helping you connect with your clients

Welcome to The Healthcare Marketing Connection! This week we are looking at five ways to expand your practice. Your practice may be meeting its financial goals for the month which is great, what you don't want to do is stop expanding and growing. Leverage what's working well and fine tune what's not. This week's feature article discusses five ways to expand your practice without making major changes to what's going right.

Last night I attended the annual "member mixer" for the Colorado Healthcare Communicators in Denver. It was nice to see some friends I haven't seen in a while and sit outside on the patio and have a glass wine while catching up. Many of you know the DNC is being held in Denver soon. They were recruiting help from some of the public relations professionals in the area to help during the convention and my friend Julie signed up to deliver donuts to Matt Lauer at 4:00 am. She's confident she'll meet him. Good luck Julie!

Have a great weekend everyone - Here's to your success!

Kelly

Five Tips for Expanding your Practice With Ease

Your client base is steady, your business is profitable and maybe even getting comfortable, but you don't want to stay where you are at. You thrive on growth and expansion and are ready to take your business to the next level.

You've learned you enjoy working with certain clients more than others. You know which ones are more likely to come back for frequent treatments, rather than once or twice and never be seen again until they are in pain. You have a strong base that refers you to their friends and understands and cares about their long-term health.

How can you find more of the clients you like best, and focus less on the ones that aren't your ideal clients?

Let's look at five ways to expand your practice by leveraging the strengths you've already created:

1. Add complementary services to whatever you already do by adding practitioners. For example, if you are a massage therapist you may consider hiring a chiropractor, an acupuncturist or a physical therapist to your practice, depending on what complements your client base. If the majority of your clients come for a massage because they are injured, you want to complement their needs, which may be different than someone who sees clients while vacationing and relaxing. The key here is to complement what's already working.

2. Package services. Creating a package rate for two or more services allows clients to try out services they may never have tried before and/or learn about services they didn't know you offered. For example, creating a package for headache sufferers in a "headache combo" may include acupuncture, massage and physical therapy. If you work with insurance companies you can still bill for these, the deductible your client pays is where you can explore ways to help them.

3. Branch into corporate services. First look at what types of businesses are in your area. Is it industrial, where the employees do heavy lifting and moving? Can you add drug and alcohol testing, physical evaluations, or any certifications they require? Or are you in an area that's mainly an office environment? Look at what types of problems these employees suffer from and create training based on that. Do they suffer from frequent headaches and back or neck pain from sitting at their computer all day? Can you do training on correct posture at workstations?

4. Network with your chamber of commerce and meet other business owners in the area. Ask them what types of issues they need help with - how can you help? Can you do onsite training and stretching exercises? Discounts for their employees or customized packages for their company? Can you offer a seminar specifically for business owners to reduce their workman's compensation claims or missed days of work?
   
   
5. Explore other ways to educate your target market. Perhaps you create a small training packet for companies that you sell for a nominal amount. Companies can hand out to their employees; you teach more people how to stay safe and healthy, your business expands and makes money in ways other than treating patients - by teaching them too.

(c) 2008, A Marketing Connection

Want to use this article in your ezine or web site? No problem! Just let me know at info@AMarketingConnection.com. I'll send you a short bio to include at the end of the article.

Announcing A Marketing Connection's New Media Marketing Package

Are you tired of struggling to attract your ideal patients? Are you spending money on ineffective healthcare marketing avenues such as large yellow page advertising, valuepac ads, shopping carts, and more?

FACT: The first place 80% of the population goes to find health related information is the Internet.

Do YOU have a strong presence on the internet? Are you neglecting proven client-attraction avenues such as having a powerful presence on the internet, connecting with prospects through blogging, being featured more prominently in the community?

The internet is where high-paying patients are.

Let me ask you a few personal questions...

Are clients finding you on the Internet?
Do you have a blog? If so, do you post regularly?
Are you considered THE health expert in your local community?
Do you have a high patient retention rate?
Are you found right away on popular search engines such as Google?
Are you struggling to make ends meet or not attracting your ideal client?

The New Media Package at A Marketing Connection will help you:

1. Increase your presence on search engines, allowing people to find you right away (without doing Pay Per Click or spending $6,000 a month)
2. Provide educational materials for your patients, prospects and the community
3. Position your practitioners and your practice as experts on health
4. Increase patient retention
5. Educate your patients, prospects and the community on health issues
6. Gets your name and what you do in the community and on the internet in more and different places than they are now

We do this by:

1. Creating custom wellness articles
2. Posting wellness articles on your web site and distributing them across the internet
3. Blogging on a consistent basis and pinging blog directories
4. Writing and distributing press releases (locally and nationally)
5. Creating hand-outs, flyers or newsletters for your practice
6. Optimizing your website for search engine optimization with our special SEO test

Call Kelly today to learn more about how we can help you attract your ideal patients right now!

303-460-0285

This week Kelly recommends GotoMeeting. An easy to use online meeting solution where you can hold a training session, have a meeting, give a sales presentation, etc. GotoMeeting makes it easy to share what is on your screen allowing your online meeting to run smooth anytime or anywhere.

If you have any other great resources you'd like me to share with everyone, let me know and I'll check it out. Kelly@AMarketingConnection.com

Boulder Writers Alliance (BWA) - September 23rd - I'm speaking on "Tips for Freelancing Success" at the BWA Expo: www.BWA.org.

If you have any other great resources you'd like me to share with everyone, let me know and I'll check it out. Kelly@AMarketingConnection.com

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Disclaimer: A Marketing Connection, Inc. does not represent or endorse the accuracy or reliability of any of the recommendations or advertisements, or the quality of any products, information, or other materials displayed, purchased, or obtained by you as a result of an offer in connection with any ad in The Healthcare Marketing Connection. We recommend, as always, that you do your own due diligence before purchasing any product.

To learn more about healthcare copywriting and marketing, visit my Web site at www.AMarketingConnection.com/article_archives.shtml. There are tons of fr ee articles on a variety of helpful topics.