4 Weird Ways Patients Are Finding Your Practice

Encouraging Cross-Promotion

The best way to encourage cross-promotion is to build strong relationships with local businesses whose customers overlap with your target patient population. So, if you want to get away from treating foot and ankle injuries, don’t team up with the local running store: partner with a local golfing association or tennis store instead. Then, plan events (e.g., free injury clinics or short educational lectures) that appeal to people who visit that local business—and who could potentially benefit from visiting your practice. If that effort is successful, talk to the business owner about hosting semi-regular events. Then, combine your promotional powers to market those events to your respective audiences.

Increasing Shareability

If you’re interested in tapping the friend-of-a-friend Facebook market, then the name of the game is fostering shareability. Essentially, you need to sit down and evaluate your content. Ask yourself what kind of responses and results you’re looking to drive (in this case, shares and an influx of patients), and assess whether the posts you’ve created encourage those actions.

In the social world, the more engaging your content is, the better. In other words, you’ve got to hook your readers—and then provide them with a content consumption experience so good that they’re motivated to share it with other people in their network. For example, the average person probably won’t share a long, text-heavy, scientific article on the benefits of hydrotherapy. But, that doesn’t mean the topic isn’t interesting; you just have to repackage the content in a more engaging way. Perhaps you could lead with an eye-catching picture—or make a short video—that includes an interesting fact about hydrotherapy or sports injuries. Pair that with a call to share the post or comment with personal stories, and suddenly, the post has the potential to make some waves on social.

Using Pinterest

There are two tricks that’ll help you increase your appeal to the Pinterest crowd. The first (and arguably most important) is to focus on pinning evergreen content—that is, content that remains relevant for a long period of time. If you pin something that isn’t time-sensitive—for example, a picture of you demonstrating your favorite spatial reasoning exercise, or a set of PT valentines—your content is more likely to attract repins over the long haul.

Second, remember that Pinterest is a highly visual social network, and as such, visually engaging content will encourage the most repins. In other words, use vibrant, eye-catching pictures that complement the message you’re trying to convey. So, if you’re posting about a great hamstring stretch, use pictures instead of lengthy text instructions.

Jumping on Trends

Chances are, unless you have a wildly large and active social media following (serious kudos if you do!) you’re going to have a tough time creating your own hashtag movement. You’ll probably have better luck catching hashtag-related attention if you use some hashtags that have already gained traction and are trending on their own. Just be sure to research those hashtags and understand how people are using them! The hashtags need to be relevant to your brand, and you don’t want to accidentally promote something that could hurt your practice.