8 Tips to Attract More Patients to Your Clinics
Covid-19 has hit every business hard, medical clinic included. How to promote your clinic and maintain patient volume during and after the pandemic? We have eight tips for you to attract more patients and emerge as front-runners in 2021 and beyond!
Register on Google My Business
Build a strong online presence for your website
Establish responsive and engaging social media presence
Use content marketing to build trust
Understand your patients
Improve your standards of services
Improve the quality of patient care
Grow reach in your patient community
Register your clinic on Google My Business
Google My Business
It’s no secret that Google is the most popular search engine in the world, with more than 90% of searches conducted on Google. Including those look for a clinic near them.
You should definitely register a Google My Business account. It is free and lets your clinic show up in search results when people are looking for you online. Once they find you, your listing shows searches where and how to visit your clinic. The information is legitimate as it is straight from you.
Simply list down:
Your business type, whether is a GP, dental, or specialist clinic.
Services offered
Opening hours
Location
Your clinic’s website (If you have one. It’s not mandatory, you can still be listed without a website)
Google My Business also improves your local SEO, it optimizes your online presence in local search results. If some patients in your neighborhood search for a clinic, your clinic will be high up on the list.
Besides, it has a review feature to showcase some of your satisfied patient’s good reviews about your clinic. Simply request your patients to share about their experience going to your clinic and give a 5-star rating on Google. These reviews can help you stand out amongst other clinics on Google.
An example of how ‘Google My Business‘ can work for clinics when a user search for ‘clinics near me’
Besides showing up on Google Map, a direction will be given to show users how to get to your clinic. Your opening hours, patient ratings, and reviews will also appear in the listing. Appearing on Google My Business listings can provide you with a steady and reliable source of new patients, especially in your local community.
Build a strong online presence for your clinic’s website
To find patients and promote your doctors online, you need to let patients find your clinic easily online. You need a robust online presence of your website besides Google My Business account.
Patients should be able to reach you through your website easily and find positive reputations about your clinic online. It’s extremely important to establish a good website design with a clear user interface, allowing patients to navigate through your website smoothly without distractions.
Your website should also contain a contact page with clear call-to-actions such as phone numbers or a contact form for users to schedule appointments or make inquiries. Patients can thus schedule speedy appointments online easily, greatly increasing patient flow in your clinic.
A clear and high-quality map on your contact page could also help give a clear direction to your clinic’s location.
Establish responsive and engaging social media presence
In this digital age, people always turn to social media to share and look for healthcare-related information, and many potential patients would cross-check your clinic’s reputation online. It is thus important to establish a trustworthy and reputable image on your social media accounts. You should also keep your social media presence responsive and engaging to maintain connections with existing patients while reaching potential patients.
Don’t just create a page and not post anything. Make sure to share and post valuable content regularly to keep your patients engaged.
Feeling lost about social media marketing? Check out our complete guide on social media marketing for your clinic!
Use content marketing to build trust
Havas’ Meaningful Brands study found that 84 percent of people expect brands to provide valuable content that tells stories, provides solutions, and creates experiences and events.
Considering your target audience as patients, you should create accurate content that educates and informs them. Present it in various forms that make complicated information easier to understand.
Examples of content include information on important medical issues, preventive health news, and health tips, such as how to mitigate the side effects of COVID-19 vaccines.
With more high-quality content you produce, you will establish your clinic as an expert in your field, a leading source of information with patient’s trust.
Understand your patients
How do you maintain patient flow? How to retain your existing patients while attracting more potential patients? The key is to understand your patients, understand their needs and expectations, and improve your services accordingly.
Ask for patient feedback in areas such as diagnosis, treatment, staff communication, and hospitality. You can do so in a face-to-face session or on social media chats and patient portals.
One easy way is to offer digital feedback automatically. Prepare a patient satisfaction survey. Send them a message after their visit that links to the survey
Don’t forget to put a suggestion box in your clinic. Although this old-fashioned way may not help to build your online reputation, it is effective to make your patients feel heard and their voices matter.
All in all, nurturing relationships with your existing patients is one of the most cost-effective ways to grow your practice. It does not only maintain your patient flow but also increases referrals that lead to more patients.
Improve your standards of services
No one runs a clinic by themselves, your clinic staff and assistants also play a role in your clinic’s overall quality of service.
One critical part that determines the quality of the patient care in your clinic is the standard of service by your medical staff, such as receptionists, clinic assistants, and nurses. They represent your clinic in a way that determines patients’ first impressions of your clinic.
There is no way the patients will refer your clinic to other potential patients if they aren’t satisfied with your attitude and services.
Thus, besides a functional, user-friendly website and active social media accounts, it is imperative to train your team to ensure the patients have the best experience when they visit your clinic.
They should be able to address patients’ questions and concerns intelligently (I.e billings or medication side effects), offer details regarding your clinic’s medical practices, and most importantly, maintain a good attitude.
Improve your clinic’s quality of patient care
It is undeniable that the healthcare market is competitive, especially for GPs and dental clinics, where there are usually multiple clinics in the same neighborhood, your patients can be easily diverted to an alternative if they feel your practices take too much time or unsatisfied about the quality of your patient care. Once you lose them, they are gone forever and will probably never return to your clinic again, which means you also lose their customer LTV (lifetime value).
Improve your clinic’s patient care quality can be done through an effective and automated clinic management system, which is key to a seamless and efficient consultation process.
UNO Technologies offers the solution of Clinic Management System that helps you run a streamlined and automated clinic to save you time and thus help you provide better care to your patients.
One fully integrated feature of the system is EMR (Electronic Medical Records) which automates your consultation process. It allows for quicker search of patients’ details, more informed diagnosis and prognosis, chronic disease tracking tools, and many more benefits that leave you more time to communicate with your patients for better patient care.
Besides, telemedicine being the future of healthcare is also offered as part of the UNO Clinic Management System. It is fully integrated without additional software or hardware. Most importantly, it is also HIPAA and MTCS compliant.
With UNO Clinic Management System, you will not only improve patient satisfaction and retain existing patients, but also gain increased referrals to one-up other clinics.
Grow reach in your patient community
While it is easy to get obsessed with expanding your online presence, don’t forget that most of your patients come from the same locality. It is thus important for you to form a local community and connect with your patients on more personal, offline levels.
It can be highly rewarding as a strong community with your patients allows you to advance your reach in both online and offline space.
One of the easiest ways to build a strong community is through newsletters. Send out neighborhood newsletters with tips and information that address your patients’ health concerns.
The point here is to actively engage your patients by providing interactive discussion material while keeping your practice at the forefront of your patient’s minds.
To conclude
In order to attract more patients to your clinics, addressing the needs and concerns of your patients is the key. While establishing your robust online presence, don’t forget to maintain a strong offline presence with community outreach and face-to-face follow-ups. Most importantly, your quality of medical care in terms of the standard of service by your team as well as your clinic management system is the determining factor in retaining existing patients and attracting more patients to your clinics.