20 May How To Market Your Practice Effectively In 2018!
In the private practice world, there’s just not enough emphasis put on marketing your practice.
And to market in a way that helps you grow a sustainable business so that you can actually do it and enjoy it for a long time without burning out.
And the big problem I see is the way that most practice owners market. Grinding, chasing, hustling to get more new business all the time. It’s way too labor intensive, it’s stop and start and it’s just simply too confusing.
But, it doesn’t have to be that way anymore!
Here’s how marketing is changing in private practice…
Well the psychology of marketing hasn’t changed, that will always be the same, always.
But what has changed is the way that you can and should deliver your marketing message.
So, let’s talk about how to market your private practice effectively in 2018.
Social media is no longer an option, but a must for any practice that wants to remain relevant in the market.
There’s just 3 simple channels my clients use to get a steady stream of high paying new patients consistently, and I’m going to recommend that you focus on these in your practice marketing in 2018.
But first, remember the psychology of marketing hasn’t changed, and of course, you must put your patients first, that goes without saying.
So in order to really help your patients and community long term, you need to create a business that will still be here to serve them.
It might seem daunting to start using social media to promote your practice, so here’s my handy tips on how to get started.
Here goes:
Number 1. Build your Practice Brand on Social
You can’t ignore social media.
Facebook has over 2 billion members, 1 billion check in daily.
Start building your brand on Facebook and build authority so that people want to come to you, and so that referrers want to work with you
Some Real quick tips:
Start by sharing informative and engaging posts with your audience.
Next – start recording that content on video.
Most people find videos much more interesting than text and they will be more likely to click on them to view.
Videos provide helpful content in a compact way.
You will be able to communicate a lot through video, more than you through just using written content alone.
If you want to grab people’s attention and hold it, come up with interesting videos that have fun and informative content. This will encourage your audience not only to view the videos but also to share them.
No need to make it fancy – you literally have your own recording studio in your hand.
You can get fancier later if you like, but it’s more important to commit to creating really valuable content.
Your posts should teach them something new or tell them something that amuses them. Being helpful to your potential patients is one of the main things that will make people want to follow you.
Once you master this aspect of social media marketing, you will be well on your way to growing your audience and stepping up your marketing campaign.
When you come up with a good social media marketing strategy, you increase your chances of bagging customers from these 2 billion users and you will build a solid customer base for your practice.
So just get started and then commit to it consistently. Build up a following.
Those who commit to building a brand on Facebook in 2018 are going to dominate the marketplace.
My feeling is that you’ll love it, and who knows, maybe you can get rid of the old office visits, cold calls and sending letters instead. It’s time to really commit to social and especially video!
Number 2. Engage Your Fans
If you’ve been in business for any length of time, you’ve got a database full of emails.
Start communicating with them more often.
Don’t just send an odd email out of the blue and then be inactive. You need to stir up your audience and encourage them to interact with you. For this to happen, you need to do your research, so as to know what kind of content your audience likes.
Go back to social media, ask questions, reply to comments and like other people’s posts.
If they’ve been to your practice already, they already know you, like you, trust you –so engage with them, show them some love, give them a ton of value and then when you run a promo – they’re far more likely to re-engage with you.
Start by sending engaging, creative, educational and entertaining emails to add more value to them.
And occasionally mix in your promotions. What you need to do is to balance out helpful content with promotional posts. A rule of thumb that most businesses use is that for each seven posts that they put up, one of them will be a promotional post.
Here are some results I’m really proud of that my guys are getting by committing to an email strategy.
Travis and Peter had 84 bookings!
Lenore had 33 bookings!
Angela had 30 bookings!
If you have a list of just a hundred or more on email it’s a great opportunity for you to grow.
I’ve got a great strategy to do this through my Get Patients Now Campaign if you want to give it a go!
I love email and I think you should too.
It’s an amazing platform to get your message out to the right people.
Make sure you focus on email this year as a strategy.
It’s easy to access, it’s fast to action, it’s low cost and it’s really targeted.
Number 3: Develop a Paid Traffic Strategy
There are so many social media platforms. However, not all of them are good for your business or practice. You must figure out which one is the best for you, based on which platforms your potential patients use more. We recommend you develop a strategy for paid ads, specifically on FB, Instagram and Google to get started.
The key word here is strategy. Don’t run ads until you have a conversion and retention strategy so that you can monetize it. The whole point of paid traffic is to be able to acquire a client and profit. That’s it, full stop.
Start small and scale up once you have predictable results. Set up a Facebook page. Ensure that you post unique promotions that are going on in your practice. Post an offer at least once a month.
If you’d like to learn how to do this the way that we recommend, check our Practice Acceleration Podcast. That’s where I go deep into how to market and grow healthcare businesses THE RIGHT WAY every week with step by step examples and actionable tactics.
Listen to it in your car, during your work out or just when you go for a walk. After all, there are so many more strategies to market and grow your private practice!
But if you just embrace these three themes, and you put all your focus into this year, you’ll have a successful practice that will last, so that you and your team can do what you do best, help your patients.
They need you, so build a strategy that helps you build a sustainable practice that will always be here for them.
To have that rapid growth in your practice, promoting yourself on social media is a critical step to your success.
Thanks for reading, if you want some more hot social media tips you can action for your practice check out my podcast so I can help you even more!
