As Doctors you are good in what you do. But most of doctors lack business nuances or expertise which are very much needed to run clinic or hosptial or to scale existing practice to the next level. You learn how to treat the patients but not the strategies involved to run the business. Most of the doctors learn business skills by trial and error, some succeed and excel in their practice but many stagnate in their practice. Right now you also need to focus more about online presence.
You have enough stress on hand to give best possible care and solutions to the patient’s problems. But do you have time to think about things like patient acquisition and search engine optimization or digital marketing and growth hack strategies.
You must take time to learn these strategies for you to implement which can help you in growth of your practice. The more you grow you can help more patients.
4 Tips For Your Practice Growth:
Tip #1 — Brand Positioning
Identify what makes you different from every other practice or doctors. What is your uniqueness and what are the benefits you offer which will help your patients to choose you.
You can build the brand in your name or your clinic name. Create a unique logo and have unique color which will reprenent your brand. Ensure to use the same color in all your marketing strategies both in your clinic / hospital and your online system including your website and all social media platforms.
Create a story for your brand which will help to connect emotionally
Tip #2 — Build Your Digital Ecosystem
Have a professional website which is user friendly, you can add your clinic tour and appointment booking platform which will help instant decision by your patients. Have email marketing system, landing page and presence in all social media platforms to market and nurture your customers.
When people across the globe look for a place to get medical treatment, they research on the web to find out the medical facilities. best suitable for their needs. They will only be aware of medical facilities in India, once there is sufficient and validated content on the internet.
Add more valuable content in your domain in the form of blogs in your website which will enhance your SEO, write articles in platforms like medium, Q&A sites like quora to build your presence. Add video contents in Youtube. Content offer multiple advantage to you, it is very useful for you to generate organic traffic, develop leads, build customer trust, and establish authority.
Interacting on Social media will not only help you connect with patients but also in developing thought leadership and becoming the host to medical debates and discussion amongst the doctors, professors and people of high academics.
Digital presence is extremely important as more and more patients are analysing the profiles of doctors and are also doing the background check about their health problems before meeting a doctor.
Doctors are undoubtedly, one of the most important resource to enrich the content present online. The enrichment could be in the form of tips, home remedies, current updates about drugs, summary of important health conventions that happen across the world, or it could be their research work that they have worked upon in the past.
Tip #3 — Enhance your Softskills
The importance of effective communication in clinical practice has been highlighted in several reports. Medical Council of India (MCI) in its vision 2015 document recommended early integration of communication skills training into medical curriculum.
Although you may not consider these skills are essential for saving lives, softskills have a greater impact on patient outcomes than you might expect and also helps in building patient relationship.
Some of the Softskills that you need to learn are:
Effective Communication Skills
Interpersonal Skills
Empathy and Emotional Intelligence
Time Management
Handling Customer Feedback / Objections
Tip #4 — Marketing Strategies
Do understand that advertising and marketing are different. Advertising is selling whereas marketing is letting the market know about your services, customer support system, efforts to address the customer needs, and determining to meet those needs. Though advertising is part of marketing.
Marketing efforts will help you to serve your customers. There are many marketing strategies that you can implement that you can focus on to bring in new patients and also to retain existing patients.
- Understand what is the need / wants of your customers and based on that you have to build your marketing strategies. Are you focussing on your brand recall or you want to tell the market what is unique solution that you offer for a particular ailment or how you are going to help them recover from their ailments.
- When you are implementing the marketing strategies you should do so with the mindset of an entrepreneur than a employee. i.e you shoud treat marketing as investment than expense. As marketing is like a fuel to your practice growth
- Focus on both offline and online / digital marketing. Ensure the message is consistent in each platform that you are implementing the marketing strategies.
- Have a review system which will enhance trust. Ensure you respond to the reviews frequently to both positive and negative reviews.