Marketing Strategies & Good Business for Physicians
BY: Andrew Eriksen
Part 2 of 2
Published in Medical Exchange
In the first part of this series, we discussed patient loyalty and how vital this is to the longevity and growth of your practice. In this article, I will provide you with some simple and effective ways to grow your practice without it costing you a fortune. What I am not going to do, is tell you to focus on Tweeting and social media which seems to be what every other article is telling you to do. The last thing you need are a bunch of friends/followers asking you medical questions or trying to schedule appointments through Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook and Twitter to a lesser extent are primarily utilized in two ways:
- Seek reviews/experiences from friends about a provider they are considering
- Solicit information from friends about good providers in the area
Neither one of these require you to be actively involved in Facebook or Twitter. What you are required to do, is focus on quality patient care and excellent customer service. In most cases, the totality of the patient experience is how you as a business will be graded. This means growing your business is not solely reliant on your bedside manner and superior skills as a physician. An example of this is the recent propagation of minute clinics and the like that in most instances are entirely staffed by NPs or PAs. This is the result of the overall impatience of our society and the intolerance for poor customer service. Since I covered customer satisfaction and patient loyalty in the first article, I am now going to focus on ways to get new patients in your waiting room.
- Put yourself in the shoes of your patient. How are your current patients finding you? Do you know where they are coming from? Source verification should be an integral part of your new patient work up. This question can be relegated to the front desk but you should also consider asking your new patients. If you are geriatric physician, the source of your new patients is going to be very different than that of a local plastic surgeon. You want to cultivate your current sources before creating new ones. If you have a consistent referring physician that you have never met, then that is a problem. If a patient is responsible for referring a family member or friend, you need to let them know you appreciate it by having a staff member call them or by sending a thank you letter.
- Majority of the patients now use the internet to find and research new providers. One simple and necessary thing for you to do is to simply research yourself on the internet. What do you find? Is it good, or are you buried on page 6 of the search results? Less than 20% of internet users go to the second page so you need to be on the first page. Are you listed on the local search engines? This will get you to first page faster than anything else and it doesn’t cost you a dime. Commission someone in your office or do it yourself but make sure you add your practice to Google Local, Angie’s List, Yahoo Local, Bing Local, Healthgrades, & Vitals. You can simply do a search for each of these and you should be able to figure out how to add your business.
- Do you have any reviews on the numerous local review sites out there? You need them and they need to be good ones. You can obtain positive reviews by making it easier on your patients to give feedback. Have a laptop or computer accessible that has a review site pulled up and simply ask patients at checkout to leave a comment about their experience. You can do a different one each day to spread the good news. You could even have a moderated review area on your website.
Our company starts hundreds of practices every year and these strategies are an integral part of the success of our clients. I hope that you found this information to be helpful and I welcome any feedback regarding these or other marketing strategies.