Providing excellent patient care is one sure way of getting loyal patients and building your practice’s reputation. However, other healthcare providers may be providing similar quality services. As such, patients may be torn on where to direct their loyalty, preferring to visit different clinics for varying health issues. With this kind of playing field, growing your practice can become painfully slow and hurt your progress. In this article, we will discuss four effective strategies to grow your private medical practice.
1. Build a mobile responsive website
An increasing number of people are venturing online to look for health information and find suitable health providers. Without a website, your practice ends up missing out on potential patients. As most online users access the internet via mobile phones, it’s essential to build a website that’s responsive across multiple devices. This will allow you to take advantage of the various marketing opportunities, like content marketing and paid advertising, to increase your visibility and brand awareness.
2. Create a content marketing strategy
Your website should serve two primary purposes: provide more information on the practice (location, care provided, physician profiles, operating hours) and provide educational content to website visitors consistently. You need to have a content strategy in place, covering your website and social media platforms as well.
Consider doing in-depth research to learn more about medical content marketing and create an effective strategy. This strategy should include engaging articles, videos, infographics that are focused on providing useful information to both existing and potential patients.
3. Tap into local SEO
Healthcare facilities that have optimized their online presence for local search appear on the map pack (top three search results that give details of a business – name, location, opening hours, rating, phone number), or on the normal search results on the first page. Optimizing your online presence for local search is easy and free. First, ensure you create a Google My Business profile. Encourage patients to leave reviews and be sure to respond to all of them.
Another way of increasing your local search ranking is by submitting and reviewing your online listings on local directories, like Yelp. Note that sometimes your practice may be listed without your knowledge. Perform a scan of your local listings using a tool like Moz and verify your name, address, and phone number, as inconsistency can affect your ranking.
4. Employ customer retention strategies
Acquiring a new customer costs your practice more than retaining an existing one, and you should adopt smart customer retention strategies to avoid losing your patients to other facilities. One smart way of doing this is following up with your patient. This shows them you care, and in return, you earn their trust.
Likewise, publishing customer testimonials and reviews may be an effective strategy for attracting new patients, but it also works well in retaining existing ones. Patients who read the testimonials and reviews may feel encouraged to stick with your practice.
Endnote
Private medical practice faces stiff competition, and you need to do more than providing excellent patient care to differentiate your practice from other facilities and realize growth. Build a mobile responsive website, create a content marketing strategy, tap into local SEO, and employ customer retention strategies to increase your online visibility, attract new patients, and nurture existing patient relationships.
