Maximize Your Practice Profits with These 7 Secrets

Use these eye care practice growth strategies to attract more patients and increase your profits…

What a great Clubhouse meeting we had discussing this important topic of growing your eye care practice profits. Thank you Dr. Darryl Glover, Jr. for co-moderating this room on December 28th, 2020. I look forward to many more to come.

Maximize Your Practice Profits with These 7 Secrets
here are the notes…

1. Quick win
   • Have your scheduling team member pre-appoint every patient as they check out (you can do this easily with your EMR/EHR scheduling software), plus…
   • Add a family member with every phone call stressing the importance of annual eye exams (here’s an example script: “now that we’ve scheduled your annual eye exam, Mrs. Smith, is there anyone else in your household that you’d like to schedule for their annual eye exam?”)
   • Stress the importance of annual eye exams with every patient point of contact
     • upon their first phone call with your office,
     • at their check-in,
     • during the pretesting (for example, a pretest script can include a phrase like “Mrs. Smith, now I’m going to be performing your annual [name of test] evaluation…”),
     • during the exam,
     • at the optical hand-off,
     • upon check-out, and
     • with every reminder phone call 
2. Define and understand your “ideal patient”
   • Remember the phrase, “If you market to everyone, you market to no one” – don’t be afraid to get specific!
     • Is it usually the mom/wife/female in the family who makes the appointments?
     • Is there a sports enthusiast ideal patient that would love to up their game?
     • Is it the mom of a student that’s always struggled in school?
     • Make sure to brainstorm with your staff all of the different ideal patient possibilities.
   • This allows you to truly understand their pain points and, thus, where to find them, how to speak their language, and how to be relevant, relatable, remarkable, and timely with your marketing messages. It also allows you to decide how you’re going to transform their lives with your specialized products and services.
   • It also allows you to focus on getting the word out about your (sub)specialty(-ies).
   • It allows you to develop new products and services.
   • Create an ideal persona of your favorite patient(s) (you know, those patients that show up on time, never complain, return for their follow-up appointments and annual exams, refer all of their family and friends, and buy multiple products and services!); you can also make up a profile that would fit an ideal persona. Use this form to create your ideal patients. Remember, you’ll probably have at least 3-5 ideal patients if you have multiple (sub)specialties and generations. Create a persona for each one.
3. Get to the top of Google for your location
   • It’s imperative to maximize and optimize your Google business listing – fill it out completely including pictures and videos of you, your staff, your office location, products you sell, services you provide, and happy patients (make sure to obtain legal authorization when using images that include patients).
   • It’s also imperative to get as many 5 star reviews as possible.
   • Optimize your listing and website/blog posts/social media for the phrases: “your location” + … (and vice-versa)
     • Optometrist
     • Eye doctor
   • Make sure to use geolocation/geotagging and location hashtags on your images, videos, and social media posts in the appropriate fields (where available) when posting to social media.
4. (SEO) Optimizing website, blog posts, Social media platforms, etc for visibility
   • Start first with the above information (#3).
   • SEO is NOT about “tricking the system” – it’s about writing exceptional content that’s relevant to your “ideal patient’s” lifestyles, and about solving their problems or elevating their statuses.
   • Use real images from your practice, you, your staff, and your patients (get written permission, of course!).
   • Make sure your content uses keywords that have “Search intent” (“how” “why” “what”; “buy”; “how much”; Directions, reviews, practice hours). When potential patients use these types of phrases, they are often more ready to purchase something from you or make an appointment with your office than just casually typing in “eye doctor.”
   • Add your practice’s local address to the footer of EVERY page and on EVERY online platform that you use.
   • Make sure your CTA (call to action – “book an appointment,” “schedule an appointment online,” “download this cheatsheet,” etc.) is front and center, along with your telephone number! So many websites do NOT do this!
   • THEN write long-tail keyword articles for specific problem-solving products, solutions, and specialties: remember to word these in ways your patients would express (eg. “Why do my eyes hurt after working on a computer all day?” Vs. “computer vision syndrome”). This will ALSO help you get to the top of Google’s Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) when potential patients type in these search intent phrases. When you commit to writing educational articles and/or newsletters, it’s a great idea to commit to a certain day of the week or month and stick to that schedule. It’s more important to be consistent than to push out higher quantities.
5. Hire or enlist a local micro-influencer (10k-100k engaged followers) to promote your products/services (this is especially easy with subspecialties)
   • Find out who in your geographic location has been a satisfied/raving fan patient of yours that also has a following of between 10k-100k ENGAGED followers (vital that they are engaged!).
   • Find out someone who is not a patient of yours with the above qualifications and offer them an eye exam and “wow” them.
   • Offer them ethically to pay or give them something they can rave about to their audience with a call to action.
   • Check out this blog post for more information about using micro-influencers to grow your practice.
6. Follow the “Professional Referral Program”
   • Look outside the “typical” referrals (other ODs, primary eye care doctors, and/or current patients) for people, C-suite corporate leaders, NPOs, etc. that have your ideal patients as part of their communities.
   • Reward those who refer – include a nice gift from a local small business (if allowed by state law) and a hand-written letter.
   • Make sure to send a HIPAA-compliant follow-up letter to your medical referral resources, as allowed by law.
7. Implement the “Patient Retention System”
   • Pre-appoint everyone,
   • Follow up w those that don’t pre-appoint with a phone call right after their missed appointments, then send a fun postcard 1 week later, etc.,
   • Periodically audit your inactive patient files and try to reactivate them,
   • Repeat step #1.
8. [BONUS] Start with Video
   • Create several 3-5 minute videos for a total of 1-2 hours of video, or more if you have the time (I have an entire content marketing plan around this – keep an eye out for more details in a later post or contact me for a customized consultation),
   • Make sure the content is relevant for your ideal patient,
   • Send the videos to rev.com to be transcribed,
   • Chop up the videos into multiple pieces of micro-content,
   • Then schedule, and share the micro-content over several weeks or months on all of your platforms.
   • Just a few hours of your time, once per quarter, can go a long way for your content. You can even delegate the editing and social media postings to one of your staff members.
9. [BONUS not discussed in the document or room] Automatic Marketing Machine
   • Create a marketing/sales funnel with a FREE offering (please check your state laws and speak with a HIPAA compliance attorney) that leads to a scheduling link. The sales part of this process happens when your front desk staff member schedules an appointment on the phone or when you or your staff sell products or further services in the practice.
   • Example: When a potential patient opts-in for your lead-generating offer, they get a short thank-you page and then your automated texting “assistant” will send a text (again, check your state laws and HIPAA-compliance laws)… make sure there’s a delay to go out during normal practice hours so it doesn’t look robotic (some marketers even include grammatical errors to look like it’s from someone at the practice!!!); when the potential patient responds to the automated text, you’ll get the text from them!

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