Premium Practice Promotion

Marketing Your Practice: Take an Internal Self Check

• Are you encouraging optometric and general practitioner referrals?
• How would you describe your patient’s experience…five-star hotel, sterile hospital, or budget chain?
• Do you educate patients on your services every chance you get?
• Are you spotlighting your advanced procedures and offering seasonal advice to callers with “message on hold”?
• Do you utilize in-house patient education with visual marketing aids, for example brochures, posters, and iPad animations?
  
• Do you recognize who is important with grass roots activities, such as patient appreciation events?
• Do you send thank you notes to patients to bolster relationships and encourage referrals?
• Do you send press releases to the local media, making the journalist’s life easier and letting the community know of your expertise?
• Are you creating corporate partnerships offering employee discounts and vision checks at health fairs?

I was introduced to the ophthalmic world over 10 years ago as a thrilled LASIK patient who referred family and friends to the clinic where my “miracle” occurred. I was highly myopic and rather fearful of the procedure, but decided to try LASIK to improve my poor vision and eliminate the inconvenience of glasses and contacts. To say I was amazed with my outcomes is an understatement. I could not contain my exuberance and shared my LASIK story with just about anyone who would listen. After referring LASIK to multiple friends and family members, I was offered a job at the practice where I was a patient; since then, I have worked to promote and proselytize the technique in both in high-volume cataract and refractive surgery clinics, and for femtosecond laser manufacturers. I love sharing my “wow” experience and helping surgeons optimize their business.

They don’t teach business at med school

Strategic business planning is a task that many physicians are unprepared for. I have observed this time after time in the years I have spent working in ophthalmology, helping cataract and refractive surgery practices promote their services. Ophthalmologists have spent a huge proportion of their life in academia: attending medical school, devoting years of postgraduate training to become a qualified ophthalmologist, then working in eye hospitals as a resident physician. Business training isn’t a big part of their lives throughout any of it, and they think like caregivers, not business people. When some eventually set up their own private practices, dealing with the realities of day-to-day business in a competitive landscape – on top of all of their other duties – can be both daunting and stressful. As the UK-based ophthalmologist Sheraz Daya puts it, “Establishing a practice is a considerable investment. Doctors are seldom educated on practice development and what it takes to have the ‘edge’.”

What follows is a distillation of what I do to make a practice work as profitably and effectively as possible.

Market your practice as effectively as possible

You are operating in a market where patients have plenty of choice over who performs their LASIK or cataract surgery. The first place to start when you begin marketing your practice is at home. Ask yourself a few key questions.

Getting the basics right counts. For example, are you doing everything you can to get the optometrist and general practitioner referrals? This should represent a steady flow of patients into your practice, but these may be patients you don’t see if you don’t make the time and effort to maintain good relationships with your fellow physicians and eyecare professionals.

The next fundamental is how you and your practice present yourselves. Even things like basic telephone etiquette counts: every telephone call left unanswered could represent a lost customer… but promptly answered calls represent potentially your first opportunity to sell your practice and premium procedures. Use your telephone hold music and marketing to educate patients about the advanced procedures that you can offer – and any special opportunities that may be in place.

The moment a patient enters your practice represents another key stage in their decision to choose you over your competitors. Ask yourself what kind of experience does a patient – or prospective patient – have when they first walk through the door? Clean and modern practice receptions, patient lounges and procedure rooms are an absolute requirement if you want to convey an air of professionalism that reassures patients that your practice is the one to choose and worth paying a premium for. There’s a great advantage to the patient being physically in your practice: it provides an opportunity to meet and greet the patient, build rapport, and instill confidence that your practice is the one for them.  Also, this is an opportune time to present premium procedures through in-house educational materials and visual marketing aids, like brochures, posters, or iPad animations that illustrate the benefits of top-of-the-range procedure or the best IOLs. Frankly, you need to educate patients on the benefits of your services every chance you get. Patient education isn’t merely a euphemism for “selling” – it’s a crucial part of the surgical process, improving the patient’s experience during consultation, the procedure, and managing their expectations afterwards; it pays to remember that word of mouth is the ultimate way to grow your practice.

When a prospective patient leaves the practice, remember to send a follow up letter or email soon afterwards. It’s polite, it consolidates everything that they’ve seen, and it keeps your practice in the forefront of the prospective patient’s mind.  It might just make the difference between them choosing you… or a competitor!

Marketing Your Practice: Take an Internal Self Check

• Are you encouraging optometric and general practitioner referrals?
• How would you describe your patient’s experience…five-star hotel, sterile hospital, or budget chain?
• Do you educate patients on your services every chance you get?
• Are you spotlighting your advanced procedures and offering seasonal advice to callers with “message on hold”?
• Do you utilize in-house patient education with visual marketing aids, for example brochures, posters, and iPad animations?
• Do you recognize who is important with grass roots activities, such as patient appreciation events?
• Do you send thank you notes to patients to bolster relationships and encourage referrals?
• Do you send press releases to the local media, making the journalist’s life easier and letting the community know of your expertise?
• Are you creating corporate partnerships offering employee discounts and vision checks at health fairs?

