Archive for Business Growth
How the Aesthetic Physician Can Thrive in the New Economy
Posted by: | CommentsThe Old Economy is gone; never to return. Aesthetic patients no longer spend like drunken sailors. A majority of them have pulled back on aesthetic enhancement due to the uncertainty of the bad economy. That doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t have the money anymore. It could simply mean they are not willing to spend it without a good cause.
To thrive in the New Economy, aesthetic physicians must better understand their patients’ decision-making processes. Here are four main points that should be carefully considered:
- 1.)The aesthetic patient has all the power to decide who gets their business (and cash).
- 2.)The aesthetic patient does not tolerate average treatment.
- 3.)Money will be spent more judiciously by the aesthetic patient.
- 4.)You will need to earn the right to your patients’ needs and interests.
To enjoy endless cosmetic patients in the New Economy, get smart about your messaging, your marketing and your customer service. It will pay off for you handsomely. Click Here To Read Full Article
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See FREE videos on www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com where Catherine Maley lays out 5 easy ways to introduce aesthetics to your current patients. Her firm specializes in attracting cash-paying patients to a medical practice using PR, advertising and creative marketing strategies. Catherine can also be reached at (877) 339-8833.
Growing a Multi-Million Dollar Aesthetic Practice
Posted by: | CommentsThe most successful aesthetic practices today work on never-ending improvement of their processes to ensure their aesthetic patients get the care, result and feelings they are looking for. They understand it’s the fundamentals that never change and always need to be focused on and perfected for endless cosmetic patients to be attracted to their practice. Click Here to Read About The 10 Endless Patient Success Strategies
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Catherine Maley, MBA is President of Cosmetic Image Marketing where her firm specializes in coaching physicians to attract more aesthetic patients to their practice by using PR, advertising and creative marketing strategies. Free videos are available at www.cosmeticimagemarketing.com or call Catherine at (877) 339-8833.
Do You Want More Aesthetic Patients or Profits?
Posted by: | CommentsYour aesthetic patients want to go to you because they know, like and trust you. They get a consistent experience every time, a consistent result, and a relationship with you and your staff that keeps them coming back for more and bringing their friends with them.
In the New Economy, the point is not to see how big you can grow your database. It’s to cost-effectively and creatively attract your preferred patients to your practice and then nurture those relationships so you grow your practice organically from within rather than from random, expensive, external efforts.
Tip: It’s not a contest to grow your database with anybody and everybody – It’s all about quality of the patient and NOT quantity
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For more Free tips and videos, visit www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com. Catherine Maley, MBA is Author of Your Aesthetic Practice/What Your Patients Are Saying and her firm offers everything you need to succeed in aesthetic medicine. You can call Catherine at (877) 339-8833 or email her at info@CosmeticImageMarketing.com.
Attract New Patients by Networking
Posted by: | CommentsWhen you align with another business owner and they introduce you to their patients or customers as their aesthetic expert, you get instant credibility with a whole new group of prospective patients who already trust you through your association with someone else they already trust.
However, before you approach others, be sure to prepare an answer to the question they will be asking themselves which is, “What’s in it for me if I share my clients with you?” Be sure you set this up as a win-win relationship because this can be a double-edged sword. Your alliances can sing your praises or cut you to the quick if they feel like they were used by you so be sure they get as much from this alliance as you do.
Tip: Set up a win-win relationship with your strategic alliances so they introduce their high-value clients to you.
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For more Free tips and videos, visit www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com. Catherine Maley, MBA is Author of Your Aesthetic Practice/What Your Patients Are Saying and her firm offers everything you need to succeed in aesthetic medicine. You can call Catherine at (877) 339-8833 or email her at info@CosmeticImageMarketing.com.
Set Up System for Referrals
Posted by: | CommentsIf 70% of your new aesthetic patients are not coming from current patient referrals, shame on you.
Today’s fragmented media outlets have your preferred patients scattered all over the universe so there’s no easy way to get to them so you have to spend way more money trying to be everywhere they are – very expensive, tiring and ineffective.
