Are you looking for ways to boost your medical practice’s revenues?
You’re not alone. Since the COVID-19 pandemic reached our shores, physician practice revenues have dropped about 32 percent. Such a significant revenue drop will significantly impact your practice’s profitability.
Or perhaps you’re in the process of setting up your medical practice and want to generate revenues right away.
Regardless of your situation, you’ve come to the right place. This article shares a handful of revenue-generation strategies you should implement.
Read on!
1. Ensure Your Practice Provides High-Quality Healthcare Services
When patients come to your medical practice, they expect to receive high-quality services. This touches on everything from front-office services like appointment scheduling and billing to patient care.
Offering satisfactory services is key to maximizing your revenues. Satisfied clients are more likely to recommend your practice to people in their circles. This is how word-of-mouth marketing works, and it’s one of the most effective ways to get new patients to your practice.
The key to offering high-quality services is to hire people with great people skills and train them to improve their customer service skills. If a would-be client calls your practice number and finds a receptionist with excellent communication and interpersonal skills, they will have one less reason not to book an appointment.
Ensure the healthcare practitioners in your medical clinic are genuinely compassionate and competent. A patient will remember how a doctor or nurse made them feel, which will determine whether they return to your practice again.
2. Find an Ideal Location for Your Practice
Although telemedicine is gradually becoming standard, medical practices are still predominantly walk-in businesses. Many patients will discover your clinic mainly by seeing a signpost as they go about their day.
This is why it’s super important to base your practice in a location that makes it visible to as many people as possible. If you’re located in a place that many people don’t frequent, you’re not going to get as many walk-in clients as you’d like. Yet, to maximize revenue, you must increase the number of patients.
When choosing a location, don’t just focus on the population. Think about your target market.
Setting up your practice in an area buzzing with college students is of little value if your practice’s target market is mainly boomers. Ideally, you’d want a boomer-targeting clinic in an area with many retirement communities.
3. Build a Professional Website for Your Practice
Even in today’s digital world, some businesses don’t have a website. Just because healthcare facilities are walk-in businesses doesn’t mean your practice doesn’t need a website. In fact, if you don’t have a website, you’re leaving a lot of money on the table, and here’s why.
The vast majority of healthcare consumers now start their search for a healthcare facility on a search engine. This means someone will go to Google and search “physician’s office near me.” Without a website, it’s unlikely that your practice’s details will show up in search engine results.
Invest in a high-quality, user-friendly website optimized for search engines. Users should easily see your services, contact the practice if needed, and book an appointment on your website.
In addition to building a website and as part of your medical practice marketing strategy, create a practice listing on Google My Business. A GMB profile is great for local SEO. Your practice will appear in Google’s search results when people search for medical practices in your location.
4. Maintain a Positive Digital Reputation
Did you know over 70 percent of patients read online doctor/ practice reviews before deciding whether to make a physical visit or book an online appointment?
If your practice lacks online reviews, it will lack social proof. A person who has heard about your clinic and is planning to visit can change their mind if they or search for the clinic on the web and can’t find any reviews.
And if your practice has reviews, most of them should be positive ones. Negative reviews can do irreparable harm. Not many people would want to visit a clinic whose past patients have had bad experiences.
Although not everyone will say nice about your practice, the goal is to maintain a positive reputation. Offering high-quality services is one way to ensure your practice gets good reviews, but it’s also essential to hire a digital reputation specialist. This professional will design and implement an online reputation management strategy to build your practice’s reputation on the web.
5. Invest in a Lead Generation Service
There are over 230,000 medical practices across the United States. Factor in the number of hospitals and other healthcare facilities, and you’ll quickly realize how competitive the market is. Even if yours is a specialty practice, like a cardiology clinic, you’ll still see intense competition from other clinics offering the same service.
Attracting new patients can be an uphill task — even after you’ve implemented most of the strategies above. Plus, as a healthcare practitioner, you don’t have the time to focus on client attraction and revenue generation.
This is where lead generation services become handy. There are companies whose primary focus is to generate leads for medical practices. All you need is to buy their service, and you’ll get a list of potential clients.
Check out Click Automations | Medical Marketing Strategies to learn more about these lead generation services.
Generate Revenue and Grow Your Practice
At the end of the day, a medical practice is a business. The practice will inevitably grind to a halt if you don’t generate revenue. The good news is that you can implement several strategies to increase medical practice revenue.
All the best, and keep reading our blog for more business tips and advice.