Sometimes attracting new patients while trying to retain existing ones looks like a two-front battle. With the competition in the industry fiercer than ever and consumers wanting fast and reliable care driven by digital trends, consolidation of those frontlines depends on a solid strategic approach.
While your current patients are bound by the trust and care you already offer, acquiring new ones demands a set of steps to attract them to your healthcare organization and keep them coming back, which directly impacts your development and overall financial success.
Implementing the strategies to grow your healthcare organization helps you run at your optimal capacity and position yourself as a renowned healthcare provider in a crowded marketplace.
Use a Strategic Approach for the Growth of Your Practice
Your patients already rely on digital services in every area of their lives. Making these innovative solutions part of strategies to grow your healthcare practice puts you ahead of the competitors. Moreover, with them, you can successfully respond to the consumerization of healthcare and contribute to your overall public image.
Here’s the list of common strategy concepts that can pave the way to expanding your practice:
Ask For Reviews
With over 70% of patients checking online feedback before choosing a doctor, it’s clear that review management must be one of the strategies used to grow your healthcare organization.
Patient reviews are shaping your practice’s public image, whether positive or negative. While it’s easy to deal with positive reviews, addressing negative ones shows credibility and provides valuable insights for improving your practice.
Asking for reviews is a usual way to get your patient’s opinions. It may sound simple, but there are certain steps to avoid if you want to collect reviews without giving the impression that it’s the only thing that matters to you.
Ensuring your patients are happy with the care you provide and explaining how their opinions help improve services makes a good tactic to get favorable reviews. Encouraging them to mention a specific treatment they got, like knee surgery or teeth implants, boosts your organic search ratings, making you more noticeable. However, don’t forget to respond in line with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) requirements. Publishing any personally identifiable information can be considered a violation of these rules, so make sure to avoid using it.
Improve Practice And Physician Ratings
While reviews reflect detailed patient experiences, ratings are standardized evaluations of your practice. Based on specific criteria, such as the quality of service or the doctor’s performance, ratings help capture information about patient satisfaction, quality of care, treatment effectiveness, and overall patient experience.
Both practice and physician ratings are of the same value when it comes to strategies to grow your healthcare organization because patients can form their opinions based on the quality of service and how doctors treat them.
An example of a good rating policy involves letting patients rate each doctor separately and allowing them to evaluate individual services and treatments to make your online reputation better—and your practice more visible in each service category. In addition to providing usual treatments, offering advice, maintaining regular communication, and motivating your patients to care about their health are essential steps for building patient-centered care and showing your commitment to their well-being.
Optimize Google Business Profile (GBP) And Apple Business Connect (ABC)
The two crucial platforms for your listing and reputation management are Google Business Profile and Apple Business Connect. You may be wondering – but isn’t it more logical to focus on healthcare-specific listings like Healthgrades? Well, no. While you should make them part of your strategies to grow your healthcare organization, these platforms are nowhere near GBP or ABC when it comes to visibility. The reason is simple: people overwhelmingly use Google Search, Google Maps, and Apple Maps to conduct their (local) research.
Google Business Profile (GBP) is a free business page ideal for improving local SEO and gaining new patients. Setting up GBP is recommended if you want to introduce your practice, increase website traffic, and get reviews. At the same time, it allows you to understand how patients conduct their searches and improve your profile for better performance.
A year ago, Apple introduced Apple Business Connect (ABC). In essence, this new tool does exactly what its slogan says—it puts your business on the map by promoting it to Apple users. If you already keep an optimized GBP as one of the strategies to grow your healthcare organization, you may think that you don’t need to set up your ABC. However, over 140 million Americans use iPhones and many of your future patients may be among them.
Use Targeted Ads To Reach Your Patients
Back in the day, a paid ad in the local newspaper or a commercial that aired before the evening news was considered enough to promote your practice. But, times have changed, and failing to advertise your services online makes you almost invisible to your patients.