Truly successful aesthetic practices know that word-of-mouth referrals are the life blood of their practice and well worth the effort.
The majority of patients I interviewed for my book, Your Aesthetic Practice, told me they would have referred you to others if they were only asked.
You cannot take patient referrals lightly.
Set up systems to help ensure your patients brag about you to their friends and family.
And, then by all means, thank your patients through personal thank you calls, thank you note cards and thank you gifts.
Your patients must feel appreciated and encouraged to refer to you because behavior that is rewarded is repeated.
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For more Free tips and videos, visit www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com. Catherine Maley, MBA is Author of Your Aesthetic Practice/What Your Patients Are Saying and her firm offers everything you need to succeed in aesthetic medicine. You can call Catherine at (877) 339-8833 or email her at info@CosmeticImageMarketing.com.
Reactivate Your Lost Patients
Posted by: | CommentsAfter your current patients, the next group of aesthetic patients to concentrate on are those lost patients you haven’t seen in over a year.
The good news is that while it takes 10 times the effort to gain a new aesthetic patient, it can take much less to win back a patient who already knows you. It’s well worth the effort to develop a campaign to win back your long lost patients – no matter why they left you in the first place.
Some reasons your aesthetic patient left your practice:
- - Perhaps the patient was having a bad day when they visited you and couldn’t connect with your staff.
- - Perhaps your staff was having a bad day and scared them off.
- - Perhaps you made them wait too long.
- - Perhaps they saw dust and clutter in your office and were turned off.
- - Perhaps they went to your price-discounting competitor and want to return to you but are too embarrassed.
Well, you are never going to know unless you reach out to them….
It costs a small fortune to acquire a new aesthetic patient – but it costs next to nothing to keep them. The financial beauty of this relationship-based practice is to dramatically decrease your marketing and advertising costs since you are nurturing your patients and growing organically with their word-of-mouth referrals.
Winning back these lost patients will take extra effort. If they left you because they didn’t feel they were treated special, you’ll want to put in extra effort to make them feel wanted. Personalize your communications to them to get the point across how much they are valued by you.
Tip: Aesthetic medicine is all about the relationship the patient “feels” they have with you and how they “feel” when they are in touch with you – either on the telephone or in person.
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For more Free tips and videos, visit www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com. Catherine Maley, MBA is Author of Your Aesthetic Practice/What Your Patients Are Saying and her firm offers everything you need to succeed in aesthetic medicine. You can call Catherine at (877) 339-8833 or email her at info@CosmeticImageMarketing.com.
How a Multi-Million Dollar Practice Becomes Just That
Posted by: | CommentsThe multi-million dollar practice becomes just that because they get good at the fundamentals which are to:
- - Attract high-value patients
- - Qualify them to ensure they are a good fit
- - Convert them to procedures, treatments and products
- - Retain them for a lifetime
- - Testimonials – document all the good things they say about you
- - Referrals – continually encourage referrals from other like-minded patients
The successful aesthetic practice realizes every step in the patient’s experience is vital so they spend time, money and resources to train, retrain, enforce, and reinforce never-ending improvement in their staff, in their processes and in their promotional efforts.
They see the value of one patient and do all they can to attract, convert, nurture and retain that patient as well as their friends, family and co-workers.
They most likely are no more skilled than you are in aesthetic medicine; however, they are skilled at patient relations and promotion. Those skills make the difference between a 6-figure and 7-figure aesthetic practice.
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For more Free tips and videos, visit www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com. Catherine Maley, MBA is Author of Your Aesthetic Practice/What Your Patients Are Saying and her firm offers everything you need to succeed in aesthetic medicine. You can call Catherine at (877) 339-8833 or email her at info@CosmeticImageMarketing.com.
Fix Your Phones
Posted by: | CommentsWe offer a mystery-shopping service for our clients. That means we call their office many times asking various questions about their services and then we critique them to determine how the calls could have been handled better.
Boy, do we get an earful! Many of these calls go so poorly that when I report back to the doctor my findings, they almost don’t believe what I am telling them we heard. They are sure I’m exaggerated so, we now tape these calls.
