Creative Ways To Increase Patient Appointments

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Hey, it is Matt with the Practice Profit System with another edition of our weekly podcast. And today we're going to be talking about creative ways to increase patient appointments. Now, there's 3 factors that go into this, and I'm going to share those with you throughout this podcast and this video. But I want to talk to you about the most common question that I get. And the most common question that I get On a day-in, day-out basis from practice owners all over the US, Canada, now even in the Caribbean and throughout all different places is, Matt, how do I get more patients into my practice? That is usually followed by something like, Matt, I have great training, I have the best machines, I'm the only one in my market that does this, I've used agencies before but the leads were horrible. That is generally the path that that conversation goes. And that probably sounds familiar to you, and that's why I want to talk about this topic on this episode, and that's the creative ways to increase patient appointments. Now, I'm going to give you a roadmap of how to do this. I'm going to go through these very quickly, and I'll give you an opportunity where you can find out a little bit more. If you want to talk with our staff, you can always go to srpmedicalmarketing.com/next. N-E-X-T. That's where you can schedule a call with one of our staff members, and they'll talk to you specifically about your practice, your problems, and help you start putting together a roadmap and some ideas of how you can get that practice humming, get more patients into the practice and all that good stuff. Now, I'm gonna give you these 3 main areas of focus, and these are designed to work with each other, not individually. And that's a really big problem that people have when it comes to marketing and getting more patients into their practice. Most business owners, practice owners treat marketing for new customers as the leper. They focus on one thing, they try to find the one thing They might be trying Facebook ads, or they go, oh, I hear my friend is doing this with Instagram and that's all they do, or TikTok. And what they really don't have is they don't have a plan or a strategy. What they have is it's kind of like trying to fix a patient that is overweight with just giving them one pill, okay, instead of actually having them lose the weight or do the exercise. So if you just run Facebook ads, or you just focus on SEO, or only invest small amounts waiting for results, You're going to struggle. So I'm going to address these issues. And here's the good news is these first 2 are going to fund the final one that will help you. That is going to be the paid advertising. So what are they? Let's dive right into these right away. The first is, here's the first way to grow the number of patients into your practice without breaking your bank. First one is step number 1, market to your existing list of patients, prospects, and leads. Matt, I've already done that. Yeah, I hear that too. We just ran a sale and nobody bought. Well, we do that and we do a buy 1, get 2 free. That's not what I'm talking about at all, okay? Patients, or you might say, or Matt, my patients are mostly Medicare, Medicaid, and they don't have any money. So I like to always answer these questions with a little bit of a story. So we have one of our coaching groups, it's called Business Mastery Fellowship. We meet every Wednesday and we go through the 12 steps in order to grow your practice, our stairway system, the whole deal. And I had one of my doctors in there who's in Hawaii, and he was like, oh well, you know, I checked the pricing of what everybody else charges for PRP, and most people are charging $600, and we're charging— I think it was $1,000 or $1,200. So we're already at the top of the market, so I really don't think we have anything that we can do there. And everybody in the group chimed in and said, no, no, no, no, you got to charge more, you got to charge more. And it was really great because my other doctor started chiming in and coaching that doctor on how to How to market to his list, and so the first thing was is that oh you got to increase your prices. Okay, so second thing he goes well my patients are mostly Medicare and Medicaid, so I'm not going to market to them. And everybody's like no no no no no no no Matt told me to market to those people, and I thought he was crazy, and it worked. Well, what is it that worked to get people with Medicare and Medicaid to be able to buy? Well, we've perfected a little process that we call the 5130, and it works in every single practice that I've plugged it into. Now, do we have some practices that it doesn't work? Yes, but it's usually because. They don't follow the steps that I'm going to outline for you right now. So the first is, is you have a list of patients. If you have a list of at least 100 patients, you should make at least $5,000 running this program, okay? You're going to send a series of 4 emails out, no images, no logo, no graphics, nothing. It's just a text email, and basically the concept is, is you're sending out to your list that you're looking for 5 people that want to fix one thing in the next 30 days. So what's the one thing? Well, it depends on what you do. Perform, fix their ED, or fix their, or stop their hot flashes with menopause, or really significantly reduce their joint pain. Whatever it is that you do, okay, you're going to put that into there, and then you wait for them to respond. Now here's the kicker: not only wait for them to respond, but when they respond, then you email them back again asking for them to call you, okay? So what we're doing is there's a psychological thing that goes on where we're making them jump hurdles to get to them. And like I said, for every 100 names, you should have $5,000 in sale, maybe a little bit more. Now, which leads me to my second part. The cool thing about it is this process actually will then create the money that you need to do the next 2 steps. Okay? So, you're not going to be reaching into your pocket marketing anymore. You're going to be increasing the number of patients coming into the practice. And you might be thinking, but Matt, I need more new patients.

No.

The best customer, the best prospect is somebody who already knows you, which leads me to my second point. And the second point is you have to educate your prospects and be the expert in your market for the thing. Okay, now this is a variation of what I call the beachhead strategy. No, be known for one message, one thing in the market, one message to one market with one offer. Okay, don't be the expert at everything, be the expert at one thing. You need plumber. You have a plumbing issue. Who do you call? A carpenter? No, you call a plumber. You have a neurological issue. Do you go to the? Do you go to cardiologist? No, you go to a neurological expert. You who? That's what I want you. How I want you to think of this. So you got to be known as the thing. Okay. So most people have their lead generation advertising backwards. They run ads hoping people will request an appointment and buy. Those leads are of low value, low trust, and rarely make big purchases. They are very cold leads, and I call them. Eskimo leads. No offense to Eskimos. Okay, the key is for you to be seen as the expert in your market for the thing you fixed. Okay, again, think ED, think joint pain, think menopause. We have a process for finding exactly what people want to know and turning that into content that educates your prospect so when they come in, they're ready, willing, and able to buy. So here's an example. You can pause this podcast and go to Google.

