Your medical practice is a business. Yet many people who own or are partners in a medical practice neglect that important detail. As a business owner or entrepreneur, there are certain things you must do in order to grow your medical practice in the coming year and beyond. These are just a few of them:
Your medical practice is a business. Yet many people who own or are partners in a medical practice neglect that important detail. As a business owner or entrepreneur, there are certain things you must do in order to grow your medical practice in the coming year and beyond. These are just a few of them:
Have a One-Year, Five-Year, and 10-Year Plan
If you don’t have a plan for your medical practice, then you’re going to have a hard time gaining new ground in an increasingly competitive medical marketplace. The American Academy of Ophthalmology recommends putting this plan in writing.
But plans and goals are two different things. Once you’ve created goals for your business, you must then create the plans that will help you reach your short, medium, and long-range goals. Don’t forget to revisit your goals (yearly if not quarterly) to determine if they are still viable or if adjustments need to be made. If you’re not making adequate progress, perhaps it’s time to examine your plans.
Embrace the Importance of Patient Convenience
Businesses today are constantly seeking new ways to improve customer service or make things more convenient for customers. While most doctors have no interest in making house calls, there are things you can do that will make life more convenient for your patients. Consider online appointment scheduling, in addition to offering before or after-hour appointments to accommodate patients who do not wish to take time off of work for checkups.
Have a Stellar Medical Practice Website
Your website is your virtual storefront. If it looks shabby, run down, and out of date, potential patients will equate it to a run-down clinic on the wrong side of town. That also means avoiding medical practice website mistakes that affect conversion and having a call to action on your medical website pages.
You must present your medical practice as fresh, exciting, and as offering cutting edge tools and technology in the healthcare industry. In order to truly stand out, your website needs to offer, photographs, medical marketing videos, and a steady stream of educational and fresh content through articles, press releases, and blogs presented in a format that’s easy for your existing and prospective patients to navigate.
Commit to Extraordinary Customer Service
How can your practice provide better customer service? Begin with the little things like following up with patients to make sure they’re feeling better after their visits, offering refreshments to patients who have fasted once their blood work is drawn, and calling to let them know when things are running behind.
Here’s an added benefit: by offering superior customer service to patients, it’s easier to ask existing patients to provide strong referrals to your practice.
Embrace Social Media
New startups and well-honed brands alike have embraced social media, whether that is Facebook Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, or Pinterest. Successful business have learned that social media marketing provides another means to build loyalty, attract new customers (i.e patients), build user-generated content, and engage existing customers. When incorporating social media into your medical practice marketing strategy, be sure to know what does and doesn’t work. In addition, take the time to monitor your online medical practice reputation.
Upgrade Your Skills
The competitive edge in medical practices often involves being the best at what you do. Whether it’s choosing one area of your field to specialize in and marketing yourself as a local medical expert in that field or sharpening all your skills regularly in order to provide a robust offering of expertise to share with your patients, you must constantly strive to improve and upgrade in order to remain ahead of your competitors.
Innovate
Technology is moving at a lightning fast pace. It’s necessary to embrace the changes new tech is bringing to the medical field by learning about the innovations that exist in your specialty and incorporating them into your practice. By offering a better way of doing things than your competitors, you are appealing to patients who are educated about their conditions and want only the latest, most innovative approaches to treatment.
These small steps carry big weight when it comes to growing your medical practice. Incorporate them into your marketing plan and see what a difference they make.