Patient communication both in your office and in every area of your marketing is absolutely essential for your practice to grow and serve people effectively. If your patients aren’t sure what you mean when you describe their condition or their treatment, they will get frustrated and find someone else that they can understand better. This is especially the case for content like webpages, blogs, e-mail blasts, letters, and anything else that your patients may read when they are looking for answers to their questions about their pain. Communicating effectively involves speaking to the concerns already on people’s minds, using language they understand, and keeping things interesting.
At Top Practices, we say a lot: speak directly to the concerns already on people’s minds. The ideal patients you want to find you will be struggling with particular issues that you are able to fix. Your content should speak directly to those concerns and how you, doctor, can fix them. It’s very important that you speak to those concerns in a way that’s easy to understand, however. The vast majority of your patients are not medical experts. They don’t know the jargon, and they may need terms defined for them. Don’t treat them like they are stupid in your content, but always remember to use the simplest, most straight-forward way of explaining things that you can.
Just as importantly, keep in mind that your patients are busy people who don’t have time to read something boring that doesn’t answer their questions. People have a limited attention span, particularly for anything on the internet. You need to capture their attention and avoid using dry, difficult “medical-ese.”
Communicating effectively with your patients through your marketing isn’t as difficult as you might think, though it does take practice. If you’d to know more, just contact us! Send us an e-mail at [email protected] or call us at (717) 725-2679.