Cracking The Code TO MORE NEW PATIENTS The Insider’s Guide to Effective Private Practice Marketing
Discover the Ultimate PT Marketing System
CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE
STEP 1 Create Value in Your Services
Are you tired of the daily fight against POPTS, hospital systems, and competitors jumping into your practice’s territory? The silver bullet that will put you in direct control of your professional and personal destiny, is knowing the science and art of marketing. Imagine, being able to control the volume of new patients into your practice, creating a raving fan base, and driving in tons of referred patients without having to buy lunches for the local doctors. Finally, YOU can be in control of your practice growth and income. I encourage you to jump into this book, read it front to back, then back to front, implement the strategies, and boom your business. In today’s healthcare environment, patients are expected to pay higher copays and deductibles. That means you have to know how to market and sell your services to compete. How you create the perceived value in your services, determines what patients will pay for, if you do it right.
The biggest barrier to getting more new patients... PEOPLE UNDERSTANDING HOW YOU CAN SOLVE THEIR PROBLEM
New patients seek experts! The professionalism of your marketing communicates your expertise, and determines just how well patients will pay for your services. The more efficient your practice becomes, the greater your profitability. Market well to keep your practice full of patients, and you will be very successful. Wise investment in your marketing, and good patient results are what keep the flood gates of new patients open.
In this guide you will learn helpful tips that are proven to drive more new patients in your door. Whether you are a small practice or a large multi-location practice, the goal is to cast yourselves as the experts, creating maximum value in your services and keeping your practice full of patients. How you market your practice determines your gross income. If your marketing looks sloppy, boring and does not push the right buttons, you are not only throwing money down the drain, but you are hurting your practice image, your brand. If you don’t send out marketing on a consistent basis, howare you expecting to get more business in the door? Be on the mind of your past customers, local physicians and community prospects on a frequent basis. Consistency wins the day and allows you to attract many new patients.
High Quality Marketing =
High Perceived PT Value
STEP 2 Know Your Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
Many practice owners want to grow their practice, but significantly underestimate the time and investment necessary to attract the volume of new patients they need to achieve their goals. How many hours a week do you spend planning your marketing? How often do you track the cost to acquire a new customer, and look at your marketing metrics to make decisions? Why your marketing budget is crushing your growth potential... Most PT owners are hesitant to spend money on marketing because they see it as an expense and not what it really is, an investment in generating more income to your business. What is the value of each new patient to you? Typically this is between $800-$1100 each new PT patient. Therefore, what are you willing to spend to bring in that revenue? Marketing becomes an expense when it fails to generate response, drive in new patients and drive in income.
Your focus should be on what is the average cost to acquire a new customer ?
Howmuch should you spend on your marketing? This really depends on if you are new or have been established for awhile. Many successful practice owners know a good rule of thumb is to invest between 5-8% of your gross income on marketing to really fill the practice full of patients and create growth. This may be more, such as 15- 20% for the first year, if you are just starting out in a brand new practice or location. With enough marketing effort, attracting new patients to fill your practice becomes easier and ensures you are full to capacity, maximizing your practice efficiency and profitability. The main reason that practices struggle in attracting all the new patients they want, is that they fail to properly plan, budget, and test their marketing. It takes the correct estimation of marketing effort to not only sustain, but to make your practice profitable. In the end if you are not growing, then eventually you will shrink.
1-4%
Marketing Budget of GI Sustains You or Little Growth
5-8%
Marketing Budget of GI Fills Your Practice
Why should a doctor refer to your practice? It is a valid question and one that you should be able to answer easily. Wouldn’t it be nice to walk into a doctor’s office and have the doctor say to you, “yes, I know who you are and I have heard the great things that you do, what’s the best way to refer to you?” It’s not science fiction, it can be done. The secret lies in gaining trust with the physician and their staff as the experts to refer their patients to. Even if a physician is in network with a group, they can still refer some patients to you. Here are some tips to do just that: • Make sure that you are asking your patients for testimonials and that you are promoting these to doctors, current and past patients as well as anyone else in the community. STEP 3 Get The Most Physician Referrals
• Train your staff to ask the patient when they are returning to the doctor. Have them remind the patient to report to the doctor on how well they are doing, and to thank the doctor for sending them to you.
