If you run any kind of business, you’ll need to consistently generate new leads. In some cases, this will be easier than others, but if you run a healthcare business, you might find it difficult. People are less keen to discuss their healthcare needs with others, so traditional word-of-mouth advertising is not always something you can rely on. With that in mind, here are some of the best ways to get more leads for your healthcare business so you can expand over time and become truly successful.
An excellent but often forgotten way to ensure more people can contact you and therefore offer you more leads to build your business with is to actively give them as many ways to get in touch as possible. Not everyone is going to be comfortable talking on the phone, for example, especially when it comes to a medical condition. They might get nervous or embarrassed, or they might not have the right terminology to explain things.
If you can offer not just a phone number but an email address, a number to text, or even a form to fill in that asks all the relevant questions (this can make people feel much more at ease, knowing they haven’t forgotten something important), you’re more likely to have people reach out to you.
When you have all the different contact options we mentioned above (and more, such as chatbots and social media messaging, for example), you need to make sure you check all these contacts regularly so you don’t miss anyone, as they would lead to poor customer service and fewer leads. You can enter their information into Net Health's EHR for healthcare market so you don’t miss anyone out.
The key to ensuring you get more leads is to respond quickly. Don’t leave people wondering whether they’ll ever get an answer to their question because, in the meantime, they may well have contacted another clinic or healthcare facility. If your competitors get back to them first, it’s likely you’ll be too late to get that lead.
Even if you are excellent at what you do, the truth is that there are many other people who are also good and many other clinics just like yours. This might sound harsh, but it’s something that healthcare business owners have to understand – there is a lot of competition and you need to stand out if you want to generate more leads.
This is where your online presence can make a difference. To start, your website has to be attractive, easy to use, work for mobile devices, and be full of useful content. Make sure it stays up to date and that everything is accurate. This will help people understand what you can do and prove you’re an expert. They’ll trust you more if your website is a good one.
However, your online presence doesn’t end there – you’ll also need to have social media accounts. Which platforms you use will be down to you, and some will be better than others depending on your client base. You’ll also need to have different content for each platform if you use more than one. For example, Twitter is very much text-based, whereas Instagram is more about images, and TikTok is for video. The more you can connect with potential patients online, the more leads you’ll generate.
In addition, you might also want to tap the power of SEO. With a simple Google search, you'll be able to reach more audiences if you have a good SEO score. For example, if someone is looking for a dentist in Worcester and they search "dentist in Worcester" in Google, if you have a good score, there's a big chance that you'll be one of the options that Google will provide for their search.
Reviews are a great way to show potential patients how happy former and current patients are with the work you do. Of course, as we mentioned above, it can be hard to persuade people to leave reviews of a medical business because they don’t want to discuss their medical needs. However, if you ensure that all reviews are anonymous and just use a first initial, for example, more people might be willing to leave one.
Ask every patient if they wouldn’t mind leaving a review once their treatment is over and you’ll be surprised at the positive response you get.
