LiveseySolar presents the Patient Acquisition Model at ESCRS 2012 Practice Development Workshop

We had a great turn-out for our talk at the XXX Congress of the European Society for Cataract and Refractive Surgery, where we presented our Patient Acquisition Model for the first time.

As we discussed at the presentation, identifying the best medical marketing to use requires a comprehensive approach that takes into account your sales pipeline, and what your potential patients need at every step of their decision making process. Get your own copy of our patient acquisition model for an overview of the healthcare marketing process. Discover how everything you’re doing (or may not yet be doing!) fits together.

The LiveseySolar Patient Acquisition Model

This is an overview of the model – download the larger PDF so you can print it out for yourself.

The model begins with your most valuable marketing asset: Word of Mouth. Word of mouth is outside of your control, but it is inside your influence. Regardless of how good your word of mouth might be, there are still a small number of people that know you (spreading the word of mouth) relative to the vast amount of people that don’t know you and are searching for your service. A major goal of your sales and marketing should be to generate as much positive word of mouth as possible.

Generally, most people who are are interested in your service (whether they know you or not) will use Google (and other search engines) to search for the answers to the questions they have. This is why internet search marketing is so important. To get from Google to your website, they will either click an organic search listing or a paid search listing. Some people, of course, will bypass Google and either follow a link to your website from another website (a referral visit) or look you up directly by typing your domain into their browser.

Once they get to your website, the job of your website is to convert them to call or submit an form to email. Clearly, your website needs to be designed to do this as effectively as possible.

A small percentage of visitors to your website will contact your business, and the most valuable of these will contact you by phone. Many businesses, in fact, must get a prospective client on the phone before they will convert into a consultation. Therefore, telephone sales training is critically important to your success at this stage of the pipeline.

After your prospect converts on the phone, they will then visit with you at a consultation. The consultation is a pivotal moment in the pipeline because it is often at this stage that the sale can be made (even if the full transaction must wait until the surgery). Consultation skills training is an important tool to increase conversion rates at this stage of the pipeline.

Following a successful consultation, the patient will have their treatment or surgery and then proceed towards the aftercare stage of the funnel. What matters here is customer service. Appropriate customer service training can affect your performance from the telephone, consultation, surgery to the aftercare. As a result, you can expect to generate as many happy patients as possible, and ideally, happy patients that refer more patients. That is the ultimate goal.

Some of the happy patients that are already on social media will have naturally used it to discuss your brand and their experiences with it in social media (either on their profiles or on your business profiles). When coordinated with offline referral stimulation (e.g. events, parties, newsletters, etc.).

All of the work above, your internet search campaign, your website, its content, your telephone approach, your consultation process, your treatment approach, and your aftercare, needs to be subject to a cycle of

• experimentation
• analysis
• reporting, and
• adaptation

And that is where the work is. The more optimised each stage of the process, the better your results will be. The better your results, the more people at the top of the funnel will know you and talk about your service to those who are looking for it. This will generate considerably more qualified prospects at the top of the funnel, and your business will grow.

2012’s presentation slideshow