One of the challenges that many eye care practitioners face is getting more patients to walk into their clinics. Your family and friends may come through to help you in one way or another, especially if you have a newly opened clinic, but that is not enough to keep your practice active and running. What can help you is a good marketing strategy and putting that into practice. Read further to learn the best marketing tips that can help your eye clinic thrive.
Marketing and promoting eye care businesses can be tricky and confusing for many practitioners. As simple as where to start with your marketing can be a struggle for most, let alone deciding on the methods, platforms, and strategies to use. Nonetheless, marketing is important, and even more important is doing it the right way.
Here are the top 5 marketing tips to help your eye clinic thrive.
Tip #1 – Establish the market you want to target and focus on.
This is an essential part of marketing because establishing your target audience can give you a clear direction to focus your attention. You need to identify your existing patients and the ideal patients you want to attract to your clinic. You can do this by checking your clinical data, or you can use a marketing tool. Several types of data can help you promote your practice, which includes:
- Basic data that shows the demographics of your patients such as their name, age, zip code, interests, employers, and referrals.
- Clinical data that shows the reason your patients visit you, their appointment history, and more.
- Practice level data that shows retail optical metrics, revenue earned from each provider, any codes billed, and so on.
Once you retrieve this information, it becomes easier to organize a personalized marketing plan that is most suitable for your eye care practice. For example, if most of your patients are children, you can run a campaign targeting those who wear glasses (targeted towards their parents but focusing on children’s optometry).
Tip #2 Come up with a marketing plan.
As the saying goes, “A goal without a plan is just a wish.” That means you can’t aim to achieve something you’re not prepared for. Your marketing plan is your guiding template, which is why it is important to have one. It doesn’t have to be complicated — even a simple plan is much better than having no plan at all. Consider including the following points in your marketing plan.
- Decide who your target audience is by paying attention to people’s wants, needs, and pain points.
- Offer a unique and valuable proposition so that people are compelled to visit your clinic rather than choosing any of your competitors.
- Analyze your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.
- Have your marketing goals coordinated with your business goals.
- Figure out the dedicated budget for your monthly spending and where to utilize it.
- Assess marketing collaterals and the merchandise you need for your clinic. (Pro Tip: start your eye care clinic’s blog)
Tip #3 Decide your marketing strategies.
Marketing methods have grown beyond advertising in a newspaper, local magazines, radio, and television. More businesses are opting to go with digital marketing because it is fuss-free and result-oriented. Digital marketing may be unfamiliar territory for you, but there’s nothing to worry about. Focus on the following helpful points.
Social media marketing: This is the most popular way of marketing for all types of businesses. Many healthcare providers are already using social media to attract more followers and patients to their clinics. Social media channels such as Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and the like have great potential for connecting you with your prospective patients quickly.
It is best to share content regularly on your social media in the form of pictures and videos. Your posts should be informative and creative to draw people’s attention. Using well-performing hashtags and publishing at the right time is also essential to increase your post’s reach. But when you have to run a clinic and put in hours to your practice, there’s hardly any time to manage your social media marketing. This is why it is best to automate your social media with a marketing tool.
Another advantage of using a social media marketing tool is that it helps you run multiple ad campaigns on Google and social media platforms, connecting you with the right patients for your clinic at the right time. Remember, 74% of people search for eye care services on Google before booking an appointment!
Email marketing: It is a time-consuming process to collect emails from your prospective patients, but once you have them, you can promote your clinic and services directly through emails. Studies have shown that email marketing has a better conversion rate when compared to other types of marketing. Pro Tip: try driving more traffic to your website and put up a form to sign up for updates or a newsletter on each page to collect data from your visitors.
Text message marketing: If you have not explored text message marketing, now is the time to do it. According to a study, 90% of people open every single text message they receive.
Tip #4 Comply with rules.
Put your creative marketing ideas for your eye care clinic into practice but don’t forget to comply with rules and regulations. Keep in mind the following points.
- Remove any Protected Health Information (PHI) from your patient that is a part of your marketing unless you have signed authorization from them to use it. There are 18 types of PHI that can lead to the identification of a patient, as stated by HIPAA.
- Make sure to sign a business associate agreement (BAA) if you use a third-party marketing company.
- Do not advertise that you’ll waive co-pays or deductibles, as it can result in violations of the False Claims Act and the Anti-Kickback Statute.
Tip #5 Analyze your marketing efforts.
How do you know if your marketing efforts are working? You need to measure them. Analysis can give important insights into the techniques that are working best for your clinic and the ones that are not performing as well. The below-mentioned metrics are the ones you should be measuring:
- The number of your website visitors.
- The performance of your posts and ads.
- The open, clickthrough, and conversion rates of your email marketing campaigns.
- Your clinic’s ranking on a search engine.
- Your patient acquisition cost and retention rate.
- Overall evaluation of each marketing campaign.
Final words
All the tips shared here are important and can contribute to the success of your marketing efforts. Although, you can get started with social media marketing for your eye clinic, which is the easiest way to connect with your target audience and convert them into your patients.
A low-cost system like Practina can be your personal marketing team that you can take on the go since it is available as a mobile app as well. This user-friendly ai social media marketing tool is result-oriented, time-saving, and easily accessible to all.
Sign up with Practina today to see what it can do for your eye care practice.
