By Rick Lau, Healthcare Entrepreneur
As physiotherapist business owners, we all know we need to market our businesses so we can keep up with the growing competition. After all, hiding away in the shadows is not going to bring new patients to the doors!
But in my experience of working with hundreds of clinic owners over the years, marketing is a big frustration.
You don’t really know what works and what doesn’t. And oftentimes, you feel like your efforts don’t work at all, like you’re treading water but seeing money flush away with that water all at the same time.
It’s time to stop all that because there’s an easy fix.
So let me enlighten you by sharing:
- The key to success with marketing
- The one thing you’re probably not doing and need to do NOW
- The most critical internal factor you can change without spending money
The key to success with marketing
Since much of our marketing is now done online, the key to success with marketing your practice is to diversify your traffic sources.
You have to be where people are and get their eyeballs on your business.
Getting listed in Google is obviously a good idea, and this starts with having a website.
But diversification also relies on various other marketing avenues that may seem fitting.
You can use any or all of the above methods as part of your marketing mix. And you do need a mix, which, without a doubt, requires big efforts on your part. But quite frankly, you can’t stick your head in the sand and ignore the need to market your business.
Once you have some marketing avenues in place, that’s just the first step. Because you need to MEASURE.
You can’t manage what you can’t measure. So you need to start measuring the conversion rates of your marketing.
What to measure in marketing
Let me give you an astounding statistics: 98% of marketing efforts go nowhere!
98% – that’s crazy. And it’s quite simply because people aren’t measuring what happens AFTER the marketing.
The reason you get jaded about marketing not working is because you’re not measuring. So you can be focusing your energy on things that aren’t working, while overlooking things that might work better.
Your marketing investments must be measurable!
Would you buy a mutual fund or ETF if you couldn’t measure it?
So what exactly do you measure?
The answer is everything. But some things are much easier to measure than others.
5 things that are easy to measure include:
- pay per clinic advertisement
- social media advertisement
- retargeted advertising
- email marketing
- direct mail advertising
Basically, with these methods of marketing you get clear numbers, stats, and figures. And you can evaluate those numbers to assess their effectiveness.
But even so, you still need to evaluate the success of each campaign, ad, or activity you engage in, so you know what can be done to improve things, or whether you should keep doing something because it’s working well.
You certainly don’t want to be wasting money or time, right? So, assess and evaluate those measurements each week or each month and you will see improvements occurring.
5 things that are harder to measure include:
- word of mouth
- seo
- organic social media
- community marketing
- doctor marketing
Let’s just back track for a sec…
What you’re measuring is conversions:
A conversion is when somebody calls, gives you their email or books online.
So, even though these are harder to measure, you can’t ignore them because they are important factors in your marketing mix.
And if you think about it, you can systemize a process that at least measures some of these marketing efforts. For instance, you can ASK every patient where they heard about your business. You can make this part of your process and log the data so at least you have some kind of numbers to work with.
For digital channels, you can use Google Analytics and set goals to track conversions.
Because here’s the thing, everyone talks about getting MORE Google traffic. But no one actually knows what their website conversion rate is!
In fact, 97% of your traffic might be leaving your site straight away, so what’s the point of getting more traffic?
If you don’t even know what your starting point is, how can you work out what your goals are. You need to measure, so you can begin to understand what your conversions really are.
Most websites have a +3% conversion rate. But great sites have a +10% conversion rate.
And the point is, if you already have that traffic coming to your site and you can focus on increasing your conversions, you can DOUBLE your conversion rate from the same amount of traffic, which means 2X more patient bookings without anymore work – make sense?
So the starting point for you right now is to MEASURE.
Think about what marketing you are doing right now and find a way to measure it.
Don’t forget the most critical internal factor
A massive part of conversions is call performance. You need to make sure your front desk staff are trained to say the right things so that every patient that calls makes a booking.
It’s all very well that you’re getting the website traffic and calls, but if your front desk aren’t answering the phone or they are saying the wrong things and turning those patients away – that’s a conversion opportunity lost.
The money is in your website. But it’s also in your phones!
CLICK HERE to download this Call Performance Guide.
It’s 100% free and you can use it to train your staff to convert more calls into booked patients.
And the thing is, it costs you nothing to implement internal factors. And these can be critical to the conversion process, so please, please don’t overlook their importance.
You can immediately increase your conversion rates by grabbing this Call Performance Guide
However, the biggest thing I want you to take away from this is that your numbers and stats won’t lie.
As soon as you start tracking numbers you will know if your marketing is working or failing. But if you don’t, you’ll still be in the same place next week, next month, or next year.
Don’t leave it to chance. Know your numbers and use them to get better results with your marketing!
