Archive for Business Growth
Is the Economy Improving?
Posted by: | CommentsIn Bob Brinker’s MarketTimer newsletter for May, he talks about the state of the economy. This month indicates continued economic expansion even with a weak housing market and high energy prices. The jobless rate declined in 34 states but the unemployment rate remains high at 8.l8% and the underemployment rate is very high at 15.7%.
So, what does that have to do with aesthetic medicine? Everything. You want to be strategic about who you target for your aesthetic practice. There’s a good chance the economy is not going to bounce back anytime soon, so just prepare. Market to your higher-end, more mature patients versus the young girls who don’t have as much need for your aesthetic services. Your mature patients are least likely to be affected by changes in the economy and last affected by changes in the economy.
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For a free download of Catherine’s book, Visit www.YourAestheticPracticeBook.com or call Catherine at (877) 339-8833. Her firm specializes in creative patient attraction – conversion – retention strategies to drive aesthetic profits.
How’s Your Staff at Converting?
Posted by: | CommentsDid you know that 20-30% of your potential new patients are lost on the initial phone call to your office? While you may have a great team of office staff members, they not be effectively trained to efficiently promote and sell your practice to the individual on the other end of the line. Click Here to Read More…
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For a free download of Catherine’s book, Visit www.YourAestheticPracticeBook.com or call Catherine at (877) 339-8833. Her firm specializes in creative patient attraction – conversion – retention strategies to drive aesthetic profits.
Retention is the NEW Patient Acquisition
Posted by: | CommentsOdds are you lost patients this past year. And, odds are, you can’t say for sure how many you lost, who you lost, why you lost them (it’s not all about the economy) or where they went and are now.
If you do nothing different, you’re going to experience lost patients again this year and in bigger numbers. You can tell yourself patients today just want discounts are whatever else makes you feel better by not taking any responsibility for losing these valuable patients.
So here’s my advice to take or leave:
A great way to make more money is to STOP losing patients. It would take a minimal amount of effort and money to keep in touch and keep these patients coming back for more and referring their friends.
How much should you invest in keeping these patients? Determine what a patient is worth to you for their lifetime, what it costs to replace them (16x that amount) and there’s your answer.
You have an opportunity here if you see it. Most aesthetic physicians do nothing or very limited effort doing anything proactive to retain and keep patients.
There’s your opportunity.
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For a free download of Catherine’s book, Visit www.YourAestheticPracticeBook.com or call Catherine at (877) 339-8833. Her firm specializes in creative patient attraction – conversion – retention strategies to drive aesthetic profits.
“Not Now” or “Not Yet”
Posted by: | CommentsYour aesthetic patient is often an inconsistent decision-maker because they base their decision on emotions that are subject to change. You may or may not know what triggered a patient’s “no”; they might have gotten sticker shock, perhaps they had no idea the downtime involved, or maybe they were simply not in the mood to commit.
However, just because they said no to you today does not mean they will say no forever. Most likely, they are saying “Not Now” or “Not Yet”. Think about it – if something bothers a person about their appearance, it doesn’t just go away as time goes by. More often, it continues to bother them and eventually they decide they must act.
The best strategy is to keep in touch with these prospective patients via in-house events, patient newsletters and special offers so they return to you, and ONLY you, when they are ready.
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For a free download of Catherine’s book, Visit www.YourAestheticPracticeBook.com or call Catherine at (877) 339-8833. Her firm specializes in creative patient attraction – conversion – retention strategies to drive aesthetic profits.
New Patient Strategies for 2011
Posted by: | Comments
Do you agree with me? If so, why and If not, why not? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
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For a free download of Catherine’s book, Visit www.YourAestheticPracticeBook.com or call Catherine at (877) 339-8833. Her firm specializes in creative patient attraction – conversion – retention strategies to drive aesthetic profits.
What Are Your Patients Saying About You?
Posted by: | CommentsUnless you’ve been on a deserted island for the past year or two, you know patient reviews are part of your new reality.
Thanks to peer-to-peer forums, Yelp, and countless other review sites, you are being scrutinized by your patients. Good or bad, they are talking about you.
Here is what you can do to ensure that talk is all good:
A “WOW” Patient Experience
Make your patient feel special and cared for every single time they call or visit you. You are in the business of feelings, so do everything you can to make your patients feel cared for and cared about. That encompasses their entire experience with your office – from your receptionist answering the phone in a friendly manner, your staff greeting visiting patients with a smile, and your building rapport with those patients so they feel comfortable.
Give Them Satisfying Result
Give your patients a good result. Make sure it’s a result they are happy with; something their friends will comment on. A look they feel was worth the money. And, by all means, address any concerns a patient might have about the result they got. You cannot afford to ignore their dissatisfaction, because that’s when they turn to the internet to vent their frustration with you.
Ask for Feedback
Be proactive about what is being said about you on the internet. When your patient tells you how happy they are with their result, ask them to share their story in a testimonial either in writing or in a video. You could give them instructions on how to give you a good review on review sites, or you could mail/email them a post-op survey. Make sure to thank your patients for their feedback and for their interest in helping spread the word about you to other would-be patients.