•Makesure thedoctor constantly receives professional marketing
information from you. Realize that most doctors have little understanding what you do, what types of patients to refer to you and when to send. Most patients who need you will never be referred to you, simply by lack of know how on the doctor’s part. • Help the doctor, the nurse, the physician assistant, front desk and the medical assistants know what are the best types of conditions to refer to you with handouts. Make yourself known for what conditions you achieve great results for.
• Doctors and their staff will judge you by how you look. Make sure you have professionally branded promotion for your office such as a professional brochure, newsletter, doctor handouts and prescription pads. Make your practice look professional and a trustworthy place to refer to. Remember, the doctor is sticking his neck out on the line referring to you, so you better look like a place that the patient will like going and come back to the doctor happy.
Bad marketing of your practice with poorly designed brochures, flyers, website and newsletters can drag your practice brand down.
However, with the right kind of professional marketing you will get lots more referrals and patients in your door.
If you are like most practices, you have seen quite a few patients over the years. You should have 60% or more of your case load as returning or word of mouth referred patients. Every powerful business has a building customer base, just ask Starbucks. How often do you keep in contact with all of your past patients? You should be promoting expert educational information to your past patients at least every month and promoting free screens! There are so many reasons why a patient can come back to you, or refer a friend or family member. However, if you are not constantly on the mind of your patients, your practice will easily be forgotten, and lose many opportunities for repeat business or referrals. What marketing your patients receive from you, makes or breaks your relationship with them. You want them to continually perceive you as the expert to call on for their problems. You maintain this trust with informative and educational promotion that stimulates interest. In addition, you need to promote to your patients to refer friends and family to you. Consistency of marketing and keeping the personal relationship tight, is what drives in a lot of new patients. I hope you are at least sending out amonthly patient newsletter to showcase your expertise and keep patients in the loop with your practice. In addition, building your Facebook group and using social media, gives you a platform to build sharing into your community marketing. STEP 4 Reactivate Patients the key to your practice growth...
Promote to your patients a free seminar on preventing back pain, arthritis or other issues. Give freeadviceanddon’t be shy toask for referrals. If youmarket consistently to your past patients, you will see a large increase in your practice volume.
New Patients In
Promotions Out
Promotions Out
New Patients In
I send out marketing now and again, or when I’m in a pinch
I was consistent with my marketing. IT WORKED!
STEP 5 Get Patients To Refer Others
Can you imagine if every patient replaced themselves with another person after they were discharged? It sure would be a lot easier to get new patients. Your patient is very thankful for your help, but that doesn’t mean they are going to refer anyone to you. You have to be proactive, asking your patient “who do they know that needs our help?”. Word of mouth advertising takes work and the best way to achieve it is with marketing promotions for your patients to give out. Give them the marketing tools they need to tell others about you. This takes a little bit of training with your staff and patients, but can drive a huge amount of new patients into your practice.
Check out our PT Marketing Blog for more cool tips! practicepromotions.net
Train your staff on how to ask for referrals. All staff should be asking the patient when they are returning to their doctor and who do they know that needs your help. Let the patient know that you want to help more people and this depends on them telling others. Ask them to call the doctor, tell a friend or family member and talk to any local clubs they belong to. Give your patients the marketing tools they need! Patients sometimes feel shy approaching friends or family about recommending your service. However, if they have a marketing brochure, or newsletter they can simply give to a friend, it makes the conversation much easier. Do you have your patient newsletter, patient brochures or rack cards in your waiting room on different conditions that your patients can take to distribute to friends and family? Do you have a referral card which patients can use to spread word of mouth? This is a great tool to offer a free consultation or other promotion increasing patient referrals to your office. Additionally, a good practice brochure is a vital tool for patients to easily take to give to others. The brochure should be professional, attractive, informative and have a lot of pictures, not just words.
Supercharge your patient referral system with Practice Promotions referral materials and watch your practice take off!
STEP 6
Online Marketing What a powerful online strategy can do...
Key online strategies you need to get more patients: • Mobile responsive website • Email newsletters
• Sign ups from your website • Using the power of a blog • Local business listings
• Build your online reputation with patient reviews • Facebook and Twitter Engagement with useful articles What is the first thing you do when you have a problem or an interest in a product or service? You GOOGLE it! Your website should be the hub of your marketing strategy. Your website should be very attractive, professional and easy to navigate on a mobile device. It should attract, interest and then convert the prospect to a new patient calling in. Websites should have fresh images every year and a complete overhaul every 3 years. This is because software changes so fast, that you have to keep up with the technology.
