A 7-Step Guide for Doctors
The patient acquisition cycle begins with attracting new patients and continues as satisfied patients become loyal, referring customers. The fuel that keeps this cycle going comes from consistently providing exceptional patient experiences. Without that, you cannot attract new patients to your practice, and your practice’s growth will stall.
To provide an exceptional patient experience, you’ll first need to understand and meet your patients’ expectations. You’ll also need to market yourself in a way that increases trust and confidence among your existing patients, which in turn helps drive patient referrals.
Here is a 7-step guide that will help you get more patients to your clinic:
1. Understand Patients' Needs & Expectations
To get started, you must first understand where you fall short as a provider. You’ll need to know the needs and expectations of your patients, as well as how you’re performing on these fronts, and who better to tell you than your patients themselves.
Take a patient satisfaction survey, or look at the results of a CAHPS survey, to understand what’s bothering your patients about the quality of your care and customer service. Engage in focused discussions on topics related to diagnosis, treatment, staff communication, and hospitality with your patients, whether face to face during treatment or through social media chats and patient portals. Find out what your patients are saying about you on review sites. By aggregating your notes on all responses and feedback, you can get a reasonable idea of your areas for improvement.
2. Conduct Sentiment Analysis for a Deeper Understanding
By empathizing with your patients and their concerns, you can understand their emotions in a more accurate and meaningful way. While you can talk with patients directly, it’s not practical to manually track and analyse every response. Nor is it likely that every patient will openly share their emotions with you, and finding time to discuss this with each patient individually is rarely realistic.
Sentiment analysis software can help here, going beyond a simple read of patient feelings to a deeper analysis of the emotions and strength behind their feedback.
Sentiment analysis tools will help you a lot in this regard. They can send a survey link to your patients as soon as they leave your office. Include the following in your survey to get an answer that can be analysed for sentiment:
- Their likelihood of recommending you to friends or relatives, based on their experience. Use a scale of 1-5 (most common) or 0-10 (the industry standard for calculating net promoter score).
- An open-ended comment box where they can elaborate on their rating and anything else they’d like to share about the visit.
- AI technology can extract emotional signals from written feedback, helping you understand exactly how patients felt about their visit and spot patterns over time to identify problem areas.
3. Identify Your Target Audience Based on Demographics
While analysing data to understand your patients’ needs, wants, and feelings, also keep in mind the target audience in each region based on demographics such as age, gender, and location. This will help you create and execute specific marketing campaigns, and optimise your online marketing activities accordingly.
From your website’s Google Analytics account, you can get demographic data on both actual conversions and interested leads.
You can also pull landing page data from analytics for your different service categories, so you know what will help you target potential patients based on their specific needs and interests.
4. Create Unique Internal Patient Referral Programs
Understanding your target audience is the first step. The next is applying internal marketing methods in your clinic that focus on increasing patient referrals. Simply asking patients to refer others, or offering generic rewards, won’t do much on its own, and direct financial rewards for referrals are prohibited in many jurisdictions. By engaging patients in genuine conversation and empathising with their concerns, you can make your referral efforts far more effective.
- Show short commercials: Show a short, informative video during wait times about ways patients can help others in the practice. Stories about how one patient helped another will resonate emotionally and encourage action.
- Offer referral incentives: Rather than a direct cash reward, consider a discount applied to a new patient’s co-pay, with a clear note explaining the discount when submitting to insurance.
Ask for reviews: Asking happy patients to leave reviews helps improve your online reputation. Make it easy by sending a review link right after they leave your office. This also helps you attract more patients through online search.
You can also try more proactive measures, like a follow-up call at the end of the day to show empathy, sending birthday cards, or including personalised referral cards in your monthly newsletter.
Tip: assign a specific staff member to manage this internal marketing program. This is especially useful for busy clinics or hospitals that don’t have time to manage marketing themselves.
5. Build Strong Relationships With Referring Practices
Building strong, mutually beneficial relationships with referring general practitioners and other non-specialists will help you attract more patients to your clinic. It takes time to build a solid reputation among referring practices, but by ensuring good doctor-to-doctor communication and prioritising the patients they refer to you, you can build a strong, lasting relationship.
Good communication means sharing clinically relevant information in both directions, from the referring doctor and back. Patients don’t like repeating their medical history every time they’re referred to another doctor.
Beyond communication, providing timely and effective care to referred patients helps ensure their long-term wellbeing. A few tips for giving referred patients a great experience:
- Have front-desk staff attend to referred patients promptly.
- Offer speedy appointments and avoid long wait times.
- Establish a direct line of contact between your office and the referring practice for timely information sharing, rather than a lengthy phone tree.
- Send treatment notes and other relevant medical information back to the referring practice soon after the patient is seen.
Providing attentive care to referred patients doesn’t mean your regular patients get any less. After all, internal referrals depend on your existing patients too. But making a newly referred patient feel genuinely welcomed is a small effort with real impact.
6. Expand Your Online Presence & Authority
Most patients referred to you will check your reputation online first. If they find bad reviews, or can’t easily find your site, they’re likely to look elsewhere. A strong, authoritative online presence helps prevent that.
Here’s what patients generally expect to find when they search for you online:
- Easy to find on the web: a strong SEO strategy ensures a robust online presence and easier discovery.
- A positive reputation: online reputation management is key to building trust in your quality of care.
- Easy navigation: a well-designed website with a clear user experience helps patients find what they need without distraction.
- Easy scheduling: a dedicated landing page with a clear, strong call to action makes booking appointments simple.
A strong online presence isn’t just about being easy to find, it also shapes the first impression your brand makes. Positive reviews alone aren’t enough. Building authority by connecting with local influencers and earning mentions from reputable sources also strengthens your credibility.
Influencer partnerships can also bring valuable connections with respected people, publications, or organisations in your field, helping your website rank higher in search and building a stronger social media presence.
7. Grow Reach in Your Patient Community
For most doctors, patients come primarily from the local area, making it essential to build a genuine local community and connect with members on a deeper level. A strong patient community pays off by extending your reach both online and offline.
A few ways to build that community and strengthen your local presence:
- Newsletters: patients appreciate newsletters that address their health concerns. Share tips and information relevant to your local community, and keep your practice top of mind through consistent, useful content.
- Community events: participating in volunteer activities and neighbourhood celebrations builds local networking and visibility. Being visible, friendly, and supportive goes a long way.
- Sponsor events and leagues: sponsoring small local sports events or youth leagues, even on a biannual basis, can meaningfully improve your practice’s brand authority in the community.
- Facebook page: set up a page for your practice to build an online community. Use it to showcase your practice’s culture from both patients’ and staff’s perspectives, and to spark conversations, run health-related quizzes, and share updates about your activities as a provider.
Connecting with local media, online and offline, and maintaining a friendly relationship with them, can also help you reach a wider audience whenever you have news about participation, sponsorships, or other community activities to share.
In the End
Each of these tips takes specific knowledge and consistent effort to carry out successfully. Some of that will come from your own practice team, and some will benefit from the support of a dedicated healthcare marketing partner.
If you’d like help putting these strategies into practice, MYSense works with Malaysian clinics and healthcare providers on exactly this kind of patient acquisition and retention strategy. Contact us to see how we can help grow your practice.
