Marketing to build up patient base

[gsiii]

I'd like to get some thoughts or suggestions on how some of the PA owners in this forum marketed their practice in the beginning to help build their patient base. I'm particularly interested in owners that essentially had to build from scratch (ie Did not have a patient load follow from a previous practice). Thank you in advance.

[jmj11]

I don't fit the profile that you are interested in because I came out here and worked hard for 8 years before going out on my own. However, I have had some experience in marketing and have found out what tends to work and not work.

 

Of course it matters what type of practice, a referral based or patient self-referral.  Because I'm a referral base practice, our best energy has been spend on developing close relationships with referring practices.  Another big draw is our web page. It could be better but it is pretty good and almost 50% of our referrals comes from it. I hope to enhance it better when I have the time and money. Another big one is that I send notes to the referring providers within minutes of seeing the patient and our cover sheet has one brief marketing statement (which will change from time to time). For example, it now says in bold letters that our practice is the only one in our district that is board certified in headache medicine.

 

I have found public media to be very unpredictable.  For example, we invested $3,000 in a Seattle newspaper ad that went out to 900,000 subscribers. In return ?  Our web page hits actually went down (I was expecting at least hackers to come calling) and we didn't get a single call from a perspective patient. Then we ran an ad (strategic based on another headache practice closing) in Everett (northern suburb of Seattle) and our phones ran off the hook for two weeks with about 40 new patients from that ad alone.

 

I hope this helps.  Then of course word of mouth is really important but that can take months if not years to create.

[ventana]

started a brand new practice (house calls for geriatrics)

 

no one doing it locally

 

figured out early on the local VNA is the key

 

marketed to them with lunches and such

 

worked well

 

 

 

 

How to apply this to your practice

you need to figure out who is your referral source, and think hard about this....  I avoided direct to public marketing as I was afraid of being overwhelmed, would rather let it develop slowly

 

 

If you are in an area saturated with your type of practice, honestly give up and move on to some where that needs you and there is no competition

 

 

Find a group on the internet that is the type of practice you want to start, then ask them