3 Ways to Optimize Your Patient Funnel - The Middle

A patient funnel is a term that describes the journey your patients take from first learning about you and your services/products to actually making a purchase. Your marketing and sales funnels for attracting new patients and converting them to paying patients may be highly effective – or a source of great frustration for you – depending upon the time and resources you are investing and the results you are experiencing.  Coincidentally, a highly effective patient funnel doesn’t have to be costly.  

Last week I offered solutions for optimizing the top part of your patient funnel. Today I would like to look at the middle of the funnel. 

Middle of Funnel (You Have Leads but Not Enough Interest & Engagement):

Issues at the mid-level of your funnels are particularly frustrating because you have leads and yet, when you communicate with them, all you hear is crickets or experience a lack of follow through such as a no show for consults or opt-out from your e-mails and other communication methods.

Common Problems:

• You have what they are interested in but your messaging didn’t resonate with them or you came on too strong or salesy.
• You have poor or non-existent online patient reviews or testimonials.
• You don’t actually follow-up with potential patients or communicate with them in an inconsistent manner. You lack a system to effectively communicate with them consistently.
• Your potential patients aren’t crystal clear about how you can help them solve their primary pain or are overwhelmed because your messaging is either too generic or overly clinical/complex.
• You don’t know what strategies are resonating with your prospective ideal patients.

Optimizing Actions:

• When creating your content, ads and any communication, focus on your ideal patient and how you can best serve them. Get into their heads (so to speak) and ask yourself, what is their primary problem and how can my team and I help?  When you come from this place, you can be direct, impactful, engaging and create the desire for them to choose you over anyone else without feeling ‘sold’. Best yet, it feels great to sell without being salesy and know you are doing good.
• Ask for patient reviews and testimonials when your patients are happiest. Provide a simple system to capture them on the spot. For testimonials, be sure to obtain their permission.
• Create a database of interested patients and segregate them with various ‘tags’ if possible depending upon the various services you provide and patient preferences. This allows you to be more intentional and relevant with your communication.  This can easily be done with various CRM systems.
• Assign responsibility for your social media posts, content marketing efforts and e-mail communication to a creative and reliable team member. Use interesting subject lines and titles that will connect with your ideal prospective patients and entice them to always want to hear your message and learn more about what you have to offer. You stay top of mind and they can easily convert to a paying patient as soon as the time is right.  Be consistent with whatever content marketing method(s) you choose.  Leverage your content as much as possible with links to your videos, blogs and anything else you create from your social media platforms as well as e-mails/e-newsletters. 
• Keep it simple, concise, fun and engaging. The shorter your videos and e-mails, the more likely they will be viewed/read.  Speak their language and discuss the benefits of what you offer instead of the technical jargon about the specific treatment.
• Track your results. What resonated most? What fell flat?  You can do this by tracking key performance indicators such as open rates, comments on posts, shares, cost per lead, click through rates, ROI and other important metrics. 

Next week, I will conclude this series on optimizing your patient funnel. Until then, if you would like to learn about working directly with me or to schedule an free opportunity audit, contact me at [email protected].