One of the most challenging parts of marketing a LASIK practice is knowing where to start. How do you make the most out of your capabilities and resources to achieve the best return on your investment?
After all, there are seemingly an endless amount of options available to you, and it can be hard to narrow these down to the ones that you should actually use to market your business. On nearly a daily basis you’re hearing about this or that online tool that’s a complete game changer, and it’s tough to separate the noise from the truth.
It’s important to understand that there is no one, ultimate way of marketing a LASIK practice. Any good marketing strategy is built upon testing, iterating, and constantly looking for ways to tweak and improve.
That being said, let’s look at a systematic way for developing, implementing, and fine-tuning a LASIK marketing strategy.
1) Establish Your Goals
Marketing plays an important part of your business growth strategy, but it’s important to consider what you want that growth to look like.
How big do you want to get? Do you want to open multiple offices? Do you want to hire more surgeons? Or do you just want enough patients to keep you busy and the business profitable?
If the latter, your marketing goals are going to be much more modest; if the former, things become pretty ambitious and there are a lot more things to consider.
You might not know for sure what your end goal is, but it’s certainly a very important thing to consider and understand when you begin building out a marketing strategy.
2) Identify Your Capabilities & Resources
This is the pragmatic side of your marketing plan, and there are really two separate things to consider here.
Your capabilities are the things that you are good at and interested in that could help grow your practice. Do you like to write? Start a blog. Do you enjoy social media? Start managing and promoting your business’ Facebook page.
Resources mostly refer to your budget. How much expendable income do you have that you can put into marketing? If it’s low, then look to leverage your capabilities (or your children’s!) to do marketing on the cheap. If it’s high, then you have more options in terms of seeking help, purchasing ad space, etc.
3) Test Before Going All In
Regardless of the specific tactics you end up using, it’s typically a good idea to take it slow at first, particularly when you’re talking about buying ad space. (Some things, like content marketing, often take more time to evaluate, so the rules change a bit there.)
So, if for example, you want to try running Facebook Ads, spend a small amount (say, $100) the first month and see what happens. If you end up with a client, then spend some more and see if the trend continues.
Then, if you’ve established it as a reliable form of lead generation, make the process more systematic and double down on your ad spend.
In other words, lock it in as part of your strategy and put aside some money every month to buy ad space. but also continue to measure your ROI and iterate on your ads, whether that be the ad design and presentation or the targeting.
4) Diversify, diversify, diversify
This is one of the most important principles to keep in mind for your marketing strategy.
It’s great when you find a solid way of bringing in new business, but that doesn’t mean that you’re done. It means that it’s time to find other methods that also work.
Why? Because you never want to rely on just one or two ways of bringing in clients. After all, if you’re getting all of your business from, say, your organic Google rankings, and you fall into oblivion overnight, then where does that leave you?
But, on the other hand, if you’re also consistently getting clients from Google and Facebook ads, referrals, pipelines, email campaigns, etc., then you’re going to be just fine.
Diversification is the key to not putting all of your eggs in the same basket, as the saying goes.
5) Focus on Your Strengths & Delegate the Rest
While the DIY approach has a lot of appeal for some LASIK practice owners, it’s important to recognize that getting the most out of your time and money often means getting someone else involved.
At Patient Pipeline, we can help you with a variety of marketing initiatives, including paid ads, pipeline creation, SEO, and content. We can also help you develop a marketing gameplan and do as much or as little as you need from us.