Stay Informed
An easy way for you to monitor what is being said about you in cyberspace is to set up a Google alert using your name and your practice name. Google will email you anytime your name(s) are mentioned. That will give you the opportunity to address issues and/or maximize nice things being said about you.
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For a free download of Catherine’s book, Visit www.YourAestheticPracticeBook.com or call Catherine at (877) 339-8833. Her firm specializes in creative patient attraction – conversion – retention strategies to drive aesthetic profits.
Where Will Your New Patients Come From?
Posted by: | CommentsI just returned from my Mastermind Conference where I hang with a small group of top Marketers in the world to share what’s working and what’s not when it comes to growing a business (or practice).
The consensus was mass external marketing to complete strangers is out and strategic alliance marketing is in. The noise is too loud in today’s massive media explosion for you to be heard.
What will work is having a group of patients who sing your praises to their friend (who believe and trust them). So your job is to make it easy for your patients to brag about you. Here’s one idea that works like a champ:
FACE TIME
Use patient appreciation events and in-house seminars to get face time with your patients and their friends so they see, hear and touch you. They will remember you longer, stay loyal to you and their friends are more likely to choose you now that they’ve spent Live-Time with you.
The bottom line is this: it’s all about the quality of a patient today and NOT quantity. You need solid patients who love you, stay loyal to you, return again and again and refer their friends. Referral systems are a great way to guarantee your patients keep you on their mind even after they walk out your door. I hope you hear me on this one.
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For a free download of Catherine’s book, Visit www.YourAestheticPracticeBook.com or call Catherine at (877) 339-8833. Her firm specializes in creative patient attraction – conversion – retention strategies to drive aesthetic profits.
Wake Up Sleeping Patients
Posted by: | CommentsYou could be sitting on a gold mine and don’t even know it. For the rest of the year, I suggest circling the wagons and turning inward. Focus on your current patient database.
If you have invested in practice software that tracks patient behavior, and you have been inputting the data correctly, there is a wealth of information there for you to leverage. You are looking for the pearls – those patients most likely to respond to your promotional efforts.
Divide up your eclectic database by:
- the regulars who are loyal to you
- those who visited but never booked a procedure or treatment
- those who never finished their treatments
- and then those that simply disappeared.
Since this is aesthetic medicine, your patients will be more fickle. These services are based on emotions so things happen. Life changes – people change – circumstances change so you want to stay in touch with these different patients with different messages at different times.
So, Internal Marketing is communicating with patients who know you versus promoting your services externally to total strangers. Since your #1 asset is your database, they are your low-hanging fruit and most apt to respond to your messages.
And, did you know next to email marketing, direct mail is still the cheapest form of advertising today because it is so targeted?
Use it to keep in touch with current patients, reconnect with old patients and build word-of-mouth referrals.
Using your database reports, develop marketing campaigns specific to certain patient groups.
For example, let’s say you have 300 patients who visited you for collagen wrinkle filler in the past two years. Now let’s say 150 of them have never returned again. Perhaps they moved, went to your competitor or maybe they didn’t like the short duration the filler lasted so they have never invested in it again. You’ll never know if you don’t reach out. This is the perfect opportunity to educate them on the advancements of longer-lasting fillers and the truly remarkable results you can obtain with them. Simply educating them on what’s new can awaken their interest in cosmetic enhancement as well as you and your practice.
Not only will you get better results; it will also be so much more cost-effective for you to target market versus throwing out a net of your laundry list of services to see who responds.
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Get Your FREE Marketing Checklist on www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com and see how you compare to top aesthetic practices. Catherine’s 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.
Who’s Your Target Audience?
Posted by: | CommentsRegardless of how much the media scares the general public, the good news is that vanity knows no bounds and is a strong motivator. A true aesthetic patient will do whatever is necessary to look and feel better. For now, they may pull back on the more extreme and expensive procedures; however, they will do something to regain what they believe they have lost to look as good as they feel.
Let’s also remember there are 76 million baby boomers that are not looking forward to getting old and they still have the disposable income to slow the aging process. They are the least likely to be affected by what’s going on and the last affected.
So one of your strategies should be to target your older, more mature patients versus your younger patients. That makes so much sense because they’ll have more aging issues than your younger patients. Since they’ve been around longer, they are facing sun-damaged skin, wrinkles and sagging body parts.
When times are tough and finances are stretched, your aesthetic patients need to dig deeper for a reason to see you as well as a reason to give up their money; especially if they’re not sure they will have any in the near future. A majority of your patients will continue to want, need and find the money for rejuvenation procedures because they want what they want and can’t stand looking old. They may also be experiencing life-changing events such as a marriage, divorce, layoff or new job opportunity so they have built-in emotional reasons for wanting aesthetic enhancement.
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Get Your FREE Marketing Checklist on www.CosmeticImageMarketing.com and see how you compare to top aesthetic practices. Catherine’s 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.
