Practice owners often shy away from marketing their practices, relying on traditional word of mouth to attract new patients and build their businesses. For others, ‘marketing’ is something of a four-letter word – an inexplicable bag of tricks designed to manipulate consumer decisions. Like it or not, marketing forms part of every business. Even when you aren’t actively marketing your practice, your location, signage, waiting room and patient experience all speak to how your practice is perceived. The good news is that by applying the principles of these 5 marketing concepts, you can boost your practice’s reputation, growth and ultimately, success.

1. Increase your visibility
   Visibility is about making it easier for potential patients to find you and schedule appointments. We mentioned relying on word of mouth to market your practice above, but word of mouth isn’t just an in person recommendation from a friend or family member. Patients readily go online to ask for recommendations of healthcare professionals. In many cases, prospective patients will take the advice of strangers – particularly before or after an online search.
   What to do to boost your visibility: Getting online is a sure way to increase visibility. Signing up with Recomed is a smart move because of all the targeted traffic to their platform – patients actively looking for medical professionals. You can also add your practice to Google My Business, build a professional website built and optimised and/or create a social media page with your practice contact information, services and more.
2. Ensure consistent branding
   You want to establish and strengthen your practice’s brand. There are practical ways to do that such as having a consistent, professional logo across your signage, digital stationery, invoices and more. The other way to strengthen your practice’s brand is creating a patient experience that makes them feel valued, heard and like they want to come back. This more intangible form of branding can increase patient loyalty and trust.
   What to do to strengthen your brand: Ensure that all signage is clearly visible and professionally done. If you have a logo, ensure that it appears on stationery and signage appropriately. If your practice is based in a mall or shared building, find out from the property managers what other ways you can create visibility. Perhaps there’s additional signage space or digital directories that you can make use of. Importantly, ensure that your staff make patients feel welcome and free to ask questions.
3. Encourage positive feedback
   Reviews on Google or Recomed (or both) are an important factor in a patient’s decision to book an appointment. In fact, research shows that reviews influence up to 97% of consumers purchasing decisions. And it’s not just reviews, 80% of people will choose a service provider or product that has a rating of 4.5 or higher. Essentially, good reviews boost a patient’s perception of the quality of care you provide and help to bring in new patients conscious effort to get reviews.
   What to do to encourage reviews: Make a conscious effort to encourage patient reviews. Add a prompt and link to your email signatures, leave visible messages at reception, and other communications with patients. A great way to encourage reviews is to use bulk SMS including a link that takes patients directly to your Google My Business or Recomed page.
4. Develop your competitive advantage
   Embracing the right technology can go a long way in giving your practice a competitive advantage over other practices in the area. Less admin & more communication equals happier patients. Implementing a practice management solution that is designed to boost efficiency, reduce duplicate data capture, and free up your staff’s time to focus on the patient is a strategic way to increase patient satisfaction and stand out from your competitors.
   What to do: Implement an end-to-end practice management solution. Healthbridge’s MyMPS integrates seamlessly with Healthbridge Clinical. This enables the safe exchange of the relevant information between clinical notes and billing instructions and processes.
5. Measure revenue growth
   Your marketing efforts should help increase revenue by driving more patients to your practice, improving patient retention, and even, increasing the number of procedures or services offered. Use a digital system that allows you to generate easy-to-use reporting to monitor and measure your financial growth. Reporting can also help you identify gaps in your patient collections process that you can automate to grow your revenue.
   What to do to measure revenue growth: Digital technology can support the growth of your revenue if your technology partner can help you find gaps in your collections processes and apply automation to reduce errors and get paid faster. Ensure that your solution can generate reports that you can use to action changes at the click of a button.

Healthbridge has been developing healthcare solutions and technology for the past 20 years. Their commitment to true user-friendly technology designed in collaboration with clinicians has made them the technology partner of choice for over 5 000 medical practices. For more information about how you can boost your marketing with integrated practice management systems, contact sales@healthbridge.co.za.