Cracking The Code To More New Patients

Cracking The Code TO MORE NEW PATIENTS The Insider’s Guide to Effective Private Practice Marketing

STEP 1 CREATE VALUE WITH MARKETING SYSTEMS

Are you tired of the daily fight against POPTS, hospital systems, and waiting on those physician referrals that barely trickle in? 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 this guide you will learn proven strategies that we have developed serving over 400 PT practice locations nationwide, to drive more new patients in your door. Whether you are a small practice or a large multi-location practice, the goal is to create the marketing systems you need to keep your practice full of patients, and create maximum value. 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. Marketing creates a high perceived value in your services, which determines what patients are willing to pay for.

New patients seek experts! Your marketing communicates your expertise, and determines just how well patients will flock to your services. The better your marketing systems and message, the more stable your practice becomes, increasing your profitability. Smart marketing, and good patient results, are what keep the flood gates of new patients open. How you market your practice determines your gross income. This is why marketing is an investment, not an expense. With the right marketing strategies, and the right investment, your ROI (return on investment), should be high. Good marketing, brings stability and provides a predictable path to expansion. Let’s get started on your journey to more new patients! THE KEY TO SUCCESSFUL MARKETING If you don’t market on a consistent basis, how do you expect to get more business in the door? Consistency wins the day and allows you to attract many new patients. Leverage your customers with frequent marketing, create a powerful online mousetrap with your website, and use digital marekting systems.

Effective Marketing =

High Perceived 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 may be crushing your growth potential... Most PT owners are hesitant to spend money on marketing because they see it as an expense, not what it really is, which is an investment in generating more income to your business. This usually is a result of prior bad experiences with marketing, where results were poor. 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? Knowing your CAC is vital, and the goal is to have the lowest CAC, which does not mean spending less on marketing. In fact, the opposite is usually the case. Invest inmoremarketing that works, and your CAC will lower, while your new patient numbers rise.

CAC = Marketing Expenses / NP

How much 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 gross income on marketing to really fill the practice full of patients and create growth. This may be more, 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 1-4% Sustains You or Little Growth

5-8%

Marketing Budget of 5-8% Fills Your Practice

Find a Marketing Plan That Fits Your Budget Learn more: www.practicepromotions.net

STEP 3 GENERATE MORE PHYSICIAN REFERRALS

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, in fact in our practice, our top 5 referring physicians had their own PT practice! 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. • 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.

• Make sure the doctor constantly receives professional marketing information from you. Realize that most doctors have littleunderstanding 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, website, 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 generate more referrals and patients in your door.

Attract More New Patients and Referrals Learn more: www.practicepromotions.net

STEP 4 CREATE PATIENT SUPERFANS THEY ARE THE KEY TO YOUR PRACTICE GROWTH... Every successful business has pretty much built themselves on building a large customer base, and repeat customers. Just ask Starbucks. Ask yourself this question, “how well am I marketing to my past patients?” Lack of marketing to past patients is the number one problem we see with practices. Once they improve their past patient marketing, they take off in their growth! You should have 50% or more of your case load as returning, or referred friends/family. PAST PATIENT MARKETING 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 consultations! There are somany 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.

Do you have customers or superfans? A superfanwill come back for repeat business and rave about your services to their friends and family. However, it is up to you and your marketing program to create those superfans. You want your superfans 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 ask 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. A monthly patient newsletter is one of your most important superfan marketing tools. It showcases your expertise, and keeps patients in the loop with your practice. It should be sent via a variety of different media, such as email, direct mail (yes, good old snail mail), and on social platforms. In addition, building your Facebook group, and other social media, gives you a platform to stay connected. Promote to your patients a free workshop on preventing back pain, arthritis or other issues. Give free advice and don’t be shy to ask for referrals. If you market consistently to your past patients, you will see a large increase in your practice volume.

New Patients In

Promotions Out

New Patients In

I was consistent with my marketing. IT WORKED!

I send out marketing now and again, or when I’m in a pinch.

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. Train your staff on how to ask for referrals. All staff should be asking the patient to tell their doctor about their results, and also what friends / family can be helped. 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.

For more referral tips visit our blog at: practicepromotions.net

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 CREATE AN ONLINE FUNNEL TO YOUR PRACTICE

The key to new patient growth is creating a marketing funnel using systems. How you attract and interest prospective patients from the begin, will determine their confidence in your services. If this is done right, money and sales objections become less. Making this happen does not occur by chance, but with careful planning from strategic online marketing campaigns that guide the patient through a decision process. The whole purpose is to flow a patient from initial interest, to a high level of enthusiasm that you are the right solution for their problem. This is done through social media, Google searches, landing pages, online patient reviews, a mobile- responsive highly interactive website, and follow- up email campaigns.

You have to build interest in the prospect and then call them to action.

