Learn How to Identify Your Ideal Patients to Grow Your Eye Care Practice
Instead of asking yourself “how can I attract everyone in my city or town”, ask “who is my ideal patient avatar?” In order to identify your ideal patients to grow your eye care practice, you’ll want to think about patients you already have, or patients you wish you had, that:
- Paid on time
- Return for their annual exams consistently
- Buy multiple products and services (2nd pair eyeglasses, sunglasses, extra lens treatments, vision therapy, etc.)
- Refer their friends and family regularly
- Give you testimonials for your online marketing
After reading the above, you probably already have one or two in mind!
There’s an old marketing saying that is even more relevant today than ever:
“If you market to everyone, you market to no one!”
Unless you learn to get specific about who it is you really want to attract to your practice, you’ll be wasting your time with your marketing efforts.
You’ll want to create ideal patient avatar profiles that include things like: where they live (eg. define their zip code, how old they are (not a range, but an actual age), what gender they are, what they look like, if they are married and have children, what their occupations and incomes are, what hobbies they have, where they hang out online, what kind of books they read, what pain points/problems they may have that you could solve with your products and services, and more.
If you really begin to understand your patients, know how they talk and what their lifestyles are like, you become more relevant, relatable, remarkable, and timely to them. This is how you build trust — in marketing, to move a potential patient from “cold” (they don’t know who you are, they’ve never heard about you so how would they possibly make an appointment with you) to “warm” (they may have heard your name from a friend or online somehow, they still won’t make an appointment as they don’t know enough about you) to “hot” (they have heard, read, or seen enough about you that they are ready to make an appointment with you — or, maybe they even have already become a patient of yours but are not sure what to buy from you yet!), you have to get them to know, like, and trust you. The only way to do that is by understanding them and meeting them where they are! Market to them in ways that are relevant to their needs, that relate to them, and that they feel is remarkable and makes sense for their time.
I’ll have a lot more information on this in future articles. Just know that you need to start researching and understanding your ideal patient avatar(s) — you may have many depending on any specialties you may provide.
To make it easy for you, I have included the following form. Upon submission, you’ll receive your answers via email. Keep your ideal patient avatar results close by so that, every time you want to write a piece of content for your blog or social media platforms, or create an advertising piece, you will write the content as though you are speaking directly to that ideal patient.
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