4 Ways to Grow Your Practice Like a Startup

For any enterprising and entrepreneurial doctor, it is important to make your presence known. That process should eventually involve a concerted marketing effort, but first you need shift your initial focus to "growth hacking". The goal is having a strong patient panel to market your services to.

"Growth hacking" does not imply any sort of negative connotations that hacking may generally carry; it actually refers to a concentrated, online presence that will build the first few steps to any modern success story.

Here are some powerful, yet simple steps to growth hack your practice: 

1. Identify a Niche: This will take some time, but knowing who to specifically target and developing a USP (unique selling point) will clearly define where and what to post across all Internet forums. Attaining that clairvoyance can yield astounding results. This video by Ramit Sethi and Chase Jarvis describes how to develop a deeper understanding if your market niche.If you are a plastic surgeon who specializes in rhinoplasty, you need to know what ages and gender you typically serve. This will help you better segment who to gear your services towards.

1. Target Market Interaction: This aspect is as straightforward as it gets. Being attentive to what people are posting and commenting about across all relevant Internet forums is essential to properly tuning the communication with the proper target markets.Take it from one of the most trusted sites for reviews, Yelp: “Responding to reviews is a great way to learn from and build goodwill with one of your most vocal customers.” Your goal is to nurture a healthy, symbiotic relationship between your practice and your patients.
2. Start Small, Work Your Way Up: Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither was Facebook; Facebook started out small and grew with increasing interest. That is the best approach to starting an informative and entertaining blog for your medical practice. It also applies to the amount and style of content shared on social media; start slow and gauge interest through likes and comments, then expand accordingly.
3. Search Engine Optimization: After setting up a website, blog, Facebook and Twitter page for any private practice, it’s time to get down to the nitty-gritty of what to write in those various media. Communication on Facebook, Twitter, and the like is mostly habit formation. Whatever you read on a daily basis that is pertinent to your practice can be easily shared through social media buttons.Blog posting can get lost in the haze of the Internet unless you know how to attract viewers. Using keywords consistently throughout all of your digital media can make your online brand, marketing campaign and overall image consistent. Learn how to use keywords in this post.Using specific keywords are used will help drive the right users to your site and help reinforce your expertise throughout the web.

Medicine is changing rapidly with new policies, regulations, and technologies. To stay competitive in a marketplace where many small practices are being acquired by large groups, it’s vital to find ways to grow your practice. Use these creative strategies for achieving consistent organic growth of your patient panel.