Check out the PT website examples on our portfolio: practicepromotions.net

BRING YOUR PROSPECTS THROUGH A SEQUENCE TO DISCOVER YOUR SERVICES

Find you - whether from a friend, family member, doctor referral, social media share or online search engine Investigate you – this is the decision making process. The first step is visiting your website, and ideally reading one of your blog posts. You have seconds to make the right impression and get them to stick on your website. They will also check out your reviews online, and possibly visit your Facebook or Twitter page to learn more. Decide – The person has a lot of decisionmaking about whether or not you are the right choice over medicine, physicians, tests or surgeries. That is even before they check out your competitors. Your brand has to speak to them and their emotions, getting them to decide that you are the right choice. The best way to do this is to showcase your patient success stories, your culture and your expertise through social media and blog posts. You also have to make it simple for them to actually contact you and come in, preferably through an free consultation form, or workshop. Commit – Once the patient actually comes in for an evaluation, you still have to sell them on your full treatment plan. Once the patient leaves your office, they have to convince a spouse or family member that spending the money for deductibles or copays at your practice is a wise investment for them. They will revisit your website and social media over and over again to verify they made the right decision. Engage them with email tips and print marketing also. In addition, they will have to show others to convince them of your professionalism and being the right financial choice. Refer – Ideally, there is an emphasis in the clinic of asking for referrals and leaving reviews. If you are not collecting testimonials and online reviews, then you are missing out on the opportunity to truly promote your practice. Furthermore, promotions and engagement on Facebook and Twitter, can make it easy for patients to share your information with friends and family, ultimately driving those potential referrals back to your website

STEP 7 BUILD LISTS OF FOLLOWERS

Your marketing efforts are wasted if you only have a hundred people following you on Facebook or other social media accounts. Your goal is to build massive lists of people connected to your online accounts and push out content to them frequently. HERE’S HOW YOU DO THAT:

LinkedIn - LinkedIn is great for building physician and other referral source relationships. You can search by your local area and physicians. Connect with them to start building your list. It is also wise to build a company page and groups that others may join. Make sure that you compile lists of all current and past customers. You will need their addresses and emails to market both direct mail and online. Promote to them about connecting with you on online and sharing their success stories on your Facebook and Twitter accounts. This makes it easy for you to boost these posts out and create a big public relations image. Use your website as the hub of your marketing efforts flowing potential patients from social media, online searches, community and direct mailings.

Facebook – Realize that as a business, Facebook does not allow you to share posts to all your followers, only about 2%!!! They expect you to pay to reach your audience with boosting posts and ads. Setup a Facebook ad account so that you can boost posts and reach thousands of people. Ensure that you boost to people who have liked your page every week. The good thing with boosting posts is that you can reach local people with certain demographics you choose who are not following you, but you would like them to follow you. Create a custom audience of your email subscribers, by uploading your list into ad manager. Boost your posts out to your email list! Twitter – Type in local clubs such as sports clubs or other groups you can connect with. Go through their twitter followers one by one to connect. This will help you build a twitter following and peoplewill start to follow you back.

STEP 8 WHY YOUR WEBSITE NEEDS TO BE MOBILE RESPONSIVE Mobile usage has now overtaken desktop usage, with 4 out of 5 consumers using smartphones to shop for products and services. What does this mean for you? Consumers want information, fast and easy to view on their phone. If your website is even 2-3 years old, it means your technology is out of date with the lightning speed of change in the mobile world. This can result in the loss of prospective new patients and income to your practice. What is a responsive website?

A responsive website is one that adapts to smartphones, tablets and mobile devices without being a separate mobile website. The website is responsive to the device that your consumers search on. If your website does not look fantastic on a mobile device, then you are loosing probably hundreds, if not thousands of potential new patients each year.

You want your emails, blogs and social media posts to flow back to your website. This is a big decision point for them in choosing your services. The vast majority of people now view these items on mobile devices, meaning your website has to be easy to read and navigate on a smartphone.

Here are some interesting statistics you should know:

53%

78%

2.8

On average people spend 2.8 hours per day on a mobile device vs. 2.4 on a desktop or laptop

78% of US Facebook users are using mobile devices to view

53% or more emails are opened on a smartphone or tablet

The vast majority of people surfing the internet are attracted to information articles. As the saying goes, content is king. The easiest way for you to attract attention to your practice is to push out your knowledge. A blog accomplishes this and allows you to post useful educational articles about conditions your prospects are suffering from. A blog should be part of your site, where you are able to continuously add new articles to it. This builds a vital database of useful information that people can access, drawing more people to your website. STEP 9 THE POWER OF BLOGGING AND REVIEWS

Coordinate your blog posting with social media

Your blog should be connected to Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. This will allow you to share your blog post with all these social media outlets at one time, broadening your reach to multiple people. You will want to boost your posts on Facebook and set a budget for that. This will help you reach a growing number of potential followers and direct them back to your website.

Build Instant Trust in Your Services With Patient Reviews

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. An important aspect with reviews is that you still have to ask patients for them. 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.

FACEBOOKANDYELP – Facebook is a great patient review tool and simple to use with reputation management software. It can rank you separately in Google searches. 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. 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. Use a reputation management software to ask for more Google reviews via email and your website.

STEP 10 FACEBOOK AND TWITTER

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.