I continue to be amazed at how much physicians complain to me their business is down, their schedule has holes in it and their marketing doesn’t work when I know their issue is “bad phones”. Nothing else you do means anything if the patient can’t get through, is put on hold or is handled in a curt way. Almost as bad is a nice person answering the phone but having no idea how to answer questions and not having enough sense to admit it, get the caller’s name and promise to have a more knowledgeable staff person call them back with the answers to their questions within the hour.
The average practice loses more than ½ million dollars per year on bad phone techniques. Please get your front office staff trained properly on how to answer the phone, bond with the caller, answer their questions and book the appointment. It could make the difference between thriving and surviving this year.
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For more Free tips and videos, visit www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com. Catherine Maley, MBA is Author of Your Aesthetic Practice/What Your Patients Are Saying and her firm offers everything you need to succeed in aesthetic medicine. You can call Catherine at (877) 339-8833 or email her at info@CosmeticImageMarketing.com.
What’s the Objective of Your Website Home Page?
Posted by: | CommentsMost doctors get this wrong. They truly believe the home page is designated to tell the prospective patients all about them, their credentials, skills, expertise and then the laundry list of services they offer.
I guarantee – that’s not it! The true objective of your Website Home Page is to get the casual web surfer to stop-notice-act once they land on your site. How do you ensure that happens? You answer the burning question most on the prospective patient’s mind which is,
“Hey, what’s in it for me?”
The secret is to talk about the patient first – not you. They don’t care about you – yet. Right now, all they care about is do you have a solution to what is bothering me right now? That can be a tall order; however, because you offer many services which is why the most sophisticated practices put up separate Websites for different procedures.
A typical aesthetic consumer is looking for information to a specific procedure so design your Website to give that to them in the form of free reports and videos they can view when they provide their name and email so you can follow-up. Start with emotional copy that addresses their fears and apprehensions, show lots of before/after photos and as much social proof (patient testimonials) as possible. Then, get into you specifically.
I guarantee if you first give the patient what they want which is information, they will then be much more open to learning more about you.
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For more Free tips and videos, visit www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com. Catherine Maley, MBA is Author of Your Aesthetic Practice/What Your Patients Are Saying and her firm offers everything you need to succeed in aesthetic medicine. You can call Catherine at (877) 339-8833 or email her at info@CosmeticImageMarketing.com.
How Do You Follow Up After the Patient Consultation?
Posted by: | CommentsYou may be under the belief that once a prospective patient leaves your office without booking the procedure you and your office just spent an hour talking about, all is lost. You may be assuming they weren’t interested or they got sticker shock or they just chickened out. Not necessarily….
Patients today can be fickle consumers who shop around. There is a very good chance they visited you as well as several of your competitors so they feel as if they can make an educated decision based on comparison shopping.
Let’s say you did everything right and now you are stuck because you don’t know how or even if you should follow up for fear of looking as if you are chasing the patient. Fear not! Use these tactics to follow up professionally and close the procedure:
- Send a handwritten note to the prospective patient immediately. Express how much you and your staff enjoyed meeting them and that “Sara” will be following up on Friday if you don’t hear back sooner;
- Now be sure Sara calls back on Friday to check in to see what additional questions they may have and then attempts to close the procedure;
- Have your patient coordinator call the patient with an important development that just came up; i.e., CareCredit is offering a new 0% financing program or there’s been a cancellation so if they can book now, they can save $500 or whatever.
- Lastly, mail/email them a current article you just found on the Internet talking about the very procedure they are interested in and, again, ask for a decision
And, if none of that works, simply add them to your database so they can receive your invitations, newsletters and email blasts because you just never know when they are ready for you.
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For more Free tips and videos, visit www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com. Catherine Maley, MBA is Author of Your Aesthetic Practice/What Your Patients Are Saying and her firm offers everything you need to succeed in aesthetic medicine. You can call Catherine at (877) 339-8833 or email her at info@CosmeticImageMarketing.com.
