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PRACTICE MANAGEMENT
Approaches to marketing during COVID and beyond
The COVID-19 pandemic has no doubt affected every osteopath in Australia. For many, it’s driven them to rethink how to promote their practices. In this article, Alan Zaia outlines some effective marketing strategies that osteopaths can introduce and implement both to bring in new patients and to engage their current patients during COVID and beyond. DIFFERENT APPROACHES
The way we market our services to attract new patients is vastly different from reminding existing patients that we’re always here when they need us. Therefore, when thinking about where to start marketing through COVID and beyond, we must distinguish between three approaches: Marketing to new patients; Marketing to your patient list; Keeping in contact with your patient list.
MARKETING TO NEW PATIENTS
When we think about marketing, we typically think about marketing to attract new patients. Marketing to bring new patients into the clinic hasn’t changed much since COVID and the fundamental aspects remain the same (Zaia, 2021a), namely: Strong, consistent branding; A powerful website;
An optimised Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business); Google Ads; Community-based marketing. These five fundamental aspects of marketing to new patients are the perfect blend of digital and physical marketing, with the ability to reach potential patients online and in the local community. Branding Creating a brand always comes before initiating any marketing strategy, because it gives you direction, clarity and purpose. More than just a name and logo, branding is the equivalent of taking an excellent case history. Much like how the process of taking a thorough case history tells you where and how your treatment will work best, the process of creating a strong brand tells you where and how your marketing will work best. Both act to give you a plan immediately and into the future.
More than word of mouth While we’re diving into marketing techniques, it’s important to address the effectiveness of word of mouth, and how pairing word of mouth with additional marketing methods can boost clinic growth. Many osteopaths would agree that word of mouth is their most effective form of marketing. However, while word of mouth is undoubtedly powerful, it’s an unreliable form of marketing because we don’t know when its powers will come into effect. Since you can’t control when an existing patient recommends you to a friend, family member or colleague, you need to have several marketing strategies operating alongside word of mouth to help you reliably attract new patients to the clinic and encourage existing patients to return.
ALAN ZAIA
Alan Zaia is an award-winning British osteopath, a finalist in The Institute of Osteopathy Practice of the Year 2019 awards and the founder and CEO of Osteohustle (www.osteohustle.com). Osteohustle is an international network of osteopaths who provide easy, ethical and effective business and marketing tools through coaching, courses and community.
Therefore, if you’ve tried different marketing methods in the past and didn’t get the results you wanted, it’s worth learning more about the process of branding, as a strong brand will fix your marketing forever (Zaia, 2021b). Website, Google Business Profile and Google Ads When marketing for new patients, it’s important for your website to rank highly for geographically related Google terms like ‘osteopath near me’ and ‘osteopath [your location]’ (Zaia, 2022). There are three different ways people searching using geographically related Google terms can find your website: Organic search ranking (website search engine optimisation); Google Maps (Google Business Profile) Pay-to-be-seen adverts (Google Ads). So, when someone searches for a term like ‘osteopath near me’, the digital trio of a website, Google Business Profile and Google Ads gives you three horses in the race instead of one.
