Want More Patients–Target Your Sweet Spot

When it comes to creating highly successful outreach campaigns for your practice, the most important component in marketing is targeting. The ultimate goal is to find your “sweet spot” – a group of patients who are genuinely interested and have a need for your unique services.

Before you take any steps, before you even think about a brochures, Facebook ads, mailing campaigns etc., think about whom you are trying to reach.

• Who do you want to reach?

• Why do you want to reach that particular type of client?

• What is it about them that makes them ideal for your business?

These are questions that need answered before you can design any outreach for your business. Only after you have a clear picture of who you are trying to reach can you design a marketing campaign and highlight services that appeals to that specific clientele.

In other words, if you skip this step, you risk designing a marketing approach that appeals to your own taste and style instead of the market segment you are trying to attract to your business.

You might be wondering why this exercise is important, why narrow the market down to specifics? While it might seem intuitive to try to reach as many people as possible when building your business, the truth is that this will suck the life out of you.

Chasing every client type will leave you frustrated, overworked, and will inhibit your ability to reach your business goals. Here’s why: your ideal client will feel the chemistry of being a good match, will leave as an extremely satisfied customer, will tell others about their amazing experience and will help you grow your business.

There’s no need at all to make this process overly complicated, using simple targeting strategies will help you identify the patients within your sweet spots and engage with them.

TARGETING STRATEGIES

When jumping into marketing your practice, the first step  is to divide up your pool of potential patients into into two groups. Warm and cold. Warm clients are those who already know of you and have had a positive experience from your services.  The more often you can target previous patients, the better. You will spend less energy and money to warm them up into taking action.  Cold clients who don’t know and trust you take more effort to make that first appointment with you. Cold clients may or may not fit into the sweet spot where you do your best work.

When you are beginner with marketing, it’s easy to get overwhelmed and sidetracked with all the different ways you can set up your marketing. You may be tempted to skip over the preliminary work of segmenting your patient list. Do the up front work and you won’t be disappointed. In order to keep it simple and get quick results, focus first on these two targeting opportunities.

 TARGET YOUR PREVIOUS SATISFIED CLIENTS

This first warm targeting strategy is a powerful one. Targeting your  previous patients is a wise move because you’ve already done the hard work of earning their trust. If you already have a client list of at least 250 people, you already have a solid group of warm leads to target your marketing. Connect with your previous patients through regular emails. Targeting your own email list is much more valuable than having a marketing person send out a broadcast impersonal email!

The more you can personalize your message to their specific problem the more results you will get. Avoid grouping them only by a clinical diagnosis. Use age, gender etc. to target your message to the specific issues faced by that group.  You can then target those same people with your Facebook ads. Pretty fantastic, right? The Facebook ad strategy works best if you already get at least 500 monthly visitors to your website.

The smart move is to place the Facebook pixel on your site right now, so Facebook can start growing your target group ASAP. Once you place your pixel on your website, you don’t need to stop there! To grow an even larger reach with a warm audience, you can place your pixel on additional web pages you own. For example, you can place the pixel to track specific blog posts, opt-in pages, salespages and thank you pages. The visitors to those sites can soon be also seeing your ads in their news feed!

Utilizing this coordinated targeting strategy insures that you will stay top of mind with your ideal clients. Subtle reminders of who you are and the value you deliver.

TARGET YOUR OWN FACEBOOK FANS

This is another warm targeting opportunity. When you target your own Facebook fan base, your ad spending is going to be much lower versus targeting a cold audience. Your ads should have a clear call to action. Your Facebook ad should encourage patients to call your office or give you their email address in exchange for something of value. When grow and nurtured your email list right, it will convert better for you. If you ever needed a good reason to invest in growing your email list, this is it!

Growing a solid Facebook fan base is one of the first steps in growing a quality email list because fans are likely to become subscribers when given the right opportunity. If you are just starting out with ads, I would suggest running a “Like” Ad Campaign for your first ad experience. These ads will help you attract your ideal clients to your page. Facebook ads tend to be incredibly inexpensive and are relatively easy to set up.

You know the patients you enjoy most, the ones that allow you to do your best work and which you enjoy every minute you spend with them. You wish all your clients were exactly like them. These are the patients that you build your targeting marketing campaigns for and are the foundation of any successful practice. I encourage you not to look past your warm fan base to be the center of your target marketing.

Amy Porterfield is a wizard on Facebook ad marketing strategies. You can find her great stuff at amyporterfield.com