Get More New Patients by Avoiding These 15 Common Medical Practice Marketing Mistakes

Many medical and health care services are not covered by insurance. Leading the list are cosmetic surgery, infertility treatment, acupuncture, weight loss surgery, weight management programs, hearing aides, private nursing, and long-term care. Although, many private pay medical practices and health services generate new patients from strong referral networks, there is a growing opportunity to drive new patients into a practice from effective marketing. If you’ve decided to invest in marketing, or you’re already marketing but you’re not generating consistent results, maybe you’re making one of the 15 common marketing mistakes outlined below;

• Marketing without a plan that includes target audience, tactics, budget, measurement, and goals.
• Not defining your best customers or patient types.
• Not understanding your competition.
• Thinking that you’re too good to market. Prospective patients don’t know that you’re great. You still need to market to them.
• Treating practice marketing as an expense. It’s an investment that should be generating a reliable, consistent, and measurable return.
• Only using traditional marketing sources. More than 90% of all patients use the Internet to find information. It’s critical to incorporate digital marketing into your tactics.
• Having a lousy website. You’ll have 3 to 5 seconds to convince a prospective patient to stay on your website. A bad websites will cost you patients.
• Thinking that getting website traffic is getting results. Results are having the right people find you, engage with you, and convert to leads and patients.
• Not having forms on your website that patients can fill out before they get to your practice.
• Promoting services without relating them to the benefits for the patient. Eight out of ten people are looking online for solutions.
• Taking referrals for granted.
• Overusing social media.
• Spending money on advertising because you like the salesperson, or what they say.
• Forgetting to use calls to action in advertising.
• Not training your staff to handle incoming calls and patients. Even with the best ads, marketing, and website patients will not stay with your practice if your staff doesn’t provide quality service.

 

Research, defined goals, strategies, execution, measurement, and optimization generate consistent returns. If you need help correcting any of these mistakes, or you just want new ideas to improve your new patient marketing, take a look at our article Successful Medical Practice Marketing Case Studies to get some fresh ideas, or schedule a call with one of URWA Consulting’s Managing Partners to discuss your circumstances.