Go on.

Well, I'll still be here. Okay, go to Google. You got Google open in front of you. I want you to type in the search bar, how to fix my knee pain without surgery. Go on, I'll wait. Okay, now what pops up? What do you see? Well, you probably see a bunch of ads, right, uh, for some national brands, maybe some over-the-counter pain relief. Maybe you see like the copper knee brace thing or whatever it is. But if you scroll down a little bit, I want you to look for a section called People Also Ask, okay? Now, this tells you what people want to know about the topic that you just Googled. Now, your job is to educate those prospects on that, on those topics with video, print, audio. Now, what I like to do is I like to do something once and then use it numerous different times. This is my podcast. So I record this with video, and this has turned into snippet videos. It goes on YouTube. We run ads. We get people to listen to the podcast. We send it out to our list.

Right?

We take something that we create one time and we use it 10 different ways. Now, if you're struggling with this, contact our office. We can show you how to do it, or you can contact and reach out to one of our partner companies that we work with, and that is Feed Stories. And Feed Stories is experts at doing this kind of thing with creating short little videos. Or if you want something more in-depth like what we do, again, contact our office at srpmedicalmarketing.com/next. And our staff can put you in contact with our team that does this. Okay, what this does is this gets people to your site to consume the video, which leads me to my next evil trick. Now you're going to post this not just on YouTube and all those other places, but you're going to post it on your page. Okay, now your Wayne site. Now this is the next cool thing that happens when you run ads to people who watch this stuff, or they come to your site. You can put a your web person can put some code on there and we're going to retarget them. And we can retarget them on Google, Google Display Network, Facebook, YouTube, all these places so that you have an ad that pops up. Now think about this. When you go to Amazon and you look at buying the latest greatest pair of shoes or fishing gear or golf clubs or whatever, that ad follows you around. That's called retargeting. Now the quality of this has changed a little bit with what's called iOS 14 Basically, a lot of the privacy stuff has limited some of this retargeting, but the bottom line is, is it still works. And there's a lot of really cool places that you can do it. So when you go around, people are seeing your ad to come in because they already know, like, and trust you. They've consumed your video. They've done something with you. So they have a little bit of understanding of who you are. Now they see your ad. Now you're only serving that ad up to a small group of people that have already been in contact with you. And now you can start to nurture that relationship. So we're switching this around. This is why front-end advertising with Facebook leads doesn't work very well, okay? Because if people don't know you, they don't like you, they don't trust you. So when you get your prospect to consume lots of information, and this information is about them, it's not about you, it's not about you and all your great training that you had or where you went to med school or how great your machine is. No, it's about the prospects Pain. Go back to that segment where I just talked to you about how you Google. What are they looking for? People, when their knee hurts, they go, how do I fix my knee pain? That's what they do. They don't go, who's got a really cool PRP machine? Or who gets the highest platelet count per millions or billions? Like, they don't do that. They don't do that like the way we do. Think about what your prospect says, your patient says when they walk in. My knee hurts. Can you make it stop? That's what they say. And that's what they're Googling. Okay. So now we're able to retarget them. These are really, really low-cost ads. These leads convert at a very high level. They come in and they're ready to buy. They're educated. And so there you go. Now here's the really cool thing about this. This is a continuous circle, okay? So we start up at the top and we're going to market to our existing list. That's going to generate revenue so that we can get videos done inexpensively and professionally so that we can post it out on the internet. And then we're going to drive traffic to those videos and things like that and only retarget the people that watch videos. It's all really simple and it's all really inexpensive and they all fund themselves so that you're not having to reach in your pocket. Now, this is a foolproof way for you to increase the number of patients that come into your practice. It's that simple, okay? So you're going to market to your existing list of patients, prospects, and leads. You're going to generate some cash off of that in 30 days. You're going to then create videos and content and things of that nature to educate your market so that they know that you are the expert because you understand their pain. And then you retarget the visitors to your site to book an appointment. That's simple. Okay, very simple, foolproof way. And by the way, if you have an agency that isn't recommending that you do this and they're just running ads for you online, get rid of them. All right. You can check us, you can talk to our team a little bit more by going to srpmedicalmarketing.com/next. We offer 30-minute consultation calls with our team to kind of just talk about your practice and see how we can help you move forward. If we're a great fit, great. We'll be more than happy to coach you through the process. Again, we don't run the advertising. We actually just help you. We help you get the results that you need. Okay. It's that simple. And if we're not a fit, then we're going to point you in the direction of somebody that will be. How about that? Now, that's a really good deal. All right. I'm Matt Gallogly. This is the Practice Profit System. I thank you so much for taking a little time out of your busy day to listen to this. And I hope this has helped you come up with some creative ways to increase patient appointments in your practice so you can get paid what you're worth and take more time off. Have a great day, everybody. See ya.

Thank you so much for listening. If you liked this episode, take a moment and share it with your fellow medical professionals. Or post a positive comment and rate it on wherever you just listened. Now don't forget, you can get a copy of my book, The Anatomy of a 7-Figure Medical Practice, for free. Just pay $7.95 in shipping and handling, plus you'll get over $1,197 in free bonus material. Simply go to srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. That's srpmedicalmarketing.com/book. Thank you so much, and we'll see you next time.