Every healthcare practice has an ideal patient, whether they’ve discovered it or not. This ideal patient profile is the key to unlocking higher revenues, increased productivity, and stellar reviews.

Filtering new patients is by no means a new practice, but it’s worthwhile to get it down to a science. This is especially important for practices that specialize in areas not often covered by insurance, like plastic surgery, dental, and veterinary treatment. But even if your practice primarily offers covered services, attracting your ideal patients can only be a boon for your practice’s profitability.

With a better understanding of how to weed out not-so-ideal patients and attract the right types of patients, you’ll be better positioned to prosper. In this article, we’ll share with you everything you need to know about attracting your ideal patients. By the end of the article, you’ll have several actionable tips you can use today!  

How to Identify Your Ideal Patient Profile

The first step in attracting the best patients for your practice is to identify your ideal patient profile. It’s crucial to get this step right, as it is the foundation for the strategies to come. Follow the steps below to reveal your practice’s unique patient profile:

1. Examine your current patients. Take a sample of your current patients and choose several that you believe are a good fit for your practice. Once you’ve done that, set these names aside. You’ll use them in the next step. A few questions to ask yourself as you review individual patients are:

• Do they return often?
• Do they seem happy during their visits?
• Do they have unpaid accounts with your practice?
• Have they left a positive review for your practice?

2. Get to know promising patients more intimately. Using the data available to you, explore a little deeper. Take note of the patients’ age, financial status, sex, location, how they found your practice, their preferred way to communicate, and any other identifying information that would differentiate them. During visits, you may have been able to decipher the patient’s interests and hobbies - those are important too. These are the building blocks for your ideal patient profile.

• Compile and search for common threads among patients. Compile the information from the previous step into a spreadsheet or report and look for similarities among patients. You may be surprised at what you find. For example, if you’re a plastic surgery practice, you may find that your ideal patients are women between the ages of 40 and 60 who are moderately affluent.
  

How to Attract Your Ideal Patients

Now that you’ve identified who your ideal patients are, it’s time to do the work to attract them. This step will be a bit different for every practice, given that every patient is individual and will react differently to marketing and advertising efforts. But if you use the tips outlined below, you’ll put your practice at a considerable advantage and increase your chances of attracting your ideal patients over and over again.

Pre-Qualify Potential Patients

A big part of attracting your ideal patients is to weed out those who are not your ideal patients. For this reason, it’s always wise to pre-qualify potential patients before booking them in for an appointment.

This may seem like tedious work, and it can be in some cases. If you foresee this being an issue, use DearDoc’s AI Smartchat to streamline the process. With this technology, you can customize FAQs on your practice’s website to engage patients in real time by answering and asking questions. Patients will then be able to book an appointment.

*See how DearDoc's AI Chat can help you attract and convert more ideal patients. Book a free demo.

Offer Services that Your Ideal Patients Want

Consider a plastic surgery practice with an ideal patient that fits the following profile: women who are 35-50 years old and live in suburban areas. The practice should offer services that women in this demographic bracket are looking for.

To find out what services should be offered, review the services that your practice currently offers and determine whether those services align with what your ideal patients are likely to need or want. You may find out that some key services are missing at your practice. Consider adding those services if it’s feasible.

Here are a couple of things you can do to identify missing services:

• Review your ideal patients’ previous visits and identify their primary reason for coming in.
• Dive into internet research on social media to determine the goals of patients in a given demographic group.

Market Your Practice in a New Way

With all of the information you’ve gleaned from the process thus far, it’s time to market your practice to your ideal patient. Here are some marketing techniques to explore to get your ideal patients in the door:

• Update your practice’s website. Ensure that your website is appealing to all visitors but focuses on those things that your ideal patient needs and wants. For dental practices with children ages 5 to 8 as their ideal patients, this may mean adding a section to the site’s home page about how the practice caters to kids. To foster patient engagement, your website must deliver a targeted patient experience.
• Create a blog to drive traffic. If your ideal patient type is the blogger type, consider creating a blog to drive traffic. When done well with search engine optimization in mind, it will draw people to your site from Google and Bing based on specific search queries.
• Bump up your social media efforts. Find out where your ideal patients hang out and build profiles on those platforms. If your ideal patients are generally younger, newer platforms like Twitter or Instagram could be your main social media target channels. If you have a more mature audience, then Facebook is a better place to spend your budget.  And if there’s room in the budget, paying for targeted ads to get eyes on your practice’s website can be extremely helpful in increasing business.
• Spread the word in other ways. Other helpful means of marketing your practice may include email marketing and face-to-face conversations. But few marketing tactics are as effective as word-of-mouth referrals via honest online reviews. DearDoc can help to automate the review-soliciting process via their 5-Star Review Generator. It’ll reach out to patients via text and email to request reviews using AI functionality.

Note: Marketing efforts may need to be fine-tuned over time for them to reach their maximum effectiveness.

Attracting your ideal patients can prove to be a challenge, but DearDoc is here to help. DearDoc is a cloud-based platform with technology designed to help medical practices grow and improve patient care. Book a free consultation call to learn more:

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