Marketing Is a Team Sport!
By Lynn Steffes, PT, DPT
Marketing is not the role of an individual or just the owner. I often say that marketing is a team sport. Everyone in your team has a role in promoting your private practice and its services, whether directly to family, friends, colleagues, and people you know in the community or through formal channels in your practice. Marketing should be a part of every job description, every interview, every orientation, and every staff role.
What EVERYONE can do to Market Your Practice:
1. Go for a Wow factor: Run a clinic that wows patients, so they will tell their physicians and everyone else about their experience!
- Provide outstanding, state-of-the-art patient care.
- Excel in customer service.
- Build long-term relationships through outstanding communications with your patients and create collegial relationships with referral sources.
- Connect in person through community involvement and invitations to return.
- Connect via appropriate social media.
- Communicate expertise through documentation.
- Provide excellent educational and content resources.
- Be generous with compliments and thank-yous.
- Encourage your patient’s verbal feedback to physicians, employers, family, and friends.
2. Speak positively and enthusiastically about the practice you work in and the people you work with in your community and with your own health care providers!
3. Be knowledgeable about your practice and potential clients: Listen for opportunities in the community to refer patients!
Be certain that your entire team knows their marketing key roles! For example:
Lynn Steffes, PT, DPT, is president and consultant of Steffes & Associates, a national rehabilitation consulting group focused on marketing and program development for private practices nationwide. She is an instructor in five physical therapy programs and has actively presented, consulted, and taught in 40 states. She can be reached at steffbiz@gmail.com.