CAPTURE NEW PATIENTS BY CONNECTING ONLINE
Facilities often rely on word of mouth and referrals to attract new patients. A better way is to supplement that approach with a strong online presence that lets current and potential patients easily find a facility or doctor to get information about the practice or specialty areas.
“Relying on a referral business as a primary way of getting new patients or growing the business is a risky strategy because it has all your eggs in one basket,” Davis notes. “The winners and the losers are going to be determined by those that capture incremental patients who have a choice and in those moments of looking, find someone who is going to be there for them. The question is whether you’re going to be there when they look.”
His company is finding that old methods for reaching patients, like static approaches that are not digitally optimized, are no longer serving facilities or their patients.
“You can’t phone this stuff in anymore,” he points out. “The organizations that are investing here are winning big because they’re diversifying their patient acquisition methods. They’re not relying on one stream or one relationship, so it allows them to move to a place that controls more and more growth.”
HELP GET PATIENTS TREATMENT SOONER
Many facilities face the problem of busy schedules and a lack of in-house expertise about websites and digital strategies, which results in the projects not moving forward.
“Oftentimes, having a marketing strategy to actively attract new patients beyond the referral base and growing the brand as an asset is a priority that keeps getting pushed to the bottom of the list because it’s confusing,” Davis says. “When organizations look for solutions, they’re faced with thousands of agencies, all of them saying they can do things, and then it becomes this game of who can you trust. What happens is that this confusion causes delays and the status quo continues. The biggest enemy is an organization not deploying a strategy.”
Facilities should realize that it’s not only millennials who are looking for healthcare providers online. It’s all generations.
“Clinics will say, ‘My population is a little older. They’re not really online.’ That may have been true five years ago, but once baby boomers have grandkids, they’re on Facebook,” Davis explains. “Don’t mistake that the people you want to reach are online.”