FORM A GROUP FOR YOUR PAST PATIENTS It is a good idea to setup an exclusive group for patients you have treated, invite members to join. This gives you a platform to share helpful tips, and keep people connected with your practice. It is vital that you build the biggest followings that you can. You can do this with a little work right from your own phone or desktop. Create custom and look alike audiences in Facebook and Twitter to target people with certain interests in your geographic area. There is also software that allows you to use Twitter to tag people’s conversations around your practice for example talking about their back or neck pain.

What you should share:

• Personal stories of patients and their results (with written consent from patient and according to your state practice laws) • Very interesting tips and facts about health that someone can use • Personal stories of staff that are interesting (with written consent) • Articles from your blog • Articles from other health blogs

What you should not share:

• Simply talking about how great you are or trying to be sales like. (talking just about your business will turn people off) • Politics • Religion • Negative posts or comments

Having the right social media engagement will drive more people to your website. it will certainly generate interest in people and be part of your marketing funnel process.

STEP 11 USE EMAIL CAMPAIGNS

Emails are still one of the most preferred ways of communicating, however, one look at your own inbox, and it is easy to see how your marketing emails can get lost in the shuffle. The key with email marketing is consistency, the right subject line and the right engagement. You have to ask yourself, what is the purpose of this email and what do I want the person to do? Take everything in small steps, flowing the prospect down your funnel, ideally to a landing page for a free phone or in person consult.

• >53% or more emails are opened on a smartphone or tablet • 80% of emails never get read, so you should never rely solely on an email newsletter • You want to achieve > 2% click through rate on your emails

It’s all about the subject line

When someone receives your email on their smartphone the main display shows the sender, the subject line and sometimes the first sentence in the body of the text. Your subject line has to be short, no more than 8 words and captivate interest enough to open emails. Here are a couple of examples:

Bad – The Advanced Physical Therapy August Newsletter to Help You Feel Better

Good – 5 powerful ways to natural back pain relief

(don’t capitalize all the words as you will be penalized)

Personalize: Many email systems today such as Campaign Monitor, Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, Emma and more allow you to merge your contacts names. Always personalize your email with Hi (first name) and try to weave their name in the other parts of the email also. This results in a much higher open rate and click through rate.

Keep your list up to date:

Build your email list with consent from each current patient. It is also good to have a lead generating system on your website to capture email addresses and consultations.

STEP 12 CONNECT BROADLY WITH LINKEDIN

LinkedIn is a hidden gem for many PT practices, especially with developing physician referrals. Many local physicians and their office managers are on LinkedIn. You can bypass the front desk and showcase your expertise. The best way to use LinkedIn is as a networking platform. Don’t try to sell your services through LinkedIn, but work to build relationships. Be careful not to use this as a communication tool about patient conditions to physicians, however, do showcase your knowledge through blog posts, etc.

You can also setup a paid InMail account to email the office manager or physician to setup a time to meet, or schedule a time to drop off materials.

In addition to physicians, you can target HR department heads, workcomp adjustors, attorneys, coaches and other referral sources, to build your network. Use LinkedIn as a networking tool and an opportunity to showcase how you solve patient problems.

STEP 13 FIND NEW PATIENTS WITH GOOGLE

Let’s face it, when it comes to online searches, Google is still the 800lb gorilla in the room. It is important that you work hard on ranking your website on Google for many search terms. These are called “keywords” and are phrases such as “physical therapy”, “back pain treatment”, “how to relieve headaches”, etc. It is important that you build your website copy around as many combinations of keywords as possible. However, it is also important that you do not over-saturate any one page with more than 1-3 times that particular keyword. Listings are an important way to build your ranking on Google. Use listing services to make sure your business information is accurate on hundreds of other directories and review sites around the internet. Google scans these and ranks your website higher, the more accurate listings you have.

What Google wants:

Google wants fresh content, and for you to produce the most relevant searches for their customers. One of the best ways to achieve this is with consistent blogging on your website. The #1 place on Google gets 33% of the page traffic and click rates go significantly down in lower ranking spots. Therefore, it is important that your website has good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to help it rank as high up as possible for many search terms

Visit our blog today for marketing articles on: • New Patient Marketing • Digital and Social Media Marketing • Physician Referral Marketing • Word of Mouth Referral Marketing

Here’s what you can do rank your business higher on Google: • Have a mobile responsive website with built in silo architecture (*PT Performance Websites are)

practicepromotions.net

• Have good content on all your pages that is keyword rich, but not heavy

• Have regularly updated content at least 1-2 times a month (ideally through your blog)

• Make sure your website is mobile responsive using the latest technology

Ranking social media

Make sure that the name of your social media, Facebook and Twitter especially have your practice name and preferably physical therapy. Ensure that your profiles on both these social media platforms are filled out with your main keywords such as “physical therapy” in the about us sections. The more content you can post to your Facebook and Twitter accounts, the better they can be ranked in the Google searches also.

Become confident in your growth and income with our proven system, using the latest in website, marketing, and patient newsletter technology, that has worked for physical therapists across the US and Canada. Discover Our 4-Step New Patient Power Marketing Plan TM & PT Marketing Systems Increase Your New Patients • Don’t be dependent on doctor referrals • Overcome POPTS and HOPTS • Market your practice like a PRO

Neil Trickett, PT PT Marketing Expert

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