The success of your medical practice depends on your ability to grow and acquire new patients, but with so much competition, many practices struggle in this area. Acquiring new patients doesn’t have to be such a challenge. In fact, with the right strategy and partnerships, you could be filling your books up with new patients in no time at all. In this article, we’ll give you four strategies to boost your patient acquisition.
Create a Virtual Front Door
Before COVID, telehealth was mainly just a care delivery method. Today, the right telehealth platform can act as your virtual front door and enable your practice to serve multiple use cases and serve new populations.
A secure telehealth platform gives your patients who are not directly in your area the ability to book appointments with you through a virtual dispatcher or booking page. Care access points can be created close to their location by installing telehealth kiosks, as well as leveraging cloud-based connections where people can book an appointment and see one of your providers virtually. The result - you can see more patients across a larger region.
Engage With Your Patients
When patients receive adequate and effective communication, they’ll be more satisfied with and have more trust in your practice. The satisfaction of your current patients is vital to being able to acquire new ones. You can encourage your patients to leave online reviews on medical provider rating sites, or you could ask them to provide testimonials for your website.
The most important thing to remember is that if you give your patient a channel and opportunity for communication, you must be responsive. If you set up a dedicated email address for patients, or if your practice management system has a messaging feature, be diligent about responding to inquiries promptly.
Ask for Feedback
When it comes to new patient acquisition, there is a ton of value in the recommendations of your current patients. It is important to be aware of your reputation. Sending post-appointment surveys is a great way to keep a finger on the pulse of your patient base to understand how they are feeling about your practice.
If patients have an opportunity to share candid feedback, you may get some useful information from these surveys that you can use to improve policies and procedures to increase patient satisfaction. Practice management software often incorporates features that allow you to automate patient surveys.
Start SEO and Digital Marketing
These days, Google is the first stop for a potential new patient looking for medical services. It can be a good idea to invest in digital marketing strategies that improve how your practice ranks on search engines like Google. Digital ad programs with Google and other SEO techniques will boost your chances of being seen online by potential new patients.
This can be a more cost-effective option for advertising because your dollars are targeted to a realistic pool of potential viewers. After all, searchers are generally only looking for providers in their neighborhoods or nearby. You can use an SEO and digital marketing strategy to tailor your content to get good leads in your area.
Harness the Power of Location
Whether you use it with your telehealth solution, EHR, or SEO marketing, geofencing is a way to target current or potential customers within a predefined set of boundaries. Apps or software programs use RFID, Wi-Fi, GPS, and cellular data to trigger targeted marketing actions such as text, email, social media, or app notifications, when a mobile device enters or exits a virtual geographic boundary – aka a geofence.
By filtering the specific geographic area by targeting criteria (such as women ages 18 and older for an OBGYN practice), you’ll have the ability to hyper-target patients with messages at the right time and the right place.
Let’s Talk Interactive – Your Full-Service Partner
Don’t tackle your digital marketing and new patient acquisition alone. Let’s Talk Interactive is a complete telehealth solution designed to help your practice grow. Our team of experts can help you with anything from designing patient portals to crafting marketing strategies to drive your message home. Contact us today to learn how we can help you.