FEATURE ›› MARKETING GROWS PRACTICES

Marketing GROWS PRACTICES

These practical strategies will encourage a steady flow of patients through your doors.

BY THOMAS W. STONE, MD

As a new retina specialist, you’re already a mature and experienced clinician. You know how to handle the clinical challenges you’ll face every day. But some of your challenges have little to do with the retina and a good deal to do with business. Marketing is a perfect example. It’s a challenging but necessary task that practitioners must address early and often, yet schools and residencies do little to prepare us for it.

In the past, marketing wasn’t common practice for retina specialists. In fact, I only began involving myself in marketing about 5 or 6 years ago. That said, today – more than ever before – we must ensure that our practices remain busy, and to that end, we must make patients and referring physicians understand our value and accessibility.

Whether you’ve joined a practice and you want to bring in new patients or you’re starting a brand new practice, you should start marketing yourself right away. You’ll have more work to do up front, but the ongoing process of marketing yourself and your practice will be made easier as you continue throughout your career.

MARKETING 101

Didn’t take Marketing 101? Neither did I. But alongside colleagues in my practice, I’ve become successful at it, and I’m happy to share my experience.

In general, you can think of two kinds of marketing – marketing to referring physicians and marketing to potential patients – and know that for each of those categories, there are strategies you pay for and those you can do for free.

But before you spend a penny on marketing, there are a few things you should do:

›› Think big picture. Understand that there is no quick fix. Marketing yourself is a continuous process that involves more than recording a radio ad. You might use any number of advertising methods, but far more powerful tools are the way you interact with referring doctors and patients every day and how you train your staff to interact with them. The patient loyalty and referrals you get from those interactions will form the majority of your patient base.

›› Determine your goals. Take time to think about your marketing goal or goals. If you’re opening a new practice, you need referring doctors. If you’ve joined an existing practice, you might build up a weak area in the practice such as getting referrals from independent optometrists or endocrinologists. The goals will drive all the steps you take.

›› Know your audience. Who is your marketing audience? If you’re marketing to eye care professionals, do you want to talk to optometrists, ophthalmologists, general practitioners, or all of these people? If you’re marketing to the public, are you talking to patients or perhaps their adult children? Again, these answers will shape your plans.

›› Be prepared online. If you hand your business card to a potential referring doctor or new patient, that person is likely to check out your website and Facebook page. That’s why your online presence needs to be the marketing effort that comes first. At a minimum, they should be current and fresh and deliver the marketing message you want people to receive. Usually, that message is something along the lines of, “I am a highly talented and trustworthy physician, and you will feel very comfortable and welcome in my practice.”

FREE REFERRAL-BUILDING

To get doctors to send their patients to you, you need to promote who you are, what you do, how you do it, and how you can make life easier for referring doctors.

The first step in making connections is to develop a database of your referral network based on geography. Include the name and address of every potential connection within a given radius of your practice. You can get this information from your local medical society if needed. Society and other professional group meetings, such as citywide physician dinners, or hospital-sponsored social events, present great opportunities to meet other physicians and develop potential referrals.

Once you have a list together, plan to introduce yourself to as many doctors as possible. Make an appointment or schedule a time to meet for coffee or lunch. Ask them about what patients they like to see and tell them about the cases you like to see. Then discuss how you can work as a team.

If you’re just opening an office, you might spend 10 to 20 hours a week on this kind of networking – 80% visiting practices and 20% working on your database. Once you have an established network, marketing might take as little as 4 hours a week.

Now that my practice has an established referral network, we have a staff member who visits every doctor in our database on a regular basis. She says hello, drops off printed information about us and finds out if any information about their practice has changed. That staff member builds relationships with the front desk staff and practice administrators at every practice she visits, so communication between our offices continues. Our representative visits most practices every 2 to 3 months and goes once a month to the practices with high referral rates. I visit doctors initially when entering a new area, and then network to identify new referral sources through informational dinners or social gatherings after that.

INVESTING IN REFERRALS

Once you and potential referring doctors are aware of each other, make it easy for them to send you patients. Here’s how:

›› Build a team. You have to make everyone in your clinical network feel like they’re part of a team. Let them know you’re available anytime they have retina conditions to refer, such as endophthalmitis or trauma. Tell them you’ll refer your non-retina patients to them.

›› Make yourself available. Remove the barriers to access. In other words, make it easy for other practices to call and refer patients to see you. Your staff is key in this relationship. If a referring doctor calls the office and asks if you can see a patient, your staff needs to say, “Sure, we’ll see him. Let’s set it up.”

