiting as long as they know they will be treated properly.
Informing Doctors of our mission and ideal patient
Referrals are a huge source of patient inflow that needs to be prioritized from day 1. As relationships begin to emerge and grow with local providers, make sure they understand what makes an ideal patient for your practice. Sometimes, a lapse of information can lead to a multitude of small issues like: Referrals that don’t have the right insurance, conditions that you don’t treat, or a bad review from a patient expecting something else. Avoid these pesky issues - create things like a flyer, webpage, or business card that quickly go over your services and conditions you treat!
Targeting quality leads
Vet this whole ordeal of obtaining un-ideal patients from the very beginning. Pretty simple - target the ideal patient. Think of the perfect patient, where do they live? How old are they? What conditions/problems are they facing? Then tailor your creatives around all of those factors. For example, If all your creative says is something along the lines of, “Pain Management Services - Accepting New Patients!” Try something more like this… “Got Pain? Now Accepting New Patients in the Athens Area!” Not only does this decrease the chances of less-qualified patients booking an appointment, but it targets the ones that are specific to your service and demographic.
Your targeting goes way beyond your creative, however. You can set your demographic, interests, target area, and even re-target people if they visit your website or click on a specific service. Make sure you’re taking advantage of all of these best practices in order to get the best bang for your buck out of your advertising.
Spending time in the practice (if you can)
A different perspective
It’s really easy for marketing people to get caught up in our work through the lens of a laptop. Some of us, if not most, enjoy the comfort of working from home. I get it! But there is tons of good that comes from getting experience within the clinic itself.
Over the past several months, some unforeseen circumstances within the business have meant that I’ve had to step up and work in areas of the practice where I had to step out of my comfort zone. This turned out to be the biggest blessing in disguise! I was able to connect with patients like never before, gaining a deeper understanding as to what life is like in their shoes.
Now that I have that experience and understanding, I’m able to create and implement marketing campaigns across all different forms of media in a much more accurate and effective way. We can go by the books all we want, crunching numbers and creating campaigns based on quantitative data, but once we pair that with the qualitative knowledge that understanding our patient base has - the potential for success is much higher!
Prioritize the nurture process and reduce churn
What’s most important
There is nothing quite like seeing a schedule full of new patients. It is the main thing that we should look at as far as success for the practice… right? Well, yes and no. Seeing a lot of new patients is nice, of course. But maintaining those patients is just as, if not more important. Getting caught up in the “new patients per month” metric is easy to do, but it’s not what ultimately drives the long-term success of your practice. Focusing on the long-term plan for your practice’s patients is obviously up to the provider, but there are many things we can do to try and keep them around.
Nurturing your patients with effective marketing strategies
Through email marketing, social media marketing and SMS marketing, you can make your patients feel at home with the posts/messages that you send out. Social media is a great place to start interacting with your patient base. For medical clinics, typically the best places to start are Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. This is where the majority of the general public find themselves when they end up scrolling on their phones. In order to take advantage of your social media, encourage your patient base to follow you on those platforms and entice them to do so by holding a giveaway or sweepstakes for a desired item. Respond to comments, post regularly, and create engaging content relevant to your practice in order to make the most out of your social media strategy.
Email Marketing through the use of newsletters can be another effective way to keep new and existing patients involved in different areas of your practice. Here, you can share information like new locations, new hires, new services, or patient testimonials in order to further drive that family-oriented feel. Not to mention, growing your email list and keeping quality leads within your list is the one thing you can truly own 100%. You may have 1,000 followers on Facebook, but you could get hacked, or Facebook could shut down one day (seems extreme but always possible). Email lists are one of the true digital assets we can truly own outright!
SMS marketing is essentially an extent of email marketing. For some businesses, it can be more effective in many ways. For medical practices like Origins, SMS is used to alert new and existing patients of upcoming appointments, balances on their accounts, approvals for procedures and more. You can also segment your SMS patient list by location, so that if you open up a new location closer to where they are located, they are notified.
All of these forms of marketing make sure that existing patients still see your name and content, reducing the chance of churn and increasing repeat appointments! Thank you for reading!
How have you been able to halt growing pains from affecting your business? Let me know!
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