External Marketing Campaigns

However, if you really want to create a big buzz in the community, you often have to invest in advertising. Some of the traditional approaches we use in the US include radio spots, television commercials, and print adverts. You may want to create a campaign with a mix of media types if you have the luxury of a large budget. If not, you need to be very selective with your advertising plans. It’s a good idea to use a savvy agency who will vet through the various timing and placement options and perform due diligence on demographics and target markets. The alternative is to do the market research yourself. Radio can be cost-effective and regularly provides a consistently great reach – car drivers stuck in rush-hour traffic make a captive audience. A more expensive approach is TV – although costly, it may be worth the investment since it can reach many thousands of viewers. In many households, you’ll find that the TV is on, the laptop or tablet is nearby and a mobile device is within reach, so it’s easy for viewers to turn to a device to get more information – so have a website, and use its URL in all of your advertising. You may have heard that print adverts are less popular with the younger iPhone-toting generations, but you might not have heard that print is still a go-to for those aged sixty years and above. This gives you an opportunity to customize that content, both in terms of what is advertised, and how: use large type. Last but not least, many ophthalmologists use transport adverts and roadside signage to create awareness of their practice and products; and it’s worth considering. The bottom line is that in all of your advertising; remember to have a concise call-to-action and maintain your branding.

Seventy percent of consumers prefer to learn about a company through articles, not advertisements. You can reach consumers by working with local media to promote yourself. Grass roots activities like patient appreciation events (Figure 1) and open days are great for promoting your practice, and increasing the likelihood of word-of-mouth referrals from former patients, but they also make great fodder for local newspaper articles. It’s likely that there are only a few, overworked journalists employed at your local newspaper, so send them press releases that have done most of their work for them (decent copy, good photographs, a good headline). It makes their life easier, and greatly increases the chances of your press release being turned into an article, letting their audience know about your expertise.

www.yourpractice.com

You need a website. Absolutely. If you don’t already have one, get started on it today. Sites like wix.com can build professional-looking websites for relatively trivial amounts of money; so long as it contains who and where you are, and what you do, then that’s a good start. Getting professionals involved is a better idea in the long-term; plan for blogs, patient testimonial videos, and relevant content for the next phase of the website – it will look professional and will sell your practice. Always check your links and offers on a routine basis to make sure all content is reading and directing as it should. Optimize your website for mobile devices… It is projected that this year mobile internet will overtake desktop internet usage, so make sure your website looks as good on an iPhone as it does on an iMac. Make both sites convenient for users to call you, get your address, and ideally “Book an Appointment Online” – the ultimate patient convenience! Some people dislike the telephone or may handle personal to-dos in the evening or on weekends. For the more experienced crowd, why not consider an app? Creating one that repurposes web content can be as inexpensive as $1,500. Last but not least, establish a social media presence on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Provide relevant information and eye health tips. My experience dictates that you should beware of posts or tweets with a sales-like tone – it lessens your credibility.

You’ve Captured Their Attention…

Success! All of your hard work is paying off and patients are inquiring by phone and online. Remember your professional polish – from answering the telephone within two rings to minimizing wait times and seeking feedback with patient satisfaction surveys. If you offer premium procedures, you must educate patients on these options. This could be as simple as a comprehensive packet mailed in advance of a new patient consult; which credentials the physician(s) and outlines your advanced services. Alternatively or in addition, your scheduling staff should send the patient an email confirmation with links to your website and applicable videos to watch at their leisure.

In Clinic and After the Procedure

With all premium services, it’s imperative to pre-educate patients on the potential to become less spectacle-dependent. The best way to do this is with an animations shown on an iPad. Another opportunity is to educate all individuals in your patient lounge (otherwise known as a boring “waiting room”) by streaming video onto a TV or monitor to create further awareness. If you don’t want to experience the Spanish Inquisition on procedure costs and basic questions, enlist the help of a Surgical Coordinator. They can be responsible for patient counseling, reviewing flexible financing options, rapport-building calls/notes sent to prospective patients, post op patients and referring physicians. You can quantify productivity by tracking staff effectiveness, using these parameters:

Enquiry to Consult Conversion
(daily phone/emails/walk-ins that book a consult) _____%

Consult to Premium Conversion (did they book a premium procedure?) ______%

Remember to track the referral sources of surgery patients; this helps you spot trends, and allocate your marketing investment more effectively in the future.

Conclusion

The key points to remember are that patients can choose from many cataract and refractive surgeons. Price is sometimes an issue, but they are going to choose an ophthalmologist that they have confidence in – they are, after all trusting you with their most important sense: their sight. This means that your entire practice needs to come across as professional in all of your marketing, and even more so in the practice.

Laura Hobbs is a Practice Development Specialist working in the US, UK and Europe and was a recent presenter for the 2013 ESCRS Practice Development Program.