Grow Your Practice Podcast

How effectively are you targeting patient list with promotions? Are you looking to attract more patients while decreasing your ad spend? Let’s find or target the segment of our past patient lists that respond to our mailings and then focus our ad spend on them. Now this is where the Recency principle comes into play: The first and easiest way segment your past patients is based off of how long they’ve been on the list…or how recent of a customer they are A simple exercise is to find out people that respond to your ad and then go back and plot on a timeline and see when those people were patients. What you should find is that the actual respondents to your promotions are typically going to be newer patients. They are more recent on the timeline. If somebody came to you for physical therapy, let’s say it was 10 years ago, they are less likely to respond than somebody who came to you 3 months ago. That is the Recency Principle in action. You can use that. So we can go back and find the cut off point on our timeline for the higher responding patients. For my example, we will eliminate maybe 2,000 names. So now you are only mailing 3,000. But these are 3,000 that are the most likely to respond…they are more targeted. Always remember a buyer is a buyer.

Problem: How To Attract Seniors But Not Medicare Solution: A simple, yet effective formula that you can use in your ad to not only attract who you want to attract, but also to repel who you want to repel. Anyways, I got this question from Practice Owner Hina Sheth asking… “We are a cash-based practice that does not take Medicare. From the pics and posts it seems like many of the workshops that are successful are attracting seniors. Any tips to attract patients that are not Medicare?” That’s a really good question…all of us want more patients but we also want patients that can pay us (since some of us don’t accept Medicare) Killer Marketing member Dave Wilderman responded to Hina and said… “Same problem with me, Hina. I did not designate an age range in my first attempt at a newspaper insert. I got 27 responses, 25 of whom were Medicare. So my next ad I just put at the top ‘If you are between the ages of 35 and 64, this workshop will specifically benefit you.’ It goes in the Sunday paper on Easter so we will see what kind of response I get.” DAVE NAILED IT. Dave played off of what we talked about in last week’s blog, which was how can I attract seniors… It is the same exact principles except the facts are changed a little bit here. Facts Can Change. Principles Always Stay The Same.

The question: How do I attract seniors to my practice for physical therapy? First off, I think this can be a really loaded question, but I am going to break it down for you using a very simple principle that you can use in marketing your private practice going forward. Whether you want Direct Access, Out-of-Network or Cash Pay, whatever that may be relative to seniors, this is how you want to look at it… The first thing that we are going to do is take a look at is something that I’ve blogged about in the past… Dan Kennedy’s triangle of Market-Message-Media Match. We need to define the market, then we need to craft the message to that market. Finally, we need to deliver that message using the correct media for that particular market.