Five Secrets to Marketing Your Private Practice in the Digital Age
Ari Goldstein and Ryan Roessler
One of the major issues that many professionals face when it comes to building a practice is the feeling that advertising their services is somehow unprofessional. There may be an assumption that if you’re good at what you do, referrals from other patients will provide you with all the new clients you need. And indeed, that’s often the case. But even exceptional professionals can have a slow start or face obstacles that have nothing to do with the quality of their services.
The truth is, to maintain a successful practice you have to communicate what you do, your office location and hours, and why patients should choose your practice over others in the area to as many people as possible. After all, most patients don’t have ESP. And since other practices are marketing their services, you should, too.
As fellow professionals who have run several successful healthcare practices and business-to-business companies serving professionals ourselves, we appreciate the special challenges marketing a practice presents. In fact, it was the insights we gained from our own experience that led to our creating a unique listing site for neurofeedback providers – the National Neurofeedback Network. We believe that the internet presents several advantages that professionals may be overlooking in developing a marketing strategy for their practices. Here are some observations that we hope will help them now and in the future.
1. Adopt the right mindset.
A professional healthcare practice isn’t just another form of business. It’s inspired primarily by a desire to help other people lead happier, healthier lives. The information and care it offers clients is often life-changing and sometimes life-saving. And an important ingredient in the relationship between healthcare provider and patient/client is a sense of trust. Consequently, communicating about a practice – any practice – should lean more towards offering helpful information to those who need it rather than trying to compete with others in the field.
If you think of your marketing strategy in terms of educating future and current patients about how to achieve and maintain better health, it should help you set the right tone for your marketing efforts.
2. Your website isn’t just another form of marketing: It’s your digital office.
There has always been a disconnect to some degree between the reality of one generation and the next. But in the beginning of this century that gap seems particularly wide. That’s because for most of us born before 1990, the virtual world is experienced largely as an addition to the one built of brick and mortar. For Millennials, however, their world view has always centered on a reality that is virtual as well as physical. For them, websites aren’t just another marketing format. Websites, as well as the social media platforms they’re connected to, are a world unto themselves that’s just as real and complex as the main street of any community.
Thus, to grow your practice today, building, adjusting and updating your website should be a priority in the same way maintaining your office is. It’s not only part of your brand, it also allows you to interact with your patients in various ways that can benefit you both. Perhaps it’s by offering a blog on the latest information about the conditions you treat or the equipment you use. Or your site may be designed to let patients make new appointments and pay bills.
The point is, recognize that your patients’ desire for convenient communication with your office is on the rise. Apps connecting users to healthcare providers as well as financial services, retail shops, transportation services and more have become commonplace and are growing in popularity every day. The faster you can keep up with digital communications trends the more likely you are to attract new patients and retain your current ones.
3. Google and other search engines are major referral resources.
Before the advent of the Internet, finding a new doctor usually began by asking relatives, friends and neighbors for recommendations. If you were looking for a specialist you might have gone first to your primary care physician. In fact, most of us still do all of the above. But we can also use our computers to locate providers in our area, research their expertise and review real patient reviews.
This change empowers patients to find the kind of treatment they want from a choice of providers within a certain location, with less effort than ever before.
As a healthcare provider, it means your marketing efforts have to include an awareness of just which search phrases and words patients search for most often. You also have to know how to include these phrases in your copy content and in your social media posts to ensure that’s your practice comes up on the list generated by the searching patient. The goal is to have your practice listed within the first three names on a search for a particular therapy such as neurofeedback. Research indicates that most searchers – 75% – never go beyond the first page of a list, and if you’re number one on the first page, 91.5% of all searchers will see your listing.
4. It’s easier to reach the top – if the cost is shared.
The most effective way to get to the top of a search engine page list is to use Pay- Per-Click (PPC) and buy Google AdWords. Here’s an explanation of this system from Wikipedia.
“Pay-per-click (PPC), also known as cost per click (CPC), is an internet advertising model used to direct traffic to websites, in which an advertiser pays a publisher (typically a website owner or a network of websites) when the ad is clicked.
Pay-per-click is commonly associated with first-tier search engines (such as Google AdWords and Microsoft Bing Ads). With search engines, advertisers typically bid on keyword phrases relevant to their target market. In contrast, content sites commonly charge a fixed price per click rather than use a bidding system. PPC ‘display’ advertisements, also known as ‘banner ads,’ are shown on websites with related content that have agreed to show ads and are typically not pay-per-click advertising. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter have also adopted pay-per-click as one of their advertising models.”
As you can imagine, depending on how many words you buy and the competition for those phrases, the cost of pay-per-click may be more than many practices can afford. Trying to find an answer to this challenge led us to found the National Neurofeedback Network. By pooling the resources of practices around the country, it enables listing members to enjoy the benefit of a first ranking on Google without investing too much time and effort to get there. Even more importantly, listing on NNN allows neurofeedback providers to attract the people most likely to visit their offices at the very moment they’re seeking neurofeedback services.
5. It takes work to make digital marketing work.
Most professionals are capable of writing the copy content, blogs and posts to market their practices themselves. The problem is, it’s not as easy as it looks. At the very least it takes a considerable amount of time and effort. And what you save in money may not be worth the time and effort spent researching, writing and posting blogs, posts, new content, and more.
Fortunately, the world is full of digital communications experts offering their services. After years of research, we formed an exceptionally talented team to work on the National Neurofeedback Network site. Through their efforts, all the providers listed on NNN can benefit from a top ranking on Google without taking any time away from their primary practices.
Remember, as professionals we may not be marketers by inclination. But ultimately, every practice, no matter how altruistic, must function as a business to survive, let alone thrive. That means we have to attract new clients on a consistent basis. Fortunately, the Internet has provided us with a valuable and multifaceted tool to interest, educate and retain these clients today and tomorrow.
