NEW YORK—As we move into Q4, evaluating the successes in your practice over the year becomes important as you look to see which goals you’ve hit and missed and how your practice can better prepare for the coming year. Your marketing efforts can have a big impact on some of your goals, so evaluating what worked and what you can implement through the end of the year to boost those numbers in this final quarter, or over the course of next year, is an important step.
Here’s a list of 10 marketing tips that your practice can use to diversify your strategy as you move forward.
Sponsorship & Community Involvement
Maintaining a strong sense of community is important for every local business, regardless of your specialty or industry. Sponsoring events or community organizations help create a strong community bond and increases brand awareness and word of mouth advertising for your practice.
The opportunities for these types of sponsorships vary widely across events like local 5k run/walks, educational classes at schools, little league baseball tournaments or local high school sports teams. If you are volunteering at the event, your staff can wear branded clothing to keep consistency and increase your brand’s awareness.
End of Year Benefits
Most practices probably see an increase in sales at the end of the year as patients come in to use their left over flex spending dollars from insurance plans. Focusing on this messaging in the fourth quarter in emails, social posts or office signage is a great way to remind people to be using those dollars in your eyecare practice and not somewhere else.
Look Outside the Industry
A good way to help keep your marketing fun and unique is to look outside of the health care sector for new ideas. What promotions is the local coffee shop running down the street? How can you implement similar ideas into your marketing strategy that other local businesses in different industries have found success with? Don’t be afraid to be different! Make it your goal to try something new in your marketing efforts before the end of the year.
Consistent Social Media
Maintaining updated social media should be a critical part of your practice’s marketing plan. Other than the time invested, social media is a relatively cheap way to promote your practice, and when you do spend money on social advertising you can usually reach quite a few people on a small budget. People like doing business with people they know and trust, and social media is a great tool for building and strengthening those relationships with patients.
Word of Mouth
All small businesses know how important word of mouth is to their marketing strategy. It’s likely that your current patients are your most powerful marketing tool. If you’re treating your current patients well, their recommendations to friends and family could do more to build your practice than anything else.
To help encourage word of mouth referrals you can implement a referral program. Before implementing a referral program we suggest reaching out to your state board or business lawyer to ensure you’re covered of legal responsibilities when running this type of program. Referral rewards can be given to patients by way of VISA gift cards, in office credit, branded items, local business gift cards or monthly drawings.
Outreach Programs
Senior centers, assisted living facilities, and schools are a few examples of places you and your staff can speak and provide practice health information and education to a new group of patients. Creating these types of outreach programs can help create brand awareness to an audience that isn’t as often online or as tech savvy as some of your other target market patients might be.
Keep it Fun
An important thing to remember when marketing your practice is to keep the messaging fun. While eye health can often be a serious subject, being a brand that people can relate to and understand will go a long way. Being in health care can sometimes make practices shy away from platforms like social media, but the truth is, consumers want to feel engaged with brands and good marketing will make them feel that way.
Use the Calendar
Using the calendar can help you come up with marketing promotions that are related to specific dates or seasons that many of your community members can relate to. But we’re not just talking about the obvious holidays like Halloween or the 4th of July. What about some of the more obscure “holidays” like, National Ice Cream Day, or National Book Lover’s Day?
Local Search
Your online web presence goes beyond just your social media pages. You need to make sure that your website is fully optimized for local search so that it pops up in Google before other local competitors. When potential patients are searching for things like, “optometrist near me,” you want your practice to be the first to pop up. There are plenty of resources online to help you better understand the things you can do online and on your website to improve your local search rankings.
Power of Your Brand
Having a strong brand makes you recognizable throughout your community. If you don’t think your brand is as strong as it could be, or maybe it’s just not modern anymore, the end of the year is a great time to analyze your brand and determine what you’d like to change. Maybe you need a complete brand overhaul, maybe just the sign outside your office needs to be updated, or maybe you order branded clothing items to hand out to special patients and for your staff to wear around the community. Think about what you can do to strengthen your practice’s brand recognition in the community.