With so many ways to advertise these days, it can be easy to get distracted, overwhelmed or just generally off-course in how you allocate your marketing time and money.
Let’s look at 10-second way to ‘gut check’ your current activities and make sure you’re on the right track…
Last night, I was going back through marketing legend Dan Kennedy’s No BS Marketing to Seniors and Leading Edge Boomers book. It’s cataract season, so a great time to brush up on my senior marketing skills.
(Highly recommend the book btw, grab a copy here)
In the book he talks about how our efforts and our marketing budget are often misaligned with where we actually get new patients.
The example he gives – and it’s a perfect one – is patient referrals. If you give great patient care and deliver excellent results, your patients have every reason to talk about you to their friends and family.
And if you look at your conversion numbers, they should reflect this. For many practices, anywhere from 20 to 40% of their treatments each month come from happy patient referrals.
So if that’s the case… are we allocating 20 to 40% of our time, our strategy, our marketing efforts, our budget toward nurturing that new-business channel and working to increase It?
Seems obvious, right?
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Most practices are not prioritizing patient referrals as a marketing channel. Patient referrals are somewhat an afterthought. Most practices certainly don’t have meetings about refining their “Patient Referral Marketing Strategy” or spend significant (if any) budget dollars on increasing those numbers.
They spend a lot of time and money talking about Google ads or social marketing strategy, even though patient referrals are likely the more lucrative channel for driving business.
I am NOT saying you should avoid Google ads, or Instagram ads, or any other type of marketing in particular. You want to build an online ecosystem so everywhere someone digitally turns, they find you.
Here’s what I am saying: take 10 seconds, look at your top 1-2 sources of new patients, and ask yourself if you’re devoting proper resources to nurturing and growing that channel.
And if not, adjust. Reallocate time, money, people, goals.
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You don’t have to knee-jerk and do a complete 180. Just start with 1 meeting to evaluate what you’re doing to encourage patient referrals, to make patients aware they should send their friends, to thank them when they do, to stay top of mind with your patients in general.
Then start adding little pieces to your referral system.
For example, one thing we’re starting to launch for clients is birthday texts. They upload their database with patient birthdays included, and we text patients “happy birthday” from the practice.
If it makes sense, we’re giving patients a birthday gift card that expires in a month. For a medspa treatment, or credit toward new pair of designer shades sunglasses, etc.
It doesn’t have to be rocket science to run a patient referral program. Doesn’t even have to be expensive.
Just think more about it, and if you have questions or want an entire blueprint on this stuff, let me know. I might put something together.
Best,
T-Cole
PS – Definitely grab the Dan Kennedy book if your audience is affluent seniors. You’ll get a ton of insights…