6 Areas You Really Need To Be Focusing On To Effectively Grow & Market Your Private Practice

When you’re growing and marketing your private practice, how do you know where to concentrate your focus?

As Doctors, we have limited time and resources – so rather than re-inventing the wheel, I want you think about these six key areas:

Number one: Make Marketing your practice a key priority and have a strategy.

If you want a successful private practice, you have to learn how to market what it is that you do – and as clinicians we need to get over ourselves about some of our beliefs about ‘marketing’.

Marketing doesn’t really mean advertising, and it definitely doesn’t mean sleazy sales techniques.

Good marketing is about providing informational content and services that helps to solve people’s problems- patient’s problems.This is called content marketing, and it helps people to find you when they’re searching for a resolution to their back or bum pain on Google.

The main traps I see people falling into when marketing their practice are either ‘I’d rather rely on word of mouth’ (which is just another way of saying ‘I’m not doing anything useful to grow my practice’), or, they go about it in a very ad-hoc, piecemeal way.

Effective marketing needs a strategic approach, and from coaching many clinicians through this process, I can tell you that the clinicians who grow their practices the most quickly and successfully are those that commit half an hour a day to this. Once you put together a strategy, it makes it so much easier, as you’re not then wondering what you should do.

Number two: Get a professionally made website.

Unless you’re 100% fully booked with a waiting list, you need to have a website if you want to grow a successful practice.

It’s simply not enough to have a listing on a private hospital or clinic website.Many clinicians shy away from getting a website up and running, because they think it will be expensive or they don’t know what to put on their website, but it is one of the single best investments you will ever make.

Why is this?

Because patients and colleagues are searching for help online – and a website is the best way to make sure you are found online.Did you know that 70% of patients will have made up their minds about coming to see a Doctor, before they even get in touch to book in with that Doctor?How does this happen? Well, marketing savvy Doctors produce content that they put on their website that enables patients to find them when they are searching for an answer for their clinical problem.

If you’re not ‘findable’ because you don’t have a website, you’re going to find it very difficult to compete with other clinicians in your sphere.

Patients are online researchers, and these days it’s rarely the GP who decides who the patient should see – it’s nearly always the patient.A good website will allow patients to get to know you for who you are and see that your niche area will serve them.

A great website will help potential patient form an emotional connection with you – particularly if you use video on your website. Think about it – if you were a patient or looking to refer a patient, you’d want to know what kind of person they were- and you can get this across on your website.

Number three: Get started with video

If you really want to make rapid progress in terms of growing your practice, get ahead of the game and start making video straight away, because you’ll be ahead of your competitors who aren’t using video in their practices.

The stats for video are overwhelming – video on social media platforms is 1200% more likely to be shared, and 80% of content that’s consumed online is in the form of video – so it’s a no-brainer not to use it. Crazily, patients are 9 times more likely to remember what’s been said in a video than in written text – so video is hugely influential.

Number four: Effective connecting with colleagues – and the following up

Getting known means getting out and about a purposefully meeting up with potential referrers.As well as appealing directly to patients, we also need to make and maintain connections with referrers.

Now regardless of your clinical specialism, on the whole, you need to move away from the outdated advice of simply ‘putting on a talk for GPs’.If you’ve obtained practising privileges with a private hospital, you may be invited to give a talk to GPs, and whilst I wouldn’t turn this down, you also need to realise that when it comes to Private Practice referrals, the GP tends to be the rubber stamper of the patient’s wishes.

You need to reach outside of just talking to GPs- it’s actually a pretty poor use of your time.

So, who should you be connecting with?

Well firstly, don’t waste further effort on connecting with peers in your same discipline- they already know who you are, and aren’t likely to be a source of referrals for you.

Instead, think of people in allied areas. An obvious example of this is reaching out to physios and osteos if you’re an orthopaedic surgeon, but other examples might include reaching out to rheumatologists if you’re a dermatologist, finding great pain consultants if you work in gynae, and meeting with clinicial dieticians if you’re an endocrinologist.

Connect with potential referrers via social media platforms, meet them and don’t forget to follow up with them once you’ve met them, or you’ll be quickly forgotten.

Number five: Start and email list

Why do you need an email list to grow your practice?

You may be staggered to know that social media platforms massively restrict the numbers of recipients who will see the fantastic information you’re sending out to attract potential patients and referrers.If you post something on Facebook, it’s likely to only be shown to about 2% of your followers – but if you post out some useful information to your GDPR legit email list, 100% of people will receive that email.

You might be wondering why you’d want to communicate with people who have already seen you – and the answer lies in keeping you first and foremost in their minds.For instance, when I email out an article about stress fractures in runners during marathon season, a bunch of patients will worm their way out of the woodwork to come to see me, simply because they read that email which reminded them that I love to help patients with stress fractures.

You may have heard of, or be using an email list (such as MailChimp or Convert Kit) to connect with patients and referrers, but it’s important that you understand that this needs to be a separate email list – a marketing email list if you will, which a person specifically chooses to opt in to receive, so that it’s GDPR compliant – and I’ll be talking about best ways to go about this in future Vlogs.So, start an email list and nurture it.

Number six: focus on where your social media followers are

The great thing about social media is that you can do it for free – but given the small returns on organic reach, you need to focus you free time on where it counts most. Conquer that platform first before you move on to other social media platforms.

For most Doctors and Surgeons, LinkedIn is going to be a very important platform, but you may work in a very visual clinical area (e.g. aesthetic medicine), and so Instagram might also be suitable for you. You need to think where your potential patients are hanging out and post there.

So, if you work with stressed city brokers with cardiac problems, they’ll probably be hanging out on LinkedIn, but if you’re an obstetrician, you might find your tribe in Mums networks on Facebook.It’s really important to understand that there’s no point in using paid advertising on social media platforms (or Google for that matter), UNTIL you know what works in terms of what to post. Spend your money on a website and not paid marketing on social platforms.

We’ve mentioned video, but I’m going to mention it again here, because video will massively boost your chances of being seen on social.

If you commit to half an hour a day to focusing on one of these six areas, you’ll massively make progress in terms of growing your practice.

If you’re looking from some guidance about the best ways to grow your Private Practice, get in touch – I’m here at drcath@clinic-alchemy.com