TRANSFORM YOUR PRIVATE PRACTICE IN 8 WEEKS

Paying for advertising is expensive and short-lived.  You are much better off building your practice by working on the experience that you give to your patients.  Do not put it in the hands of marketers or sales professionals – you are the best person to promote your practice.

Do not go looking for new patients while there are patients on your database who already know about you, that you could talk to and engage with.

Notice I said that you are the best person to promote your practice.  The thing that you are promoting should not necessarily be you.  You should be promoting the experience and the transformation that your patients are likely to achieve.

When you can build tangible processes in to your practice that set you apart from your competitors, you can start to deliver helpful information to patients at all stages of their enquiry.  This leads to an automated systems that delivers an excellent service regardless of how good your secretary is and will work while you are in clinic, on holiday or off sick.

You can help people in more ways than doing procedures or seeing them in clinic.  No matter what speciality you are in, when you think about why patients are coming to see you, it is about a perceived concern or a functional problem.  Doing procedures or seeing patients in clinic is part of the way to helping patients with their problems, but there are other ways that we can help them by providing information and advice which can be done by engaging with patients before they are ready to see you in clinic.

The private sector is different to the NHS.  The NHS is all about the most efficient way of treating large numbers of patients and ensuring significant pathology is prioritised.  We do not need to run our private practice in the same way that we run our NHS practice.  We can acknowledge that healthcare is not all about excluding significant pathology – it is often about giving peace of mind, caring and supporting.  That is why we need to provide information and guidance for patients and not shy away from keeping in touch with patients and offering follow up support, whether or not they have significant pathology.  This does not necessarily need to be done in person and can be achieved with automated processes that deliver audio, video and written information.

Your website has only one job and that is to encourage people in to your store.  It is only the storefront, it is not the whole store. You want to encourage people in to the store to browse whether or not they want to buy anything, so don’t rely on a ‘book now’ or ‘contact us’ button, because this is leading people straight to the till.

The average length of time people spend on your website is measured in seconds, so do not spend too much time and energy on building a comprehensive website with reams of information.  The only important metric to measure the success of your website is how many leads it generates.  Your website should have a ‘lead magnet’ which is a useful document or guide which patients can exchange for their contact details that you can then follow up with to explain the benefits and ethos of your practice.

It is not that your clinical results are not important, of course they are, but they are not important when it comes to building your private practice.  We will assume that you are doing your best to achieve excellent clinical outcomes for all of your patients.  When building a successful private practice, you need to stand out for something other than the clinical results that you get for your patients (although these have to be good).

Clinical results are often subjective and cannot easily be scaled or sold.  If you want a practice that runs more like a business with tangible reasons for a patient to come and see you, there should be things that you can talk about and demonstrate to patients  to show what makes you different.  Your clinical results are only experienced after they have had treatment and are often influenced by many factors.