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Most doctors are trained to provide quality patient care. On the other hand, running a practice is a whole different arena. It becomes necessary to step back to look at your practice from a business perspective. Like any business, growth is critical for long-term success.
Understandably, taking the steps to grow your practice in 2023 can be overwhelming. Business and marketing trends are always shifting. Furthermore, every practice is different, so there is no one-size-fits-all strategy to grow.
In this guide, we’ll lay out all the basics you need to learn how to grow, thrive, and survive as a medical practice in 2023.
The First Step to Growing Your Medical Practice
Before you embark on any strategy to grow your medical practice, you need to see where your practice is at now.
Assessing the current health of your practice is important for creating a unique plan. Figure out what your practice is struggling with the most. Notice what has been effective.
Some questions to ask yourself:
- Where do you see the most time wasted?
- What is the state of your staff?
- Is your software (EHR, EMR, etc) working for or against you?
- What are your patients saying about you?
Knowing the strengths and shortcomings of your practice gives you opportunities for where you can grow. You are able to work on the weaknesses while ensuring that you maintain and nurture the strong points.
Learn Who Your Patients Are
Knowing your patients translates into high standard medical care. While that is important, it also allows you to establish a better way of attracting new patients and retaining previous patients.
Why is identifying your target patient or audience important? As a medical practice in today’s age, the market is full of competitors. However, each practice brings something unique to the table, which someone out there may be looking for.
Knowing who your practice is best aimed at can help you reach the people who are most likely to become patients.
How do you establish your target patient? Here are some ways to get started.
- Ask yourself: What kind of patient you want to treat? What conditions are you most interested in or qualified in treating?
- Analyze what types of patients you have had in the past
- Set specific, detailed demographics for each target patient segment
- Based on that information, figure out your target patient’s main values and concerns
The conclusions you come up with from profiling your target patients help you customize your marketing.
Research the Competition in Healthcare Marketing
Find out what other independent providers are doing. Research other medical practices in the same field as you, and even in the same locale, to figure out who you are up against. You will learn what works for them, and what you should avoid doing.
The research you uncover will reveal what distinguishes you from your competitors. That will be your selling point.
How to Grow your Medical Practice in 2023: A Practical Guide
Because there are so many avenues to consider, it’s hard to sift through all the medical practice advice. To keep you focused, remember these 3 major principles that support success for your practice in 2020:
- Adaptability
- Patient-driven
- Digital Presence
The following tactics for growing your medical practice will fall into one or more of these three camps. Without further ado, let’s see the options you have at your disposal.
1. Become a Patient-centered Practice
Growing your medical practice means gaining more patients. The purpose of getting to know your patients is to target your efforts towards them. It sounds self-explanatory, but the shift to patient-centered care is relatively recent.
Before, the focus was on treating the condition, without taking a person’s contextual situation and individuality into consideration. Now, by implementing patient-centered care, you engage your patients, get to know them and work with them.
This, of course, starts before any patient even walks through your door. To increase your patients, you must focus on who is most likely to match up with your practice.
For example, if you know that your services attract younger people, capitalize on their increased internet use. According to a study, younger generations tend to use the internet for health information, while older generations don’t. You can use this insight to make your website user-friendly.
Knowing who your patients help you tailor your message to them. You know how to reach your specific audience.
2. Optimize Your Website
What does it mean to optimize your practice website? To stand out in the midst of many competitors, you want a website that makes it easier for patients to be aware of your practice.
Features of a well-designed website that helps in growing your practice:
- Easy to use: Your practice information and services are laid out in an organized manner, allowing visitors to navigate your website smoothly.
- Mobile-friendly: A responsive website design is your ticket to generating more patients. According to the Pew Research Center, about 52% of smartphone users look up health-related information on their devices.
- Educational: Your website is not only to market your medical practice services, but it is also to inform and engage visitors. By being transparent about all things related to your practice, you build trust with potential patients.
- Self Service: Your website has adequate features that can help patients get through making an appointment, sending information to you, making payments, etc. – all without picking up the phone and calling someone.
3. Boost Search Engine Optimization
The other side of an optimized practice website is search engine optimization (SEO). Growing your medical practice depends much on garnering attention online. After all, 77% of online users seek health information on a search engine. So capitalizing on SEO can direct more traffic to your well-designed medical website.
How do you improve your SEO? A lot of factors go into how well your website ranks on search engines. Because you are a medical provider, you must keep in mind two main factors: Authority and Relevance.
Many search engines, like Google or Bing, rank websites based on these two factors. An authoritative website is one that is most reliable, making it more likely to convert visitors. If your website is deemed informative and exhaustive in its knowledge, many people will share or other websites will link back to you. Thus, web crawlers deem your website as helpful and boost your ranking.
Relevancy is the other key component for both you and people trying to find the services you provide. Think about what your target patients may be typing into search engines. Those will be the keywords to base your content upon – content that is relevant and addresses patient concerns.
Here are some basic tips to improve the authority and relevance of your website:
- Keywords: Make sure all your website pages are tagged correctly for search engines to know what they are about. Focused Keywords, titles, meta tags and snippets should be accurate and up-to-date.
- Loading speed: Your site should be optimized for page speed, meaning none of the pages should take too long to load. Otherwise, you risk visitors bouncing off.
- Content management: It is essential to not only add new content but to audit existing content and make sure you clean it up/ refresh it (re-write content) so your traffic relevance can continue over time.
- Quality content: According to a study by AHREFS, an average #1 ranking page will also rank well for about 1,000 other relevant keywords. That means you should cover one topic in great detail (i.e., include all the subtopics under that one umbrella topic), and rank for tons of long-tail terms in that content.
- Links: Boost pages with internal links as well as outbound links. This helps improve your site’s page rank as well as is a leading indicator to sea