If you are an entrepreneurial plastic surgeon operating your own practice, it is very likely you’ve been approached by marketers touting Search Engine Optimization or other types of advertising with offers promising to deliver more traffic to your business.
The majority of small businesses like yours often buy the hype only to find that for the most part, the squeeze just isn’t worth the juice.
Why?
Because the reality is that getting more traffic for your plastic surgery clinic does not automatically translate to more happiness for you. There might be more sales (debatable) but almost certainly there will be disappointment with your end results if the focus stops solely with driving traffic, whether we’re talking SEO, Facebook, Yelp! or even the lowly billboard.
Here’s a few dirty little secrets most small business owners don’t know about driving traffic:
- Roughly 95% of the real visitors you paid for to visit your website leave, never to return. And, you will have absolutely no idea who they were, even if you use retargeting pixels.
- Other forms of traffic (i.e. FB, Yelp, Groupon types, etc.,) often deliver the worst kinds of potential patients. You know, the nit-picking looky-loos, and the complainers that leave a 2-star review, even when they freely admit that your service was stellar, who also will never refer a soul to your doorstep.
- You end up paying for so many ad sources that you don’t know exactly which strategy is producing exactly the type of client you want, and worse, you can’t improve results due to a fear of futzing up the one thing that might be bringing in patients.
If this feels like what’s happening in your business, trust me, more traffic from SEO or PPC or whatever will not help get your business to the level you want it to be.
So, exactly what IS needed to make sure your investments in ads to get more patient traffic actually make your business and life better overall?
If your practice is missing any of the following elements, spending money on online marketing (or really any type of marketing) won’t help you meet your goals.
If your business doesn’t have a clear way to:
*Gather all possible information about any lead that might trip up onto your digital doorstep,
*Determine if that lead is your preferred patient type, and then
*Fill your pipeline with only the best leads that you want to fill your life with…
…then you have to really ask yourself: “What’s the point of throwing any money at all into getting random traffic?”
Spending money to drive more traffic into a suboptimal lead system is like doing this:
No one wants leak money if they can help it, right?
So, how do you make certain your marketing dollars are working as hard as possible for you?
First, stop any and all leaks in your lead gathering and management system. This means you need to clearly understand your business’ patient entry points, management system, and referral system and then work to optimize them. Do you know all the potential points of entry (and therefore, potential future failure) in your lead system?
Second, clearly identify the sources of your best leads. Once you get your best patient type in the door you’ll need to interrogate them painfully and thoroughly (just kidding, well… maybe…) to understand what drives them so you can know which traffic sources are producing your perfect patient type. Do you know the exact type of customer you wish to attract and which you prefer to avoid.. and how to get them?
Third, invest more money only in those sources you discovered during your illegal water boarding of your best patients, and reduce investment in the sources that drag your business down. Do you know which keywords produce the patients and procedures you want spend your life hours on? Do you have an automated way to ensure you attract more of their type?
Last, create an ever-increasing loop by religiously asking your favorite, but now exhausted patients for referrals and reviews, while also sending them coupons that give them many reasons to come in more often. (If you just do this alone, you’ll solve a myriad of revenue/patient type problems but it will take a bit more time to get the snowball effect.)
If you already know what your marketing dollars are doing behind your back then you’re likely up to your neck rolls in wealth. But your competitor who might be reading this article now will most certainly have you in their sights soon.
If you cannot say Yes!! to the questions above, then you can probably use some help getting your clinic to thrive exactly how you vision tells you it should. Just don’t spend more money blindly hoping to drive the right patient leads until you have rock solid answers to the questions above.
If you want help getting the answers you need to drive your business exactly where you want it to go, just click the following link to have a short chat with me here: Let’s Have a Quick Strategy Chat — The info is free, takes about 20 minutes of meeting time to relay, and about a couple hours for your staff to implement, but could be worth a lot of bottom line income to your clinic.