Health practitioners who operate their medical practices handle the duties of a doctor and shoulder the responsibilities of a CEO, entrepreneur, and sometimes even a marketing manager at the same time. According to a recent survey conducted by DearDoc, 59% of practices identified growth as their primary goal. Whether you wish to grow your practice or just keep your patient load consistent, attracting new patients is an important component of your operation.

If you want to expand and diversify your medical practice in 2022 and beyond but aren't sure where to begin, here are a few ideas to consider for growth and better practice management.

How to Grow a Medical Practice: Tips and Strategies

1. Know Your Market

Understanding your market is essential for brand success. It is what inspires successful marketing initiatives, builds value premiums, and eventually improves the profitability of your business. Before reaching out to new patients, you must first understand your present patients. Start by looking at your practice records and identifying your current patients' age range, gender, occupation, and geographic region to see where you can make improvements. This information will help determine the most effective marketing strategies for promoting your practice and attracting new patients.

Once you've identified your primary audience, you'll be able to employ the methods and content that will be most appealing to them. This prevents you from wasting marketing dollars on platforms that your target patients do not utilize or interact with strongly. The information gained from this will also enable your practice to enhance its service offerings and sales strategy better to fulfill the needs of its target audience better.

2. Hire the Right Team

Operating a successful practice takes a significant amount of effort and time. You can be certain that you will be able to push your practice to another level with the right team.

Therefore, knowing who to recruit is one of the most important decisions you will have to make as a firm owner. When it comes to patient satisfaction, knowledgeable, courteous, and empathetic employees make a world of difference. As a result, your employees should possess great interpersonal abilities. Consider carefully what type of people you may need to recruit, and make sure that any new hiring aligns with the growth objectives you've established.

3. Engage Your Employees

Hiring the right team is step one, but now you need to engage them. Just like you keep your patients happy, keeping happy employees is just as important. When your staff is excited to come to work and satisfied with their work environment, they’re more likely to stay with you longer and talk about you on social media.

Not only will potential new patients see this ‘social proof’ eagerly pop in for a checkup, but you’ll also attract high-quality new team members too. In fact, happy employees have a more productive workflow, bring in more sales, and contribute to the overall fulfillment of your customers.

4. Build an Online Presence

With today's technological advancements, having a website for your healthcare practice is an extremely effective commercial tool. It's the place where you can create a good first impression, turn visitors into new patients, and broaden the reach of your practice's online presence. Your internet marketing initiatives, like the actual locations of your healthcare business, must have a solid foundation from which to expand.

DearDoc's cloud-based solution is designed to help medical practices build a stronger online presence. With a suite of tools like the AI Chat, website builder, and review generator, we help you attract and interact with more patients online. Book a demo to learn more.

5. Get more Online Reviews

Learning how to acquire new online reviews is crucial to growing any practice's patient acquisition strategy, owing to Google's prominence as a platform. Almost all consumers (88%) say they trust internet reviews as much as personal recommendations from friends. It is common for patients to be significantly affected by the views of others and to focus their selections down to whatever practices have the most positive reviews.

While you have little control over what patients publish online, as part of your 2022 medical marketing plan, you may be proactive with your patient feedback. This involves soliciting feedback from happy patients through the use of internet reviews and managing your profile on review sites. Ensure to respond to both positive and negative reviews about your practice because this kind of feedback is beneficial. Think of it this way: If your medical practice has a 4.5-star rating and a variety of excellent reviews, and another rival firm has a few average reviews, who do you think the patient would choose?

6. Follow up with existing patients

Follow-up is the act of contacting a patient or caregiver at a later, predetermined date to inquire about the patient's development after their previous visit to check in with them regularly. Following up with prospective patients should be a top focus in your marketing approach. Follow-up enables further investigations to be examined and acted upon, stimulates specialized assessment of patients, and ensures that patients with chronic diseases get the necessary secondary care input.

Furthermore, follow-up aids in the development of a positive working connection between you and your patients. Use these effective follow-up approaches for tracking your patients' progress:

• Work with your team to determine which patients may benefit from follow-up.
• Determine a suitable follow-up schedule.
• Organize methods for recording a follow-up, such as an electronic health record (EHR) or an email marketing tool, to improve patient safety.
• Decide which personnel will be in charge of updating the tracking systems.

