New Patient Marketing

The medical industry is a bit of an odd ball in regards to marketing. In most industries, if you refer a new client or customer to a different company, it is reasonable to expect some exchange, incentive or reward for such a gesture. This is done above board, and you don’t expect to be exposed on “60 Minutes” or something like that for receiving a “finder’s fee,” “bird dog” or commission.

Needless to say, the inability to do so in the medical industry puts you at a disadvantage. The only incentive is full customer (patient) satisfaction that the referring source hopefully gets to find out about. How do you accomplish this?  By getting the patient to express their satisfaction with their rehabilitation services in a format that can be reproduced. So, that is one principle that you need to figure out how to apply, for your practice and patient population.

Another aspect aside from patient satisfaction but not disrelated, is the ability to get the patient to refer their friends and family who may be in need of your services as well. When I say that this is not disrelated, it is best illustrated by this example:  You go to a restaurant downtown and find that their service is poor, their bathroom is not clean and the food is not very appealing. Later on, your mother calls you to ask if you know any good restaurant downtown because she wants to meet with her friends there. Would you tell her to go to the one we mentioned above? Most likely not.

Again, you would need to work out how to consistently get the patient to refer their friends and family. In our experience, we have helped thousands of clients to concentrate their new patient marketing efforts in the two points above. We have a full map to do so, of course, but two of the basics are above.