Everyone wants to know the “secret to success,” that one big plan or tip that will shoot your practice upward and help you meet your goals. Some will tell you there are no strategies that are guaranteed to work. It’s all just a trial-and-error shot in the dark. But that’s not the case. There actually is a secret strategy to marketing your podiatry practice—and really, it’s broken down into two secrets:

Secret #1 – You need a comprehensive marketing plan that touches all four sources that bring you patients.

There are only four sources that can direct patients to your office: the internet, medical or non-medical referral sources, recommendations from other patients, or marketing efforts at events and other community venues. This is why Top Practices’ members use the Four Pillars of Marketing strategy for their own practices. You need to focus all of your marketing around connecting your web-based, referral, internal database, and external outreach efforts so you reach all potential patients where they already are.

Here’s the takeaway: you can’t just pick one of these areas and neglect the others. If you do and pour all of your efforts into just one “pillar,” you will be missing opportunities to reach people, and you will be disappointed with your results. That’s why all pillars are equal and equally important to your marketing strategy.

Secret #2 – You do all of this marketing to build your list of people in the community who know you, like you, and trust you, so you can communicate to them on a regular basis over a period of time.

Using that list of people and nurturing those relationships over time is the greatest “secret” marketing strategy that we know of. The information is out there for the world to see—we talk about it all the time at Top Practices—but most people simply don’t understand the vital importance of taking care of that list. It’s the key to reactivating inactive patients and to building your referrals.

You want your patients to like you and consider you a true and helpful expert on lower extremity issues. That way they both come back to you when a new problem appears and they refer you to their family and friends. For that to happen, you need to communicate regularly with these people and invest in healthy practice-patient relationships.

So the secret strategy for success in your practice is two-fold: have a comprehensive plan that invests in all four pillars of marketing equally, and foster your list of current and potential patients who already support and like you. You don’t have to go at this alone, though. Let Top Practices help you figure this out for your own practice. Contact us by calling (717) 725-2679 or e-mailing [email protected] for more information.

Rem Jackson
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Founder and CEO of Top Practices, LLC
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