Social Media
Pat ients
Search Engines
Websi te
Postcards
Newsletter
Physicians
Marketing is a combined approach and needs to use all kinds of media to get the results you want. When you combine print marketing, social media, online marketing andword of mouth, you have a powerful combination to draw themost new patients to your practice. Use your print media to funnel patients to your website to sign up for free downloads and useful information, which shows you as the expert to go to. Leveraging social media can spread word of mouth fast. The key is to continue to drive people back to your site and make it a useful resource. Blogging is the perfect avenue to showcase your expertise and create interest in your practice. Your website should have a blog that is updated at least twice a month. This attracts new patients. More and more people use the web to research what problem they have and who to go to. Your website should contain a lot of useful information that your potential patients can download and review to learn more about their condition. Don’t have a mediocre website that is just “there”. Ensure your website uses the latest online marketing strategies to drive more new patients Don’t forget to check out the latest PT websites at... www.PTperformancewebsites.com
One of the most important aspects of online marketing today is having plenty of online reviews. However, you should choose wisely the services you wish to use for your patients to post reviews. While you may provide exceptional services, poor online reviews by a minority of unhappy patients can taint your image. Make sure there is a physical process in your office to ask for reviews and testimonials from patients. Use reputation management software to control negative reviews, and make it easy to leave reviews right through your website across Google, Yelp and Facebook. Facebook and Yelp – Facebook is a great patient review tool and simple to use with reputation management software. It can be convenient for patients to rate you on Facebook. Yelp is also an important review site, however, the downside to Yelp is that you cannot manage bad reviews. If someone posts negative comments, it is up there for all to see and you cannot take it down or edit. STEP 7 Build Your Online Reputation
Google My Business – By setting up and updating your account regularly, you make it easy for people to post reviews on your Google + page. This also attaches itself in the search feed on Google, which makes it extremely powerful in having more people click on your website. To have patients leave a review, one of the simplest ways is for them to look you up on Google Maps, then leave a review.
STEP 8 Build Your Social Presence
The average user spends at least 30 minutes a day on Facebook, and Twitter is just slightly less. Facebook is still king of social media and most age groups for PT are spending their time on Facebook. However, Facebook will only show your posts to about 2% of your followers.
Basically, they want you to pay to play and reach your followers. Therefore, a budget for boosting posts and ads is essential if you are going to use Facebook to your advantage. Twitter tends to be more frequently used by millenials, athletes, etc. It is important to note that not just millennials are using these social outlets, but a very fast growing older population. The important thing to realize with these social platforms is that they are SOCIAL. You are competing for the millisecond of attention with all the other posts in someone’s newsfeed on a daily basis. However, it is important to note that these are incredible public relations (PR) platforms for your practice, helping to change the mindset of prospects and make people more aware of your great services. Take time to post patient success stories (with written permission of course) and post out relevant educational resources.
Ultimate PT Marketing Checklist
PHYSICIAN AND REFERRAL SOURCE DEVELOPMENT
BRAND YOUR PRACTICE
Benefit: Physicians and patients view your services as professional and high-value
Benefit: Physicians willing and wanting to refer to your practice
� Physician referral newsletters � Physician letters and postcards � Leave behind materials for physician offices
� New patient packets � Referral systems � Powerful, mobile responsive website
� Business cards � Social media � Brochures
CURRENT PATIENT COMMITMENT & FRIEND/FAMILY REFERRALS Benefit: Patients committed to their treatment recommendations and referring others
ONLINE & COMMUNITY PR PRESENCE
Benefit: Being well known by the public and engaged online
� New patient packets � Print practice newsletter � Patient rack cards/brochures � Referral cards
� Powerful, mobile responsive website � Direct mail and digital newsletters � Blog articles � Strong social media engagement
RECRUITING AND GROWING YOUR PRACTICE Benefit: The ability to predict your growth and attract a portfolio of top quality candidates � Professional staff mailing list � Direct mail recruitment flyers & postcards � Website career page
CUSTOMER REACTIVATIONS & WORD-OF-MOUTH REFERRALS
Benefit: Past customers coming back for care or referring new customers
� Monthly practice newsletter � Social media engagement � Referral postcards or letters
Go online today to book a free webinar about PT marketing products www.practicepromotions.net
Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter