When you made the decision to enter private practice, you ceased being solely a physiotherapist. Now that you are responsible for a full-fledged business, you are a physiotherapist-business person-administrator-marketer.
Quite a load, to be sure, but reality is that the most successful physiotherapy clinics are those that know how to market their business. It’s no longer enough to have the best university grades, greatest staff and a superior skill set, although these core elements will always remain important. In today’s challenging health care environment where patients (clients) are more demanding than ever, you must use cutting-edge marketing tools and savvy to keep them coming and coming back.
With the rise of the Internet as an educational and search tool, it behoves your private practice to maintain a unique presence on the Web. Having a physiotherapy-specific marketing website gives you an opportunity to differentiate your clinic from competitors, bring in motivated, “self-referred” patients and keep lines of communication open with current patients and prospects.
Consider some specific advantages of having a good, interactive website for your practice:
- Get your practice found online when someone searches for physiotherapy in your area.
- Become a trusted source of targeted physiotherapy information for patients and interested web surfers.
- Fostering relationships and two-way communication with visitors, with little effort.
- Improve your credibility via reach, education and appropriate use of the medium (e.g. blogs).
- Affordability and effectiveness when compared to traditional advertising (a good website costs less and gets you more business than a Yellow Pages advert).
- Accountability, knowing your website’s effectiveness can be measured.
- Introduce yourself, your staff members and your facilities to the general public.
- Ability to easily stay current in response to emerging trends.
Thanks to evolving technology, your website no longer needs to be a set of static pages and images. You can easily take advantage of videos that discuss issues important to your patient base and highlight presentations where you appear as the expert. You can start a blog and experiment with social media.
A purpose-built physiotherapy clinic website should be easy to manage, requiring little (if any) of your time. It should be painless for you to try new technologies and ideas and keep your content up to date. It should be found easily via search engines like Google. It should also be backed by a professional support team, because chasing people for help when you need it is never fun.
But most of all, your website should make you money, not cost you money. Last thing you want is to dish out a few thousand of your earnings for something that takes up too much of your time and doesn’t bring any added business or benefits.
The Internet is like an ocean and new business owners are justifiably wary of getting their feet wet due to the unknowns or previous experience. Speak with us to take away the pain and risks. Let us help you open up a digital front to the world and reap the benefits of modern value-added, patient-centric marketing.