What a crazy year this has been for alternative medical practices this year. Many of our clients have gotten creative with their marketing efforts. Some have gone completely virtual, while others are continuing to help their patients in-office. Regardless of where you fall into this category, there are ways you can salvage your goals for the year.
We still have a few months ahead and, as a practitioner, you’ve gotten over some of the biggest hurdles of your career. You’ve become versatile and risen to the challenge of what the pandemic has thrown at you. We know that even in the midst of this craziness, you can still finish strong.
Here are the top things we encourage you to focus on to reach your goals this year.
1. Determine What Your New Goals Are
Like most functional medicine practitioners, you likely lost a lot of revenue in the first and second quarters. However, you’ve had time to pivot your offerings and get into a new groove with how you can treat your patients or work with your clients. Now that you have a good flow, you can turn your attention to production.
Start by figuring out what your new break-even point is to pay all of your bills for the month. Once you know how much you need each month for the basics, you can create a baseline goal. If you’ve already been breaking even, then increase your goals. While you may not be able to bring in more than you did last year, you will likely be able to bring in more than you have in the past two quarters.
2. Get Back Past Patients or Clients
A lot of functional medicine and alternative health practices lost patients during the pandemic, but not necessarily to other practices. These patients may not be getting the health treatments they need. It’s time to re-engage those patients and get creative on helping them.
This could mean:
- Offering payment plans or accept options like CareCredit.
- Re-packaging your treatment plans to reduce costs, but still provide value.
- Scheduling a complimentary call with the doctor to remind them of their treatment plans or go over any new health goals.
Also, it’s important to remind your team to focus on caring for the patients. One thing that is often overlooked in medical offices is customer-service and it’s been even more of a challenge during the pandemic. It’s so important for them to feel cared for at every stage of the game.
3. Focus on Getting in New Patients
Now that people are beginning to feel more comfortable going to the doctor’s office, they are looking for providers to help them. There are many ways you can focus on getting new patients in the door. Here are the top ways to market your practice:
- Google Ads – these ads target specific keywords and locations in your area. Ads can be used to drive warm traffic to your website.
- SEO – search engine optimization speaks to the process used to help websites show up for searches. For example, if someone is looking for symptoms you treat, your website would need content that talks about those symptoms and how you treat them.
- Referrals – since so many doctors are not as busy right now, it is a good time to work on building a referral network with others. If you haven’t invested in relationships with other practitioners, take time to do that now.
These are a few of the ways you can work to find new patients. It’s important that if you are going to invest in marketing efforts that you answer your phone. Often time, a potential patient will not leave a message. Get coverage for the phone by bringing on help or hiring a medical answering service.
Contact us Today For SEO and Google Ads
Can your functional medicine website be found? Is your Google My Business listing showing up when people are searching for terms that are related to what you do? One of the best ways to show up for searches is to invest in SEO on your website. The team here at Functional Medicine SEO practitioners show up in search results.
Contact us today so we can schedule a call with you to go over your website. We’re happy to talk to you about the health of your SEO and ways we can strengthen it to show up in more searches. Fill out our contact form here. Or, if you would like us to send you a free SEO site audit, sign-up here.
