How to Get More Patients and Make More Money in Your Cash-Based Practice

Whether you’re a brand new provider developing a business plan or a well-established practice with a ton of patients, every healthcare and wellness practitioner has the same goals — to obtain more patients, and to find a way to care for and effectively manage those patients. How do I get more patients (or clients) is one of the most common questions we see.

The key to getting more patients is the same as in every business: growing a health care business requires good marketing! But marketing is more than posting on social media or word of mouth. What your practice may not be leveraging is (a) properly positioning what you currently offer and (b) expanding the offerings within your practice (virtual care, telemedicine, health packages, etc.) to create newer and larger revenue streams.

Recently, the BodySite team sat down with Tyler Tumminelli, founder of HealthClients (a service that helps providers and practice owners get more patients and make more profit per patient), to discuss how healthcare providers can better position their products and services in a way that communicates the value of a provider’s offering to make more revenue. We found some great ideas here and wanted to share them.

First of all, how you communicate what you offer to patients is just as important as what you offer patients. Are you clearly conveying the benefits of your services? Are you expanding your offerings to stay relevant in a competitive market?  Let’s talk about how you might change your approach to align your offering, with your marketing.

Tyler broke down the offering with the communication of the offering into four “P”s of marketing:

– Place
– Product
– Price
– Promotion

It’s likely that you already have a location or place in mind such as an existing office for your practice, but have you really examined all the ways that you can price your products and promote them in a way that makes you stand out from the rest?

Like most providers, marketing probably isn’t your primary area of expertise because you’re focused on improving the health outcomes of your patients.

Tyler unpacked with us a very powerful but simple framework to leverage what you already have, to capture the low-hanging fruit in your existing client base but also go after a whole new set of clients that you’re not marketing to properly, or maybe at all.

One example of a practice that successfully implemented the HealthClients strategies is Dr. Eric Kusher. He runs a medical weight loss clinic and was weighing how to improve marketing in house or with the help of a third party. According to Kusher, he had 60 patients that came onboard within 10 days of implementing this approach. In about 2 weeks, that generated roughly $40k in revenue.

Some of the highlights of the strategy covered in our interview included key concepts that are simple but which most doctors and coaches just don’t consider. One of those concepts is to build your pricing structure for strangers. To grow beyond your referral base into a new client base that has never heard of you before, you need lower the barrier to entry and potential resistance of new clients.

For example, you can have a high-priced consultation fee of $400 or $500 for your referral-based customers because those customers are coming in based upon the referral of an existing customer. There’s already a trust factor. But if you’re going to start to attract customers that are not familiar with you or your offerings, you’re going to need to lower the barrier of entry.

One great way to do that is to offer services of value for as low as $49 or $79 (or even free) to attract them. Equipment-based services are a great example – like a laser therapy or a hyperbaric oxygen therapy or a small assessment that provides a deliverable. It should offer value to the person so you attract them and then you can sell a larger offering or package. Then, you can offer the engaged new customer something in the $1,000 to even $10,000 price point.

What can you sell in that higher price range? Just about anything that is tied to an outcome rather than charging for your time. Just as your marketing should offer prospective clients and patients something that is a value to them, the packages that you sell should be outcome-based so that the patient or client has a vision of what they’re getting from you. Selling 10 sessions of your time is not interesting to a client who has pain or is overweight. On the other hand, patients will pay you thousands of dollars if you’re offering them a package of services and time that will lead to solving their problem.

To leverage the products that you’ve property priced, you need to promote. One strategy to generate leads is to leverage your efforts to gain the attention of three cohorts that Tyler referred to as the “attention trio”. The trio consists of:

– Attention You Rent – paid advertising (Facebook, Google Adwords)
– Attention You Earn – trading time for attention (networking)
– Attention Your Own – your current list and customers

This is an easy model to look at and you need to make sure you’re tapping into each one.

It’s usually best to start with the attention you own:

-active and inactive lists, organic web traffic, etc.

The way to address marketing to customers you already own is through 5 main themes:

1 – Reactivation campaigns (to lead lists and patient lists)

2 – Birthday campaigns (to active patient client lists)

3 – New patient special offer on website with easy ways for them to give you their information

4 – Review campaigns (too happy patients)

5 – Value campaigns (to all of your lists)

Reactivation Campaign

You likely have a list of customers who have already given you permission to contact them by email or text (attention you already OWN).  One great way to get people back in the door is to use your CRM to email and text with emphasis on bulk texting.  Make a “new patient” offer with a discount and send it to your existing list, encouraging the list to act quickly due to limited space AND asking for them to share this with family and friends.

(Make sure you use a software that allows the user to reply STOP to opt out.  This is big source of potential liability in many jurisdictions. )

Birthday Campaign

Another great way to engage the list you have (attention you own) is the birthday campaign. Showing you care about the client makes the offer less about the sale and more about them.

We’ll unpack more of the methods to implement the HealthClients strategies in this blog in the coming days, but to get the most out of our talk with Tyler, we recommend watching the entire video above.

If you’re looking for help with implementing marketing strategies or just business model strategies into your current practice, be sure to give some thought to how you’re offering services in your practice. Nearly every patient you see needs to go home with a guided program that ties it all together. And you need to automate that process or you’ll be chasing your tail and not scaling efficiently to grow your offerings and get more patients.

If you want help pulling all of the pieces together from marketing, to practice management, patient guidance and education, remote monitoring and more, consider our our newest Platinum Tier, which includes content creation services, business support, and access to a host of exclusive offerings. With the Platinum Tier, you can jumpstart your practice’s success by allowing us to help you assemble your customized care plans right inside the BodySite platform so you can offer them and manage them all in one place. Learn more about the Platinum Tier at this link.