7. Connect with the community

Events such as educational seminars, screening or immunization clinics, and other pop-up events may help you educate your local community, build your reputation as a local expert, highlight important services, and expose your practice to prospective new clients and patients. Patients and other health professionals benefit from group health visits, in which a physician sees a group of patients who all have the same health issue. Not only does this increase the number of patients who can be treated, but it also helps healthcare workers avoid clinical fatigue.

In addition, group visits enable clinicians to spend longer with patients than one-on-one meetings. Consider establishing a social media challenge in honor of a popular event that already takes place in your region, to encourage your patients to attend.

8. Improve Your Patient Experience

A huge part of your patient care comes with creating a delightful patient experience for your current and potential patients. To healthcare providers, your patients now have the choice of comparing practices before choosing new services and you'll want to stand out from your competition.

Eliminate wait times by adopting an AI Chat tool to allow online booking and send reminder texts or emails before your appointment to give your patients a modern experience. According to Hubspot, 56.6% of doctors are getting a competitive edge through DearDoc AI chat. By staying competitive and keeping your patients happy you’ll see new referrals flow in. Be upfront and honest about procedures, how much your services cost, and the different outcomes the patient can expect when going through you.

9. Leverage SEO and Content Marketing

Growing your practice's organic traffic is a long-term but effective healthcare marketing method to bring more potential patients to your site. Pay attention to your site's technical SEO and create a blog section to create high-quality content that targets your patient's pain points. This will not only grow your patient base but also build trust with patients by establishing your practice as a thought leader.

10. Focus on Your USP

Do you have a really comfy lounge area for patients to wait in? Highlight that. Maybe you’re the only chiropractor in your area giving out free consultations, so share that with new referrals, on your website, and on social media.

Although it can be easy to compare yourself to what other specialists are doing, make sure to package whatever it is that keeps long-time patients coming back, and share more of that with the world.

11. Incorporate User Based Content into your Strategy

Imagine scouring Amazon for a new suitcase for your upcoming vacation. The first you’ve saved has 5 stars and 432 reviews. The second has 3 stars and no reviews. Which one would you pick? Surely you’d go with the first one.

But, why?

Ultimately, when people are in an unfamiliar territory they look to others who have experienced the situation or product for guidance. In this way, they can prime their environment to obtain a similar or the same outcome.

Today social proof can be shown through Yelp reviews, social media testimonials, or even case studies. One of the most powerful types is user-based content. User-based or user-generated content is content that is made directly by your customers and posted via social media or other digital platforms. In a world where fake news, fake reviews, and fake results reign, there’s nothing more transparent and authentic than a video or testimonial directly posted by one of your patients.

13. Be responsive

More and more patients are expecting more digitalized communication with doctors and they no longer want to wait over your busy phone line. If patients cannot find the answer or reach you quickly, they'll go straight to your competitors.

Now, this could be overwhelming— especially if you’re a larger medical practice. To strengthen patient relationships and respond quickly, many medical practices use DearDoc's AI Chat to interact with patients on their website. The chat allows patients to access FAQs, and important information, and book appointment. Book a free consultation to see how DearDoc's HIPAA-compliant AI Chat works.

14. Activate your Brand

Whether you’re a seasoned practice or you’re starting to get your name out there— your brand is more than a logo and a mission statement on your website. It’s the emotional connection your patients have to your business.

By leveraging your story and integrating a human touch into every step of the patient journey, you can create brand evangelists who are stoked to share your offerings, values, and business with everyone they come in contact with.

Bottom line

As we look forward to what the year 2022 will bring in terms of healthcare, we must keep in mind the reality of the last few years. With the emergence of COVID-19, flexibility and innovative solutions remain the best approach to deal with the pandemic's effect while also preparing for a digitally-driven future.

Acquiring new patients isn't the only way to expand your practice. Therefore, a patient retention strategy is an essential component of your practice's growth strategy. DearDoc can assist you in developing efficient tactics and building your internet presence from the beginning:

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