I’m Dr. Hassan, a Board-Certified Physiatrist and Independent Practice Owner. I help physiatrists start and grow their own profitable practices so they can achieve financial independence and live without limits.
What if you’ve taken the time to create a marketing plan, but now you’re so busy servicing your current patients that you’re having a hard time staying on track with your plan? Is it okay to set the plan aside for a while? After all, you’ve got enough business to keep you busy, and you’re not sure you can handle additional patients right now anyway.
While marketing might not seem like a necessary activity when your practice is going gangbusters, it’s only a matter of time before your lack of marketing starts to impact your practice. Standing on top of your marketing plan, even when you’re busy, ensures you’ll always have a pipeline full of patients in your practice. While you may be busy right now, if you stop marketing for the next three months, you may soon find yourself high and dry when it comes to patients. That’s because you’ve stopped the flow.
As an independent practice owner myself, I can relate to being too busy to market. It seems the days are never long enough to get everything on my to-do list done. But as a marketing professional, I know I cannot afford to forgo my marketing. So what is an aspiring practice owner to do?
Here’s my five-step marketing plan and what I suggest to other physiatrists looking to start their own practice:
1. If you haven’t already, create a marketing calendar.
Marketing calendars are most useful when you have the least time to think about promotion. However, having a plan in place that details your monthly marketing activities assures that a steady stream of promotion enters the marketplace, keeping your business in the minds of established patients while attracting new ones.
Schedule all of your marketing activities in your calendar according to how frequently you plan to do them in your marketing plan. If you plan to do something monthly, enter it in the calendar once each month. Weekly? Enter it four times per month. Do this for every scheduled activity.
2. Hang your marketing calendar over your desk on a bulletin board or on the wall.
Make a habit of looking at it every morning. This way, you won’t have the problem of it being out of sight and out of mind. I can’t tell you how many aspiring practice owners I’ve coached whose marketing plans have ended up in a file folder in a drawer. You’re certainly not going to grow your practice that way. The same way you want your business to be at the forefront of potential patients’ minds, your business’s potential must be at the forefront of your mind.
3. Try incorporating your monthly activities into your weekly and daily to-do list.
Enter the activities as to-do tasks in your calendar, just like all your appointments and other practice activities. I do this with all my marketing activities. I use Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, and iCalendar. This is the only way I know I’ll keep myself on track. If something is on my calendar, I treat it like any other meeting or appointment, and I do it. For example, every Wednesday, a little notice pops up to remind me to write my weekly blog. If that didn’t happen, I’d either be writing it on Monday at midnight, or it wouldn’t get done.
4. Pick one day per month to review your marketing calendar in detail and to look three months ahead.
What is coming up that you need to prepare for? What do you need to transfer into your to-do list to ensure that you don’t forget to do it? At the end of the month, I usually do this when I’m doing all of my month-end work (i.e., running collections reports, doing billing, and updating my marketing tracking reports.) Make it a habit to review your marketing at the same time you do these tasks. After a few months, you won’t even have to think about it anymore. It’ll become a habit.
5. Consider a hiring a virtual assist or support person to help.
If they can take some of the tasks off your plate that don’t require your expertise, it will free you up to focus on what I call “revenue-producing activities.” These are things like working with patients, creating products and services, and marketing. I can’t believe the difference it made when I hired some help. I didn’t think I could afford it, but now I don’t see how I lasted so long without help.
When you find a way to get back on track with your marketing, and you do it regularly, it really does become a part of the way you practice. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem like marketing anymore. It’s just what you do to run your practice. That’s when it becomes effortless, and that’s when you know your practice will be continuing to be easy and profitable for the long haul.
Read my blog post on the truth about perseverance and goals.
—
Attention, Physiatrists! Stop leaving money on the table. Learn how to make the most of each encounter. Schedule a FREE 15-minute Strategy Session NOW to learn more: https://calendly.com/hassan-akinbiyi/15min
—
I’m Dr. Hassan, a Board-Certified Physiatrist and Independent Practice Owner. I help physiatrists start and grow their own profitable practices so they can achieve financial independence and live without limits. Follow me on social media @DrHassanRehab.