›› Communicate back to the referring doctor. Right after the patient’s visit, tell the doctor exactly what you did and why. Not only does the doctor want to know everything that’s going on with his patient, but he also wants to be ready to speak knowledgeably when the patient returns to his office.

›› Do the work for them. When doctors refer patients to retina specialists, they’re usually delivering a diagnosis that may scare patients. Our referring doctors provide patients with printed brochures about our practice. The brochures include pictures of our doctors, details about our educational backgrounds, a history of the practice and maps to all of our offices, as well as a description of what will happen during the first visit. We also include new patient forms they can fill out in advance and bring into our office. Soon, our practice will have its own app, providing another medium in which we can educate and interact with our patients.

Providing information about your retina practice makes them more comfortable because they see where they’re going and what they need to know for the visit (for example, the distance to the practice and if they’ll need to arrange for a ride). The brochures also transfer the responsibility of educating and comforting patients from the referring doctor to the retina specialist.

FREE MARKETING TO PATIENTS

You can market your practice to patients through both free and paid avenues. I use a combination of the two, but if you’re starting a new practice, it’s reasonable to start with free opportunities first.

›› Participate in radio or television interviews. Broadcasts that have health segments are always looking for doctors. You can contact the producer and offer to discuss AMD. It’s free to you, it only requires a small amount of your time, and the interview has tremendous reach. After I participate in an interview, we post the videos on our website and Facebook.

›› Remind patients, “Tell your family and friends.” Just reminding happy patients to tell others about you can be very effective in helping you build your practice. In fact, this is how I get about 10% to 20% of my new patients.

›› Use Facebook and your website. Some retina patients are online and some are not, but all of their children and grandchildren can and will visit your website and Facebook page. These sites should show them why you’re a current, competent, excellent choice for their loved one.

›› Speak to groups. My colleagues and I give a general talk about eye health, cataracts and retina conditions at retirement homes and healthy living communities. The talk only takes 15 minutes, but these folks love to ask questions. They’re usually well educated about their eye problems and they’re happy to get answers to their questions. These engagements have several positive outcomes. First, they get our name out to a new group of potential patients. Second, it helps us build our referral relationships. Some patients ask about their cataracts or glaucoma and tell us they’re not happy with their current doctor. It’s a good chance to refer those people to doctors in our referral community.

CONSULTANTS AND PAID ADVERTISING

Paid marketing to patients typically involves a formal campaign. Depending on what works in your market, that might involve using television or radio commercials, billboard or newspaper advertisements or direct mail. Email and social media efforts can be effective as well if your target audience uses them. Practices pay marketing consultants to handle most of this work.

QUICK TIP

You can market your practice to patients through both free and paid avenues. I use a combination of the two, but if you’re starting a new practice, it’s reasonable to start with free opportunities first.

If you hire a consultant, keep these criteria in mind:

›› Local experience. The right marketing strategies vary from market to market, so be sure to choose a company that knows what works in your market. You don’t want to spend $10,000 on a newspaper ad, only to learn newspapers aren’t effective advertising for medical specialists in your area. Our marketing company recommended we run ads in a local healthcare magazine that reaches readers age 50 and older. The approach has worked well for us in our location, but it might not work in yours. Local knowledge matters.

›› Financial analysis. What’s a typical annual marketing budget for a practice like yours? What’s the most effective way to spend it? Marketing is expensive, but it pays off if done right. When you talk numbers with a marketing company, they should be able to give you a ballpark estimate of what your return will be before you spend thousands of dollars. For example, in a medium-sized city, you can spend $50,000 on a 6-month marketing campaign, in addition to about $7,000 over that time period for a marketing consultant working a few hours a week. That’s $57,000 over 6 months. Does the marketing company predict you will exceed that number in revenue from new patients?

›› Results in real numbers. The company should provide metrics to help you measure whether the marketing is effective. For example, if you run an ad on a radio show, maybe seven people will call, four people will come in, and two will undergo surgery. Those are profits you can compare against the cost of the ad and the consultant.

JUST THE BEGINNING

Even if marketing is completely new to you, some of these avenues should feel comfortable. Be confident. As long as you don’t rush into an expensive, unresearched campaign, it should be a positive experience. Some strategies will work better than others, but you can adjust as you learn to ensure you’re headed down a productive path for your practice. NRP