Huyen: Wow Xmas and New Year are right around the corner, so exciting right? I love this special time of the year!!
Are you and your team taking advantage of these off days to reflect and tackle a New Year practice marketing plan? In this very special podcast, we’ve compiled our top 3 New Year’s Resolutions that every practice marketer should be pinning to their fridge door for 2020. Have a listen, to refresh your strategy and make this next year your best one yet:
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Podcast Intro
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Steve: Hello and welcome back to another Queen of Cosmetic Marketing podcast show, I’m your host Steven Tait and my co-host from the intro is Huyen Trung. And we’d like to take this opportunity to thank you – our podcast listeners – for your support over the last 2 years of the show and we are looking forward to a great new year in 2020 with a lot more amazing content that we are producing for this channel so it can continue to be the best resource for you to learn how to automate, grow and scale your practice.
Huyen: We are spending these last few days in our office and studio to record this special podcast for you as our small gift to all of the healthcare practices out there who are listening and supporting our podcast channel. For us, we’ve made a commitment to producing consistent content no matter what day or occasion it is, and your support has helped validate that effort.
And it is a New Year soon, which means that for some of you, that means a new batch of resolutions. New Year’s resolutions are a tricky beast to tackle. We often (inspired by the champagne and fireworks) make bold statements and impractical goals – of which we end up falling short within weeks.
Steve: But with a bit of forward thought, I’ve seen firsthand how carefully guided resolutions can make a tangible difference – for you and your business!
There are a few more days left until January – so this is the perfect downtime to reflect on your year in 2019 and enter 2020 with a well-crafted marketing strategy that will take your competition by storm. And by starting your planning now, it will give you an invaluable head start. To help inspire you, we’ve got 3 great New Year’s resolutions that can take your 2020 to the next level.
Huyen: First of all, you need to seriously audit of all your activities within any given day of running your business. It could be checking emails, training new staff, consulting patients, screening new employees, working on your new website, outreaching to referral partners….whatever it is, we want you to go away and do an audit of those activities, really get a bird’s eye perspective of how you are currently spending your time and where your energy is going and once you write that all down, then what I want you to do is circle the items that are responsible for bringing in the revenue. What we will be accomplishing here is an 80/20 analysis of your activities using the Pareto principle. The Pareto principle for those who don’t know, suggests that roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.
Steve: So, in this exercise we want to identify what are the things that are moving the needle and actually bringing in the sales… that majority 80%. What are the 20% of the activities that you are doing that are generating 80% of the results for your business? And then essentially we want you eliminate or delegate anything else.
All that grunt work or errands that you are doing in the business that are not bringing in sales, that’s what you want to hire people and want to delegate right? It means that you as the founder or practice owner, needs to focus on the most highly leveraged activities that you can do, which is to grow the revenue of the practice.
Huyen: We talked about “How to buy back your time so you can scale your practice up” in our podcast number #11, we’ll leave the link to our show note so you can check it out. It ‘s a helpful podcast that outlines easy strategies and ideas for gaining back your time for all allowing you to focus more time on the tasks that matter to your business. Start your 2020 by focusing on those tasks.
The second resolution that we’d like you to do, is to do an audit on your performance against the 4 essential practice marketing pillars (internal, external or community, digital marketing and referral partnership building), what have you done in these areas? And which activities generated good traction? And then work on a plan on how to improve those activities even further next year.
Steve: Let us quickly walk you through what these pillars are…
- Digital Marketing or web-based marketing (Website Content Marketing, Search Marketing, Social Media)
- External or community marketing; This can include public speaking, event sponsoring, local community events (such as visiting and delivering seminars, screening events at nursing homes, local schools, libraries, local private and public hospitals).
If you have more resources you can consider local or niche newspaper articles, niche magazines, local TV or radio interviews, and more. All of this serves to establish yourself as an active presence in your community—again, keeping yourself in the forefront of people’s minds.
- Internal Marketing (nurturing and promoting services to existing patients and their referrals, this could be done both through both online and offline channels)
- Physician referral marketing
Huyen: It’s critical that you’re able to track the performance of each marketing activity you do, so you know what works and what doesn’t.
We are going to talk about the “Top 4 Essential Pillars of Practice Marketing That You Need To Master” in our next podcast number #43, so please look out for that.
After serious contemplating and evaluating these first two resolutions, what we want you to do next is to think about this 1 major thing that can help you to scale your practice… which is automation. Our question to you is “Have you automated your practice?”
Steve: Automation can happen in many different aspects of the practice, it will save you a lot of time and can increase your new patient conversion rates and existing patient retention. There are 3 aspects of automation that you need to master; Lead Generation, Lead Follow Up and Nurturing and Existing Patient Retaining. Let’s take a little closer look at them…
- Lead generation
The critical part of lead generation is a Sales funnel. So what is that?
