Many practice owners feel that everything will be solved, in terms of running a successful practice, if they can just drive in more new business. They have somehow come to the conclusion that more new patients will solve everything that is wrong.
To a certain degree, this is true because the practice exists in order to service people and deliver your professional care to them. And it is a fact that patients or clients come and go due to moving on, passing on, and so on, and therefore there is ALWAYS a need for more new ones.
However, you can waste your marketing time and money very easily if the management of the practice is not also top notch. For instance, here are some of the downspouts where you can lose your marketing dollars:
Potential Marketing Downspouts
- Not enough attention, time or money is being spent to attract the correct number of new patients to keep the practice full.
- Poorly designed promotion such as fliers, websites, Facebook pages, signage, décor, and much more are a huge money waster. No cohesive message, look or branding. Listing out services you can deliver that can resemble a menu but loses the patient or client’s interest (instead of asking engaging questions that make them think). A massive amount of money is spent every year by many practice owners on poor quality marketing.
- Reception staff are not trained on sales skills, and shopper handlings in particular, and so lose 2 – 5 potential new patients every week (statistically).
- Practice is running behind schedule constantly and turning off new patients or clients thus preventing referrals from happy clients.
- The practitioner is not trained on ideal treatment plan presentations and so is unable to get some of the patients or clients to go ahead with the ideal care they deserve to have.
- Too many cancellations and no shows resulting from less than perfect service in one spot or another in the practice.
- The worst offender in terms of marketing downspouts is NOT DOING IT AT ALL. Many practice owners simply rely solely on word of mouth. However, this just keeps the practice smaller than it could be if you ALSO attracted business through hundreds of potential other avenues.
Putting attention on repairing any downspouts and creating more new pipelines to increase the new patients flow will result, if well done, in increased growth of the practice.
Call us for help with your marketing!
416-466-6217 or click here
