As a healthcare provider, you are working your little bippy off trying to deliver the best possible technical care to your patients, right? And most of your patients or clients are appreciative about this, even though they don’t necessarily tell you that.
But how do you get the word out to the general population around your practice that you deliver wonderful care and service? We’re not talking about fliers and newspaper ads and so on that you send out promoting your own practice. There is an additional method of making your practice known and well thought of, and that is public relations or PR.
What is the Value of Public Relations?
PR is not used just to make you and your practice look good. Here is a brief list of what it CAN do:
- It can help you rise above the competition in your area and make yours the practice of choice.
- If you have a truly good service, PR can make that known far and wide.
- If someone has an undeserved bad opinion of you or your service, good PR can change that opinion.
- If you have a bad image in your community due to a rumour campaign, etc., a good PR campaign can also change that.
- If your marketing isn’t as effective as you think it could be, or if your income is down, you can revert those situations with a good PR campaign.
Build a PR Campaign for your practice
A PR plan starts off with a statement of what you want to achieve with the campaign, then work out the target audience you want to reach, then the specific activities that you want to make known, what avenues you can get the messages out on, etc. Also, very key is putting someone in charge of getting the campaign going and maintained!
There are many actions that can be part of your PR campaign and here are a few ideas to get you started:
- Having a good Facebook page where you can post up good news and good works in the community that your patients and clients are involved in (the patient or client will then share and forward this in many different ways). And of course, your own practice’s activities should be made known there too.
- Get you and your team involved in a charitable community activity.
- Send out press releases of activities you and your staff are involved in to the local newspaper.
- Write and post a press release online, and optimize with keywords relating to your profession.
- Use Google+ and get your patients/clients to submit their testimonials.
- Use the social media avenues, such as Twitter, podcasts, Instagrams, LinkedIn, YouTube, and so on to promote your activities.
- Put Google+ on the front page of your website where visitors can read what your happy patients/clients have to say about your service.
- Take part in local parades, street festivals, and other community activities.
Get going on a campaign for your office and become the most popular practice in the area!
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