Seven Simple Strategies to Market Your Medical Practice

Getting in the habit of actively marketing your practice shouldn't have to wait until your New Year's Resolutions. Get started today with these seven simple strategies to market your medical practice:

1. Have a blog connected to your practice website. Blog often and about a variety of topics. And make sure people can subscribe to your blog by e-mail (which is more beneficial for your marketing efforts than RSS feeds).

2. Turn your existing patients into raving fans. It is easier to maintain an existing patient base then it is to find new prospective patients and convert them into patients. Make sure you and your staff over deliver and takes excellent care of the patients who love you already. Those patients will become raving fans and carry the load of some of your marketing for you.

3. Gather testimonials. If you have ancillary products or services and they have worked for you personally or for your staff and your services, save them and use them on your website, for social media, or for other marketing efforts. This builds credibility and social proof that you are amazing.

4.  Stay in touch. Take those e-mail addresses that you gathered in the first strategy and stay in touch with your patients, at least monthly. Make sure you include a note from a provider or staff member, a recommendation of a product/service/event, and a short article of helpful content.

5. Be open. Make sure your marketing message conveys what patients, disease processes, or diagnoses you are passionate about (market to your ideal patients). By showing up and showing who you are and what you have, you will invite the type of patients that will make your practice both successful and joyful for you.

6. Participate in the media. Seek out and take opportunities to be featured in the media as an expert and share those appearances in your marketing efforts. You could be featured nationally or locally, in print or online, or even on television or the radio. It is often as simple as sending an e-mail or making a call.

7. Get offline too. It would make all of our lives easier if we could only use online or offline-marketing strategies to market practices. The fact of the matter is that with a "brick-and-mortar" business (which is what a medical practice is), you must be involved and present in your local community. Both online and offline marketing works together in synergy to get the desired effect of bringing in more patients to grow your practice. 

Pick a few of the strategies that you can begin immediately with the goal being to implement all of them by the end of January 2014. Once you get in the marketing groove, you will find that marketing is fun and even a joyful experience. Rome wasn't built in a day; it takes 21 days to form a habit and in the case of marketing, six to 12 months to be great at it, but stick with it … it will pay off.