Building a Marketing Strategy
Are there ways to market without disturbing your referral sources? What can you do right now to create an increased flow of qualified patients? Let me give you an example of a single strategy and how to expand upon it. Mastering this one strategy will prepare you not only to increase your practice but the practices of the doctors with whom you work.
- Take photos on every patient, pretreatment and post treatment. In your post treatment photos, take a smiling shot of you and your patient together. Take full face smiling shots as well as shots of designated areas in the mouth.
- Get success stories in writing from every patient who gives indications that he or she is happy with treatment. Have a line on that success story form that asks for permission to publish and a place for the signature.
- Do not limit yourself in the above. Every patient gets a pre treatment photo or photos.
- Put one staff member on charge of this task. That staff member may assign others to help her, but she is the one in charge of this project. Give her a statistic to keep track of. Number of photos, number of success stories and two statistics that she can monitor.
- Create methods of distribution of the above. Here are some suggestions :
- Buy a USB picture frame that allows you to upload your photos. New patient love to see a smiling patient with a smiling doctor. Have that playing continuously in your reception room and financial arrangements room.
- Create a loose-leaf binder of your photos and Success Stories.
- Make a disk of those success stories and photos and send that disk out to every new patient before the new patient visit.
- Separate out your patients’ success stories by referral source and send the referral source’s patient’s success stories to that referral source, preferably as they occur. Repeated messages are always preferable to a single message.
We take one single strategy and maximize the strategy before going to another strategy. It starts with a thought, then a strategy, then an assignment, then another strategy. And it doesn’t cost a lot of money to do it.
We will be talking about marketing strategies in Boston this year. We’ll have two sessions together, one on Sunday and the next on Monday. The goal will be for us to build our practices, rekindle former strategies, and open the door to new strategies. Boston is a great city! Make your plans to be at the AAP in September. Bring your staff.
Want to learn more about how the AAIP can help you?
Email us at AAIPsheldon@gmail.com. AAIP membership and AAIP consulting can make every periodontal practice better.