Five Cost-Effective Ways to Grow Your Practice

Even the most well-established practice can struggle to find ways to grow their business and acquire more patients. Oftentimes, this is due to budgetary constraints, especially in a market where profit margins can be thin and even more so for practices that are already overextended with new investments. However, there are plenty of ways to grow your practice without breaking the bank. In this blog, we will go over a number of cost-effective measures that you can employ to help grow your business.

Identify Your Target Clients

One great way to make your search for more patients as effective as possible is to figure out who your patients tend to be. To do so, use your EHR and/or practice management to run demographic reports on your patient population. You should look at a number of important factors, such as age, gender, occupation and location. You can then use this data to target your marketing efforts, strategies and spend to the right audience which will bring in more patients.

Find Your Practice’s Differentiator (and Promote It)

What differentiates your practice from any other practice out there? Why is your practice special? To stand out from your competition, you need to figure out what makes your practice unique and then tell people about it. For example, is your practice known for doing great mommy makeovers? Perhaps your practice is a big supporter of a popular charity or offers “emotional support animals” to help nervous patients feel more comfortable. Whatever it is that makes your practice stand out above the crowd, find it and flaunt it.

Get Involved in the Local Community

An aggressive community outreach program is probably one of the least costly and most effective ways to grow your practice. People like the idea of being patrons to businesses that give back to the community. This can be done in any number of ways. For example, supporting fundraisers at local schools or sponsoring a local athletics team. Participate in a local parade by hosting a float. The possibilities are almost endless. Check out this great example of how Boling Vision Center, a Nextech client, increased its sales with community outreach in this past blog post.

Social Media & Patient Engagement 

Social media has become a very common platform for what is basically “free advertising.” To remain relevant these days, almost any business needs to be active on social media. This is just as true for healthcare practices. However, this requires consistent and frequent posting. You should post at least a few times a week, with a variety of materials such as staff photos, practice news, patient updates and procedure showcases. Having an active online presence will also encourage clients to post online reviews and can even slightly improve your search engine rankings. There are also marketing automation systems that can assist with this, such as Nextech partner Podium. Your practice might also consider using a solution that offers free accounts, such as Hootsuite.

Promote Convenience-Adding Technology

If your practice already has up-to-date technology that provides patients with digital and online options, that is great. However, such tools will not help grow your business if you fail to make sure people know about them. This includes both current and potential patients. You should be “shouting from the rooftops” about such features, promoting anything and everything your practice offers to make life easier for patients such as patient portal, online appointment scheduling, online payments, telehealth and other such solutions.

Expanding your practice sometimes has more to do with the amount of effort you are willing to put into it than it does with how much money you are willing to spend. With a little initiative and planning and using the strategies outlined in this blog, you can expand your practice without draining your bank account.

To discover how Nextech can help your practice develop and implement cost-effective growth strategies, fill out this form and a member of our team will be in touch!