Healthcare marketing resources for private practices.
With Thanksgiving and the Holiday Season fast-approaching, I wanted to take this opportunity to discuss thanks, gratitude, and appreciation as they apply to your healthcare marketing strategy. (If these are not currently part of your marketing strategy, make sure to keep reading!)
The BEST Healthcare Practice Building Advice I Can Give. I’m going to break a cardinal rule of Internet content marketing today. (Sssshhhhh…please don’t turn me in to the Internet content police!) What rule is that, you ask? I’m going to share – in my very first blog – the single best piece of healthcare practice building advice I could give to a healthcare professional. I’m not going to make you pay for it. I’m not even going to make you wait for it. Are you ready? Here it is: The absolute best piece of marketing advice I can give to a healthcare professional looking to grow their practice is to connect with your community. Sound simple enough? Let me explain. 
Maintain or Regain?
Maintain or Regain Your Healthcare Practice?
I had an interesting conversation with my husband Michael, last week. We were talking about how for most people…if they change nothing about their nutrition, exercise, and emotional health habits…today is the healthiest they’ll ever be. For the majority of people who don’t eat well…don’t exercise…and let stress run their lives…they lose health incrementally each day. Thus making today their healthiest day…pretty sobering thought, isn’t it?
Before we go off on a conspiracy tangent, let me clarify! While we certainly could have an interesting and compelling discussion about surveillance technology, drones, and Internet monitoring, that’s not the point of this blog. Instead, I wanted to remind you that our actions speak much louder than our words, and people are watching. (If you’re a parent, you probably have a few stories from your child-rearing days where this was embarrassingly obvious.)
One of the best areas to focus your marketing and patient education on is continuing care, especially if you are running or hoping to transition to a concierge practice.
Just as it’s less expensive to keep good employees than to continually hire new ones, it’s also cheaper to keep existing patients coming back than to always be marketing to find new ones. Happy patients also do a lot of the marketing work for you. They refer their family and friends to you. That kind of marketing costs you nothing and is the best endorsement you can receive.
Employees can make or break a practice. Even the best doctor can’t overcome a bad staff. If you want to keep your practice successful, you need to understand the cost of good employees.
We all know the cliché that your staff is the front line of your practice. They’re the first impression potential patients and patients get of your practice when they call or come into your office. And many of us emphasize this ad naseum to our employees.
In order to gauge the success of your practice, you need to track certain data. In a sea of numbers, you need to know what metrics to measure by.
It’s never easy to raise your fees but sometimes it’s necessary. You don’t want to do it arbitrarily, on January 1 for example, because it will seem to your patients, well, arbitrary!
Summer is over and everyone’s lives are hectic again. When you’re marketing among the madness, make sure your message doesn’t get lost. 
Summers tend to be slow for a lot of practioners. We hope you used your slow summer season productively. But summer is over now and we need to make up for the downtime and ramp up business through smart marketing. However, during this time of year, when people head back to reality, your marketing has to compete with all the other things vying for the attention of potential patients.
There are unique financial challenges facing physicians. We earn more than the average person but we have some problems that our contemporaries do not.
The average student loan debt for recent medical school graduates is nearly a staggering $200,000. The average salary for a primary care physician is $195,000 per year, the average for a specialist is $284,000, the average for an “alternative care provider” can be anywhere from $30,000 to $150,000. Add on another $8,000 in non-education related debt (most likely due to credit cards) and perhaps a mortgage. Being a resident or new in practice may not pay well, and there isn’t time for a second job, so a lot of life’s expenses get charged.
Patient education can make or break your practice. No amount of marketing can make up for a lack of patient education.
It sounds like a ridiculous question, but ask the average person what an orthopedist does. Answers might range from “I don’t know” to, “Something to do with knees.” But what if you’re an orthopedist who specializes in shoulders? A potential patient with a shoulder problem might pass you by because they don’t know orthopedists do more than deal with knee injuries.
It’s up to you to educate patients on what you do…everything you do.
