Four Real Life Ways To Find New Patients

Many clinicians in private practice feel powerless at the lack of real world advice when it comes to getting out into the community and growing their exposure. Your online presence is definitely important, however for location dependant services such as physiotherapy, your real world activities can be just as effective.

To get started, here are four real life tips you can use to improve your business, both in number of clients and improving profit margins. 1. Give every new client a "Showbag". Create a gift bag that both promotes your clinic and provides real value to your clients. You can include the obvious stuff like your business card and promotional flyers. Then you can insert your monthly newsletter. If you don't have time to write one then you can always pay someone to do it for you. You can develop information sheets that a specific to the services that you offer and then a gadget such as a pedometer. 2. Have a newsletter. In our previous point we mentioned a newsletter. It's an old fashioned concept but not an outdated one. Particularly not a printed version. Even though email marketing is touted to be extremely important by most marketing authorities, your business is a physical one and you have patients who walk through your door and wait usually at least five minutes before their appointment. If they pick up an old magazine or sit on their phone this is a wasted opportunity to both educate and promote your business. Physically print out your newsletter and have your receptionists hand it to them beforehand, simply asking "Have you read our newsletter this month?". This is a great chance to capture the attention of your audience and educate them. 3. Ask your patients to refer your services to their friends and family. You can incentivise your patients in an ethical way, where you're not encouraging anyone to overuse your services when they don't need them. This is also a good way to introduce your clients to other aspects of your business. For example, offer a free massage or group pilates session for every referral they send you. While it may feel like you are losing money in the short term, you only offer this promotion once a new patient has actually walked through the door. To make this process easy you can even create a flyer stating your offer which patients can fill out and hand to you with their friends details already included (with their friend's permission of course!). Check with your registration body to see what kinds of promotions are allowed in your region. 4. Don't dismiss maintenance care as unethical. Because it's not if you genuinely think it's making a difference. And perhaps keeping an eye on people who have long term recurring issues before they have another painful episode isn't actually a bad thing? This can even be a follow up phone call to a discharged patient six weeks down the track to make sure they're going ok. Most patients, if they recognise that you genuinely can help them will really a appreciate such a phone call. Sign up to hear more from us.