Gathering place for osteopaths
To market or not to market
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Jody Jakob on -
There are loads of brilliant osteopaths who earn peanuts or give up and become bank tellers or shop assistants because they do not know how to market themselves. It can be soul destroying when you know you have something valuable to give and there ain't no takers.
Yes word of mouth is best but it is slow...and there are mountains of competion these days....from other osteopaths, Chiros, and acupuncturists to crystal gazers...not to mention the free local GP and consultant othropedic chaps
You have got to do find the best way for you to market........a multi approach is good.
Some suggestions:
- Get a website
- Use Google ad to get more hits.....you only pay for clicks so its really targeted advertising and the best way bar none
- Join some local clubs...Rotary etc
- Give talks
- Talk to local pharmacies....offer free treatments for the staff (they get asked a lot of advice) so they know what you do....most people are still surprised that an osteopath is actually a physcian who looks at the whole body and takes into consideration medical history.....
- Healt clubs......
- Remember in all these places don't try to sell yourself...just be yourself and offer to give more than you get.....give advice, referrals...send people to the pharmacy to buy things you perscribe etc
- ...hang in there......and just keep giving!
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Permalink Reply by Kat on -
thank you Mark and Jody for your replys. I am currently working as an associate and planning to go into a second associate possition (this one with an existing patient list) but both osteopaths seam to rely pretty much on word of mouth and don't really do much marketing. Mainly because I think they have found it un productive in the past.
I have taken on board what you have said and as I feel some marketing is needed I will try and put your ideas in to practice.
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Permalink Reply by Kat on
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Thank you Michael for your advise. I had forgoten about the BOA marketing book we were given and yes it has a lot of idea and food for thought.
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Permalink Reply by Williamstown Osteo on
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Marketing is one of many important considerations when commencing practice.
It is important to understand who you would like to market to ie your target audience, there is no point placing ad's in local papers if your not interested in treating older clientele etc.
I have found over the two years my practice has been open that word of mouth accounts for 40% of my referrals. This however takes time. To get patients in the door quickly to then build on your word of mouth you need a short term strategy.
Our website, google searches and yellow pages account for a further 40% of our NP's. You must have a website to drive business to you in the short term. Google adwords is also a fantastic way of attracting patients quickly.
Online marketing also helps get you noticed without having to offer specials and devalue your service.
We have managed to grow our patient list to 130 patients per week over a 2 year period.
You should be receiving patients from your practice principle, eps if he is taking a commission.
Good luck
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Permalink Reply by Shanan Sher on -
I have been in practice for 17 yrs. I find adverts and flyers to be expensive ways of getting only a few referrals. I only give flyers to new patients to give them more information about osteopathy. To me door-to-door leaflet drops offering treatments for $10 cheapens the treatmetn offered. Offer a high quality treatmetn at a good price.
Like all good things ; the hard part is starting.
good luck פריצת דיסק
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Permalink Reply by Robin Newell on
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In my experience door to door leaflets may get 1 patient per 100 if you're lucky, people often put stuff staight in the recycling
box. yell.com has been quite good if you have the money-it helps your website come up quicker on google searches. I takes a good few years to bld a list so you ideally want to have a good set up so patients aren't put off by the clinic even though your treatment might be good!
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Permalink Reply by Jill Shooter on -
hello Kat,
A website is a good idea, I built mine from mr site which is a disk from amazon at around £20 and I think has given a good base for information as to who you and what you do, make sure you get it linked to google or other seaqrch engines(usually free). Freeindex sites are another good (free) listing to get on. For flyers cards etc I have found vistaprint (ggogle them) to give good quality although postage is quite expensive (look for their offers). Talks are good and a cheap way to get your name know. good luck but it does take time!
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Permalink Reply by Noel Adams on -
Hi Kat, it shold be down to the senior osteo to get the patients in. if you are spending time pounding the streets, why not pound them foryourself instead of giving a % away. you could always advertise at a lower rate for a limited time to encourage patients to try you out. Also, tell your patients that you work through referals, give them an extra appointment card with THEIR Name written on it, tell them to pass it on to someone else, and when that someone else brings the card back for an appointment with you, give the initial patient a £5 off their next appointment, and do the same with them.
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Permalink Reply by Williamstown Osteo on
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When working as an associate there are certain reciprocal obligations that you have to your practice principle and your principle has to you. As an associate in a clinic you agree to uphold the professional standard of the clinic, whilst engaging in certain extra-treatment activities such as articles for the clinic newsletter or talks to local sporting clubs, GP's and health professionals.
As the principle he agree's to provide you with the facilities to conduct your services and if his clinic has a vision to develop and grow, the patient load to do so. Other facilities such as internet, reception, marketing etc should be negotiable within your contract.
Remember however clinics are not what they once were. The antiquated set up of 50/50 for a room and table is rare these days. Clinic's often come equipped with websites, marketing (google, adwords and directory sites), laundry services, reception, computers and computerised booking and note taking systems, internet etc... All of this comes at a greater expense to the principle and therefore will be reflected in your remuneration rate.
Take all these things into account when making your decision to market or not. If your paying 50% and getting your room and table then I suggest you hit the pavement.
Cliff @
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Permalink Reply by Vladimir on -
For what it's worth; in my opinion (IMO) the best marketing strategy is one that is made up of many marketing strategies (this was also mentioned by the first person to reply to your original post). Door to door leaflets, IMO, are completely worthless.
