PT Practice Growth Strategy Step By Step
The Base Line – Your Numbers Right Now
Current Monthly Patient Flow: Tracking your marketing progress starts with gathering some basic information. To begin, you need a “lead” activity base line. A new patient lead is anyone who contacts you that is not currently receiving care and asks about your services. For example, if you receive 100 calls a week and 60 ask about a first appointment or what services you provide, then we have 60 New Patient Leads. If 36 of those actually book an appointment, then we have a 60% booking rate as our starting point. See the row labeled Current Monthly Patient Flow. To measure this you will need to use call tracking.
Lead Generation With Advertising
Improve Advertising: Generating inquiries and booking are two separate functions. New patient inquiries come from your baseline market share plus the results of your marketing and advertising. Use call logs and other tracking devices. These include responses to special offers, tracking URLs, site analytics, tracking phone numbers, and other devices for measuring new patient inquiries. The chart pictured below shows a 25% increase in inquiries. This is a reasonable advertising goal for most independent clinics.
Conversion Rates – Improve With Marketing Tools
Improve Marketing Tools: New patient booking rates depend directly on your staff’s ability to “close” or convert the inquiries. For example, some clinics convert more patients than others. For every ten new patient inquiries, one clinic may book eight while another only three. We observe these differences between clinics every day, and that’s why we strongly recommend measuring conversion rates. A 10% conversion rate improvement (as pictured in the chart), is a reasonable goal. In addition, it has a significant impact on the financials.
Low conversion rates are typically a symptom of a problem, like a weak Internal Marketing program.
Internal Marketing Programs Increase Service Utilization
Increase Compliance & Service Utilization: Marketing to increase compliance and service utilization should begin the moment a new patient contacts the clinic. When your communications are set up to educate patients on the benefits of care and other services they may want, increasing the average “spend” by 10% is easy to do.
The numbers in the chart are for demonstration only.
Have the capacity to grow but just need the right PT practice growth strategy?
The chart above helps you see what needs to happen in your clinic in order to leverage your marketing and advertising for maximum Return On Investment. Click the tabs to get a more complete explanation of how the PT Referral Machine process works to help you systematically grow your patient flow.
We find this growth worksheet very powerful. It allows us to collaborate with clients on specific and measurable objectives. Looking at each variable and setting a goal of 10-30% improvement is realistic, achievable, and manageable. Then, if the bottom line isn’t moving as planned, all we need to do is review the individual components of the growth formula.
Each tab below corresponds to one of the rows in the worksheet, and provides a brief explanation to help you follow the path to a 51% billing increase shown on the worksheet.
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