However, placing promotional content just like that over the internet is not how digital marketing works. One of the strategies to grow your healthcare organization refers to targeted ads—personalized promotional pieces crafted strategically to appeal to specific target groups based on their characteristics, such as patient demographics, behaviors, and interests. For example, a patient with chronic arthritis will search for therapies that make his joints hurt less. If you are a healthcare provider dealing with such conditions, that patient’s inquiries serve as a hook for your targeted ads, letting you attract those who fit your services the best.
Finally, you can now use predictive analytics to make the most out of your postcard marketing efforts and deliver tailored solutions to the right, high-value patients. Using big data, you can identify and send postcards to only the people who need you care. That’s right, predictive analytics can predict who will need which surgeries and then you can send your postcards to only those houses. Since it’s not a digital campaign, to make sure your efforts are worthwhile, make sure to track your postcard marketing success with call tracking and/or QR code placements.
Keep Your Website Up-To-Date
Many healthcare providers use websites as the primary source of information about their practice and services. More personalized than profiles on social media, they are suitable for promoting unique content and creating a customized knowledge base.
Keeping your website updated sends a message of credibility and aligns with other strategies to grow your healthcare organization. You can attract patients with content that provides value to them, but sharing outdated or irrelevant information can quickly harm your reputation. Imagine the patient looking for already-proven laser treatment of skin conditions, and finding nothing about it on the website that promotes your dermatology practice. That’s not something that makes you reliable.
Even if your website reflects a successful and modern healthcare practice, its purpose is limited if not visible to a wider audience. That’s where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) comes in to save the day. By driving more organic traffic to the website, you make it easy for search engines and potential patients to find you. However, you should know that SEO is a long-term investment, and needs ongoing monitoring, content creation, and maintenance for consistent improvement of your website rankings and visibility, so it’s important to understand which SEO strategies make the most sense for your business.
Provide Remote Help with Telehealth Services
For ages, visiting a doctor was an indispensable routine in providing healthcare. Then the outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020 changed the game and remote interactions became an everyday healthcare routine.
While there are some differences between telehealth, telemedicine, and telecare, these terms describe the same activity—providing remote care with the help of new technologies.
In the scope of strategies to grow your healthcare organization, telehealth presents the future of medical care, making your practice less dependable on the location, when possible or needed. Among the other benefits, the ability to reach people in far-off locations makes this strategy a potential life-saver. In addition to this, online appointments, direct communication, and time-saving messaging ease access to healthcare even for those with busy schedules.
Reduction of unnecessary emergency room visits, hospitalizations, and travel expenses related to in-person appointments by making a call or sending a message helps you lower the costs and treat more patients in the same period of time. Simply put – adopting telemedicine helps both you and your patients save time and money.
Measure Your Return On Investment
Implementing the strategies to grow your healthcare organization can hardly be successful without knowing if your investment is worth it.
Return on investment (ROI) is a valuable metric that helps manage your financial resources wisely, for optimal patient care and your practice’s sustainability. If you’re not blessed with infinite money to spend, then the marketing ROI calculation is necessary for you to know how marketing investments return in terms of improved patient care and increased revenue.
For example, measuring your ROI on marketing gives an insight into how your marketing dollar is spent and shows Patient Acquisition Cost (PAC). With these insights, you can make strategic decisions about your healthcare marketing investments. Otherwise, your marketing funds are just part of a guessing game, hard to track and return.
Combine Different Strategies For Your Practice Growth
Connecting with your patients can be demanding and requires time, energy, and additional resources. Implementing the strategies to grow your healthcare organization may feel beyond your possibilities. Still, it can positively affect the return on investment, resulting in exceptional growth in your practice and reputation.
SocialClimb’s comprehensive and HIPAA-compliant platform can help you apply these different strategies efficiently and effectively. You can save time managing listings and patient reviews, enhance visibility through effective digital and postcard ads, and track patient interactions all in one place. Accessing detailed marketing reports and real-time insights can save you precious time and money. Yes, healthcare marketing can be scary, but with the advantages that HIPAA-compliant, automated healthcare marketing tools bring, you can focus on delivering exceptional healthcare and dedicate more time to your patients knowing your marketing efforts are in place.
