How to attract leads to your medical practice

Your practice will only survive with one thing: a steady flow of new patients.

Here are a few ways that patients will find you:

1. Provider referrals - Go and sell your practice to other local providers. You’ll not only create good relationships with local doctors, but you’ll build a solid local network of potential referral sources.
2. Patient referrals - By simply providing good care and having a likable personality, your best patients will refer you to their friends and family.
3. Insurance referrals - Your in-network insurance companies will showcase your information on their provider lists, and you will hopefully get new patients directly from your insurances. Make sure your practice is listed and your information is updated.
4. Internet search - This is our focus today. I promise that new patients will find you on the internet. I’m going to show you a few ways to make sure you're making it easy for potential patients to find you and schedule an appointment. Don’t miss the inbound opportunities that are already in knocking at your door.

Acquiring New Patients Online

As a medical provider, you need to take control of your online brand by using proper online marketing and SEO tactics. To simplify an online marketing and SEO plan, let’s break it into 3 sections:

1. Website
2. Education through Content Marketing
3. Email Marketing

Website

Your website is your marketing and information hub. It’s one of the best places to educate and acquire new patients. Don’t overcomplicate your site. Make it easy for someone to learn what you do and how to contact you. Include information about you and your company, the services you offer, and a place for patients to schedule an appointment. It’s really that simple.

I like to give patients the option of how they’d like to schedule an appointment, so set up a self-service online appointment system if you have the ability. A HIPAA-compliant contact form is better than nothing (Check out Jotform - It's only $100/month and is 100% HIPAA compliant. One new patient will offset the cost!). And of course, include your phone number and hours of operation. Make sure your phone number is clickable on your mobile site.

Making it easy for patients to schedule an appointment is the best way to turn your website into a 24/7 lead-generating machine.

Educate Your Patients Through Content Marketing

As a medical provider, you are also an educator. You educate your patients at every appointment by offering expert advice on living a healthier life, information on proper medication usage, or by offering tips on reducing pain after surgery. You are a wealth of knowledge, so make sure your website reflects this as well. As more and more of your patients go to the internet to self-diagnose their aches and pains, make sure you're also educating on your website and sharing this knowledge with your patients.

As you add educational content to your website, it will gain authority as you build out a content library of information around your services and specialties. One way to stay in front of your customers is to build a blog on your website. Whenever you answer a common question in your clinic, create a blog post and answer the question in writing. It's that simple to create content for your site. If you don't have time to do this, make a voice memo on your phone and send them to a copywriter. They'll be able to transcribe and write up a fantastic blog post based on a 30-second voice memo you make.

I promise that answering questions in writing and putting them on your website will bring new patients to your website in the next 6 months. Google's algorithm is based on answering questions, so why not get ahead of the game and put the answers out there. Answer questions and make it easy for them to schedule an appointment. It's that easy.

Email Campaign

Have you ever received an email newsletter from a doctor? If it had a "Meet the Staff" section and a blurb about what awareness month it is, you probably deleted it immediately. I admit I used to send these out all the time when I worked for a medical practice. But times have changed, and people get too many emails each day to even open something that's not interesting or relevant. If you've ever received an email that you actually signed up for, it probably included a headline or an article that caught your attention...BECAUSE IT'S RELEVANT TO YOU! General newsletters sent to all of your patients are probably annoying to the majority of your email list, and most just end up in the junk folder anyway.

Send relevant articles to your patients. Provide education that gets people excited to open your next email. Emails don't have to be templated and boring. They can be simple check-ins to say "hey, check this out" or "Here are our thoughts on XYZ." Keep it relevant and interesting, and remember that most people don't have 10 minutes to read a lengthy email, so just keep it short and sweet.

With an effective content marketing strategy and an easy-to-use educational website, you're already well ahead of 90% of your competitors.

"But I Don't Have Time...I Need Help"

We help medical practices create everything mentioned above. We create simple and effective websites and can create educational content marketing and email campaigns that will educate your current patients and bring new patients to your website.

Even if you already have an in-house marketing team, we can provide support to them by setting up new patient lead funnels based on the educational content we'll help you create.

Reach out to schedule a call and let us help grow your patient volume this year.