How To Get More Patients To Your Practice Without Burning Money

Getting patients to come to your practice is a key aspect of running one. After all, medical practices are still businesses and in order to stay afloat, they need to maintain sufficient patient volumes. As a result, medical marketing strategies are super important for any practice, regardless of specialty or general practice of medicine.

Of course, healthcare advertising can be expensive and not all practices have room in their budget to grow their ad spend. In this article, you will learn about how you can get more patients to your practice without breaking the bank.

Tips For Attracting More Patients On a Budget

Understand Your Patient Base

There are several things you need to understand about your patients before you’re able to effectively grow. The first is to understand the areas in which you’re lacking. Patient satisfaction surveys can help you uncover your practice’s weak points.

Another thing you need to understand is the demography of your patient base. Answer the following questions:

• How old are they on average?
• what races and ethnicities are present
• what languages are spoken
• how far does a patient have to travel to reach your office
• How educated are they?
• What’s the average and median income?

Build Relationships With Referring Practices

Most practices get patients through referrals, and these referrals come from building good relationships with primary care providers and other non-specialists.

Some tips on building good relationships with referring practices:

• Make sure referred patients have a wonderful experience. Patients see their primary care provider relatively often and have a relationship with them, and their word will be taken seriously by the physician.
• Create a direct line of contact between your practice and practices that refer patients to you. This makes it easier to share information.
• Let the referring practice know of treatment and other notes promptly after the treatment has been provided.

Make Your Online Presence Strong

A strong online presence is absolutely paramount in the digital age. It’s not as simple as just having a website and some social media accounts. A strong online presence means that patients are able to find you, online communities know about you, and your website is easy to use by anyone no matter what device they use.

Investing in healthcare SEO is one of the best ways to build a strong web presence. Doing so usually involves working with a healthcare SEO company, but it also means creating content for people to read or watch online.

You also want to make sure that your practice is actively participating on social media. By having a staff member regularly interact on social media on behalf of the practice, your practice will be seen by more people in the community.

Grow Your Reach In The Community

In addition to a strong social media presence, you also want to make a concerted effort to be a part of the community that you serve. Many physicians are not native to the community they work in and have not had the opportunity to become well known there.

One important part of growing your reach in the community is to be a part of community-held events. A good way to do this is to sponsor and attend events held by groups such as the chamber of commerce or community service groups.

All in all, growing your practice does not have to be expensive or complicated. By being there for your patients and providing an excellent experience while also making it easy for them to find you, you can see sustained patient growth over time.