Jeff was a medical professional with a successful practice. Every day he helped patients with some of their most nagging concerns and helped them lead happier healthier lives.
However, there was a problem in Jeff’s business – a problem that caused him tremendous anxiety and stress.
Jeff’s business had reached a point where he was simply maintaining his revenue stream without seeing any growth.
Perhaps this is happening in your business. Or perhaps you have a consistency problem – revenue seems to fluctuate wildly from month to month, creating a frustrating cycle of feast or famine.
Whichever situation applies to you, you’re not alone. Situations like these are all too common in today’s economy.
Many of these businesses turn to online marketing as a way to attract new clients. However, the results are often lackluster. The reasons why businesses have so much difficulty with online marketing comes down to two factors:
- No strategy. Many businesses owners have no real strategy in place designed to attract leads – leads that eventually become patients.
- No system. They also lack systems designed to simplify the booking process for the patient.
The ability to attract and engage prospects AND make it easy for them to engage with you can provide both stability and huge growth potential.
Patient Marketing: The Old Way
Jeff, like most medical professionals, had been relying on old school lead generation strategies such as Pay Per Click (PPC), Search Engine Optimization (SEO), print and radio advertising and direct mail.
While these strategies are effective to a point, they were only reaching people who were already interested in Jeff’s services. To put it another way, he was targeting the “low hanging fruit.” Jeff wasn’t optimizing his online sale process and as a result, he was leaving a TON of money on the table.
It’s important to remember that today, your prospects have virtually unlimited options, all of them, just a click away, so competing on price alone will not be enough to fuel growth.
In fact, the historically tried and true “Four P’s of Marketing” (Product, Price, Place & Promotion), are all being challenged by a simple winning formula – add value first.
Patient Marketing: The New Way
The new way of marketing takes leads on a journey from not knowing you at all to eventually becoming a patient.
It does this by educating and giving value to your prospects throughout the process, allowing you make a real impact on their lives, and in your community. It’s also far more cost-effective and yields quicker results than most traditional forms of advertising.
Most importantly it gives value first by answering the question:
“How can I help?”
Facebook Advertising
Most marketers using Facebook treat it like just another online channel.
The reality is, Facebook is a social space, not a market. They go there to hangout and chat with their friends, read the news and look at videos.
Facebook is best used as a place to build relationships. Instead of trying to sell directly, you must offer value first, building authority and credibility with your audience. Once you’ve done so, then you’re in a much better position to offer your services.
On a practical level, Facebook offers the lowest cost for ads per 1,000 impressions, averaging around $6.00 (this has recently changed) about 1% of the cost of TV ads.
Additionally, with 1.71 billion monthly active users and 1.57 billion mobile users, it’s a safe bet that your ideal patient is using Facebook on a regular basis.
Facebook also offers a service called “Intelligent Targeting,” using data such as location, demographics, interests, even behaviors to ensure that the right ad gets to the right person, at the right time.
Quizzes
Quizzes and surveys represent a fundamental shift in marketing. Interactive content allows you to have a kind of two-way dialogue with your audience.
This gives you a huge advantage over your competition because it allows you to communicate with your prospects in exactly what they want in their language while gaining valuable insights into their wants, desires and pain points.
Humans cannot resist the opportunity to test themselves, compete, compare, share their opinion and have fun.
Instead of constantly writing new articles, recording new videos or distributing new whitepapers, creating a quiz allows you to create compelling content just once. This gives you the freedom to focus on what you do best – helping your patients.
Godfather Offer
Most marketers and medical business owners provide a “free consultation” as their offer. The difficulty is, someone who doesn’t know you is not likely to come in for a “free consultation,” when they suspect it’s just a set up for a sales pitch. Again, you’re only targeting the low hanging fruit. This leads to low conversion rates
The Godfather Offer provides prospects with an offer they can’t refuse. It’s made up of four primary components:
- Compelling main offer. Your product/service must be able to delight the prospect in some way.
- Risk reversal. This involves offering some sort of guarantee to the prospect.
- Bonuses What can you offer to help them solve their problems faster without increasing the price?
- Urgency/scarcity. The prospect needs a reason why they should take action now.
Email Nurturing Program
Email marketing is still a powerful method of marketing. Having an automated follow up email sequence in place that builds rapport and credibility with prospects is essential to turning leads into paying patients.
Companies using email to nurture leads generate 50% more sales-ready leads and at 33% lower cost. In addition, nurtured leads on average, produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities compared to non-nurtured leads.
Conclusion
We’ve covered a lot in this article, and to be honest there is a LOT more to be said on this subject. Let me leave you with a question:
How different would your life and business be if you had a marketing system that magnetically attracted new patients on a monthly basis?
In this live training, I go cover 4 key strategies that will help you book at least 30 new patients every month to your medical practice.