Simply put, a sales funnel illustrates the ideal journey that your prospects go through on their way to becoming your customer. We elaborated on this topic in quite a lot of detail in our podcast number #26 Sales Funnel and How It Helps Grow Your Practice on Auto Pilot. We’ll leave a link to it in our show notes below so you can check it out.
Huyen: A sales funnel helps you build relationships with prospects and nurture them until they are ready to be your patients. Relationships are the fundamental aspect of all types of businesses (both online or offline, referral or partnership building)
With a good sales funnel, you will spend less time closing a lead because these leads will have been nurtured along through your sales funnel already, and 90% sold on what your sales funnel is providing even before they come and see you.
The important part of a sales funnel is having a Lead magnet, which can be a Foot in The Door Or Front End Offer. Either way, it has to be irresistible in order for prospects to sign up for them. These lead magnets can be special webinars, reports, ebooks, videos that help to address a prospects’ pain points, or low cost new patient offers… etc…
Now…speaking of sales funnels…
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Webinar Course Promo
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Steve: Yes, that course can really help a practice that is looking to automate through webinars really grow and scale quickly. But let’s get back to the podcast…
Now once you have a lead, caught by your Lead Magnet at the top of your Sales Funnel, to nurture them further along your sales funnel we need to automate a series of communications as part of a Lead Follow up and Nurturing Process.
This can be done through many means… like an SMS reminder of a special offer or sending out relevant valuable informational emails that tap into the core questions that prospects may have in their mind about a treatment or procedure.
Then, we can further add them to on-going communications through a newsletter, ideally sent fortnightly even though a lot of practices just want to send out only every quarter or every month. Sending these newsletters can all be automated and planned ahead of time to save your practice time, so it isn’t too difficult to add more regular emailing communication.
And finally, once we manage to get these leads converted into paying patients. We need to nurture these relationships, building a strong bond, and make sure that we have a high existing client retention rate and referral rate.
Huyen: And finally, a very important part of automation that you need to set up for increasing your Existing Patient Retention.
A lot of times practices do pretty well with appointment reminders via calls, emails, sms which can be generated from their patient management software. However, a lot of the practices miss the after appointment follow-up, this is to check-in to see if they have good experience and if they do, we can send out an sms or an email to them to rate their experience and leave reviews on Google and Facebook for the practice. It should be done immediately after the patient checks out at the reception desk and the system should send out these automated message immediately.
Steve: Even better than that, if you can schedule a couple of relevant helpful pieces of content to send the day before and after a surgery or treatment day, that’s even be better. For example, If the patient is scheduled to have breast surgery… a week before the scheduled date, you can send out a couple of emails/sms to check in and send them relevant useful info about the surgery preparation. This could be in the form of a quick video like… “When Can I Go Back to Work After A Breast & Tummy Tuck Surgery?”… or a day after the surgery send an email/sms from the practice about “Breast Surgery Post-Operative Care “How Do You Take Care Of Your Breasts After Surgery?
But you can go further, and email or SMS to check in to see how a patient is feeling on the 4th and 7th day post care, and send relevant useful info if needed. This is to make sure that the patient has a smooth experience prior to and after treatment/surgery, and it will definitely make patients feel special and cared for. And the great thing about it, is that you can set it up to run automatically.
Huyen: Pretty easy stuff, but now it is over to you. It’s your time to take 2020 by storm.
Yes, those resolutions made at midnight as another year ticks over don’t always go to plan. But making attainable goals is a sure way to transform your practice for the better.
In my experience, the first step is always to review your recent efforts: What worked this year, and what didn’t? Perhaps you have new services or a refreshed target market? Assess where you are, how things are going, and where you want to be this time next year.
Then, start thinking about the fine details: where will you focus your resources? What actually needs to be done to make all of your goals possible? Where do I start?
Steve: We have helped countless clients turn their online marketing strategies around, and in my experience, these 3 steps are powerful ways to make a real difference in a practices growth potential. They are tangible steps that don’t cost much, and are easy to implement, with benefits that last well beyond the time it takes to reach them. Set aside last year’s struggle and challenges and power through with an online marketing strategy that actually works in 2020 – believe me, it’ll pay off.
Huyen: Well, unfortunately our special podcast today has come to an end, we’d like to take this opportunity to thank you – our listeners – for following our show for the past year. We’ve received a lot of positive feedback from this healthcare community and that’s motivated us immensely, and we promise to deliver even more awesome content in 2020 as our on-going effort to help you the healthcare practices to automate, grow and scale your practices.
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Show Note:
Podcast #11: How to Buy Back Your Time so You Can Scale Your Practice Up https://onlinemarketingfordoctors.com/podcast/buy-back-time/
Podcast #26: Sales Funnel and How It Help Grow Your Practice on Auto Pilot
Podcast #43: Top 4 Essential Pillars of Practice Marketing That You Need To Master
Automated Webinar Sales Funnel: https://onlinemarketingfordoctors.com/webinar-marketing-system/
20 Ideas for Foot In The Door Offers: https://onlinemarketingfordocto
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