Getting a website is a good idea. Learn how to make one yourself, because web developers can be very, very costly in the long run. In the short run it might be quite cheap but they will charge for every change they make to your website; and if your website is not dynamic, it is not as powerful.Consider the possibility that your practice address changes, or you have started working at an additional practice. Do you want to keep paying your web developer £50 or so every time you want to change the adress; when all they have to do is press File>New and type for 2 minutes?
One of the previous replies mentioned that a website got them 2 patients in the space of 3 months. Frankly, and no offence meant, but you're doing it wrong. Getting a website is only half the story (if that); akin to getting accepted to Osteopath School. It is only the beginning, you then have to work at it for a while, to raise its profile.
Regarding raising the profile of your website, PPC (google it) will bring you short term results. SEO (google it) will bring in long-term results. Learn about online marketing and online strategies. It will take time, but it will be time better spent than walking around puttin leaflets through doors.I cannot stress enough, realy do your research. SEO can be a bit of a minefield; i.e. you could fall prey to SEO charlatans, who will offer thousands of links for around £50. £50 is not enough to do anything in SEO, so don't fall for it. Not every link is born equal, so keep that in mind. You might be able to pay someone £50 for two hours of their time, doing donkey work, submitting your site to free directories. Imortant first step to take; but you might as well do it yourself. Don't forget about the paid directory submissions. It costs roughly $35-$90 to submit to a good directory. It's worth it.
Next, consider what you want to rank for (what search in google will bring up your website on the first page). Ranking for "osteopathy" is not exactly advantageous. Who cares if you rank for osteopathy? If you live in Scotland all the users from London that see your site will not be getting on the train to come and see you. If you rank for "osteopath in Glasgow", however, you will get the relevant people looking at your site.
Last but not least, I speak from experience. My wife is a very good SEO and I have helped her for a number of years. and before you ask, we are not offering our services; this was not the intention of my post. I simply wanted to shed some light on websites and offer my 2 cents in general.
P.S. to answer your question more directly, YES, you should market yourself! word of mouth is what established osteopaths rely on, and that curve may have very well been somewhat exponential at some point; but you have to get yourself out there, to give a slight injection of "juice" into that slowly rising curve!
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Permalink Reply by Vladimir on
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I have re-read this thread and came across something slightly amusing.
The smart guys here are putting a link to their website at the end of every post. It's a legitimate way to gain links from a really strong website (my toolbar says that sacral musing is PR5, which is not something you can shake a stick at!). The links have the rel=nofollow tag on them, but still very good links!
With that said, my wife's website, is a good source of information on link building.
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Permalink Reply by Vladimir on
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SEO stands for search engine optimisation.
It is very important if you want to rank for any particular word, basically.
It invloves a few things, links being the main thing, the more links you have, the better, however, be careful, because you don't want to have links from an unreputable site or even be in a bad link neighbourhood.
The next most important thing (probably even more important than links) is content on the site. You have to make sure that your site provides a good user experience and is informational. Search engines send out "bots" or robots, which are basically pieces of software that go around reading sites (they follow links to get from site to site) and making a record of what is on there, i.e. index them. (Google is basically an index of the web) They cannot read java, flash, text on an image, etc.
They are not human and do not have eyes. The reason I say this is that for a start, your website is bad ahem, "not optimised" in terms of SEO, because none of that text on the homepage in actually readable by an engine bot that comes over to crawl your site. You're making your life very difficult from the off. So my advice is, take off that pretty image, and type the text out.
Apart from that, get links (good ones) in any way you can. You can have a facebook page, build some links that way. Directories are a good way to go. Anchor text on a links is very important. Google SEO, learn about it.
The next thing to mention is that Google does this neat trick of automatically opting people into a magical thing called "optimised search". It does a load of crappy stuff, including remembering what sites you visit and how long for, deciding that you really like that site, since you're spending so much time on it, and whenever you search for stuff again, it actually changes rankings, to return your previously visited sites near the top of the listing! Great, you think, but in reality, due to the fact that you invariably spend lots of time on your own site, it can make you think that you're already ranking for something which you're not. The amount of times at work that someone calls me up and says "my site ranks first of 'shoes', so that's totally awesome!" After slapping my own face for the sheer disbelief, I have to nicely ask them if they are signed into their Google account (gmail, etc) or if they still have their customised search on (if you do not know about it, and haven't actively turned it off, you are autmatically opted in), and every single goddamn time, the answer is yes. I get them to turn it off, and BAM, all of a sudden a clog maker in the middle of scotland no longer ranks first for "shoes", instead, a giant big brand conglomerate with an SEO budget of £50,000 per month does! :P
This link builder site contains more info. Do give it a good read! :)
Another thing you can do, go to google.com. type in cache: followed by your URL.You will see a cached version of your site. In the box at the top, click on "text only version" and you will be able to see what the search engines see.
You will see that the text only cache is basically empty. Devoid of content. No text. Bad ju ju. Google thinks it's just a holding page for "nothing", basically. If you want my advice, you should fix that. Populate it with content. Get some more links. Monitor how it progresses by googling it once in a while from a neutral Googling platform (not signed into a google account, and with the customised search turned off). Your rankings should improve withing a few days of getting the page populated with text. The fact that the page had been cached in the first place, some might call that a minor miracle.
My post contains some sarcasm, and for that I must apologise, mainly because I did not mean anything bad in what I typed. I have good intentions.
Last but not least, I hope you appreciate the advice, I usually charge for this! :)
All the best.
Vladimir
EDITED to add: why are you interested in ranking for lots of keywords? Get yourself ranking on-page (first ten results) for 1-5 keywords first, then you can expand if you really want, but 5 or so keywords is all you need.
Also wanted to mention that I aced my OSPEs today! So yay for me! :)
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